Faith Gives People True Freedom and Unites Them with God

Patriarch Kirill (Moscow and All Russia) –

A person who believes in God is filled with tremendous power, because knowledge is revealed through faith. Faith brings a person into living contact with the Lord, and everyone who turns to God with faith gains a special life experience said His Holiness Kirill, Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, in his sermon on February 7, on the 35th Sunday after Pentecost, the feast day of the Synaxis of New Martyrs and Confessors of the Russian Church.

“All atheistic work aimed at destroying the faith in our country consisted of rationally, relying supposedly on some scientific achievements, proving that there is no God. The unfortunate propagandists simply did not realize that they were using a completely different method of persuasion than the one through which people come to believe in God. Referring to some scientific achievements, some logical reasoning, atheists tried to convince believers that faith in God is insignificant, because there is no God,” His Holiness Patriarch Kirill said.

“Why didn’t it achieve their goal? Because people’s faith is not based on human knowledge, but on real spiritual experience – the experience of contact with Divine power. And this is not self-hypnosis, because no self-hypnosis could give people the strength to meet torture, death, to stand against the wall to be executed [by a firing squad]. They had to answer the question, “to be or not to be?” If you remain a believer, you will die. If you renounce the faith, you will live. What self-hypnosis could there be? Everything fades into the background, the moment of truth comes, the main moment of human life – and at this main moment people, not through logical proofs, but through real experience of communication with God, declared their faith and did not betray the Lord,” he noted.

“Faith not only unites a person with God. Faith raises a person, faith gives him some wings that help him soar over the commonplace, over human prejudices and preconceptions, over certain kinds of thoughts and words, over any fashion. I’m not talking about a fashion to dress a certain way, but a fashion for certain thoughts, for politics, and for certain patterns of behavior. Faith equips a person with such knowledge that he soars above the entire everyday life and becomes invulnerable. Anything that easily enslaves a person, everything that brings him into captivity of other people’s thoughts or actions, cannot enslave a sincerely believing person,” the Patriarch stressed.

HT: Pravmir