Your ability to really love your enemies…to do good even to the ungrateful or wicked absolutely requires the intervention of the Godhead. It required that Christ suffer and die because of your natural enmity to God. It requires the Holy Spirit’s power to give you a wholly new life. It requires the Father’s patient hand to prune and grow you in a way of life that is otherwise impossible – even inconceivable. It requires nothing less than radical repentance, living faith, and renewal of your whole heart that you might begin to learn how to really love. Such faith working through love is the product of a good news worth living and dying for.
David Powlison

LET US RISE IN EARLY MORNING

όρθρίσωμεν δρθου βαθέος.

Let us rise in early morning
And, instead of ointments, bring
Hymns of praises to our Master,
And his Resurrection sing:
We shall see the Sun of Justice
Risen with healing on His wing.

Thy unbounded loving-kindness,
They that groaned in Hades’ chain.
Prisoners, from afar beholding,
Hasten to the light again;
And to that eternal Ptacha
Wove the dance and raised the strain.

Go ye forth, His Saints, to meet Him!
Go with lamps in every hand!
From the sepulchre He riseth:
Ready for the Bridegroom stand:
And the Pascha of salvation
Hail, with his triumphant band.

-ST. JOHN DAMASCENE.