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Our Life in Christ
Our Life In Christ brings you the orthodox Christian faith as recorded in Scripture, taught and practiced by the early Fathers of the Church, and preserved within the spiritual life of the Orthodox Christian Churches around the world.
Join program hosts Steven Robinson and Bill Gould for an hour of insightful discussion about Orthodox Christian faith and practice. We record the program each week in Steve's basement lair, and distribute it here as a podcast, broadcast it on Ancient Faith Radio, and archive it on Our Life in Christ's website.
For more information about Our Life in Christ, and for the full collection of audio archives in MP3 format, visit OurLifeinChrist.com.
Visit our Schedules page to see when this podcast will be broadcast on Ancient Faith Talk.
Programs:
Christ is Risen! KPXQ Radio Program Segment
Christ is Risen! Indeed He is Risen! This is the anthem of Pascha, and since it was in fact Holy Week and Pascha last week, we have decided to "go lite" this program hour and air a 20-minute interview segment we did last month with local Phoenix evangelical drive-time radio program host Andrew Tallman in lieu of a full study hour. So enjoy, and next week we'll tackle another topic. A blessed Bright Week to all.
The Prayer of St. Ephraim - Patience, Love, and Not Judging Our Brother
We finish this Lenten series discussing the virtues of patience, love and not judging our brother. Again, the Orthodox axiom of working out the virtues in the body is true, and we learn that patience is not merely a passive state, but also requires spiritual/bodily effort to restrain evil thoughts/actions, choosing to perform God's will instead. Love for God, neighbor, enemies and the whole of creation is our aim, cultivated with our growing awareness of God's pure and captivating eros coming down from heaven. Engulfed in this love we lose interest in the world and adopt the humble mind of Christ, whose words on the Cross, "forgive them for they know not what they do," are to become our own towards all men.
The Prayer of St. Ephraim - Humility
Following Chastity in the the list of virtues in St. Ephraim's prayer comes Humility. Reading from the Fathers, we find that humility is not merely a state of mind, but a mystery that comes about as the result of labors of the soul and body, mirroring the Incarnation itself - and so it is by nature incomprehensible. We look at humility and its opposite - pride and "prelest" to try to gain even just a little more understanding of this virtue and why it is central to our life in Christ.
The Prayer of St. Ephraim - Chastity
St. Ephraim begins the second half of his great prayer "Give rather a spirit of chastity, humility, patience and love to Thy servant." Asking God to take our sinful passions away is followed by a petition to give us virtue - chastity being first in the order. In the Fathers, and especially St. John Climacus, we find that the virtues - which are in truth the energies of the Holy Spirit - act in our heart and are active through us through the deeds of the body surrendered to Christ. And chastity, rather than being limited to some quaint notion of sexual purity (true enough), is the virtue of wholeness in Christ which enables us to fight the passions fervently.
The Prayer of St. Ephraim - Lust for Power and Idle Talk
We continue our discussion of the famous Prayer of St. Ephraim the Syrian and his plea for God to remove from him the "lust for power" and "idle talk". As is made clear from the sayings of the Fathers cited here, these sins are so well-rooted in our normal, everyday lives that raising our self-awareness regarding how and how often we commit them is a significant Lenten undertaking.
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