What is love? It is no sentimentality. Love for Christ means to keep His commandments. It means to have a personal relationship with Christ, i.e. to be personally aware of the following truths: “You died for me. You love me. You suffered for me, You sweated blood in Gethsemane, You were scourged, crowned with thorns, covered with spittle and humiliated, You carried a cross, fell down, humbled among criminals and murderers as if You were one of them, like a beggar – You who worked miracles allowed to be humiliated and ridiculed for my sake. Finally, You were crucified at Calvary. I am ready, too, to suffer or even to lay down my life for Your sake.

Jesus tells us to put all our trust in God. He tells us to look at birds and lilies to see how God cares for them. We cannot make one hair white or black by our endeavour. We cannot add a single day, hour or second to our life by worrying or keeping our nose to the grindstone. When we will be dying, we will see if we were wise or unwise, but it will be too late then and we will have no more time to change it. So let us be wise today! In other words, let us rely on God, let us be mindful of eternal life. Our life is in God’s hands. Why should we worry?

“I revealed to them Your name, and I will continue to reveal it,

that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”

These words are the conclusion of Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the disciples with Him as well as for unity with the Father and for the knowledge of God’s love and Christ’s presence in us.

Jesus says that He revealed to the disciples, and to no one else, the mystery of the name of God the Father, which is also the name of Jesus. The Father loves the Son from eternity. He gave Him His name, and Jesus reveals this name to those who are His. This name is Yehoshua – Lord is salvation – Jesus.

Jesus says to the apostles several times: “Do not be afraid!” The Scripture says in many places: “Do not be afraid!” When we are afraid, let us face the truth. And where to get the courage and strength? In prayer. In God’s presence. When you pray, do not talk to yourself, for such prayer will not give you strength. First realize: Where is Jesus? He is here and He is waiting for you. He is waiting for you to come into contact with Him, to give Him your sin and your problems. These two things. Your sin first and then your problems. We fail to do so. It is a very simple thing, but we not only need to know about it, we need to put it into practice. Practice! Then we will experience that Jesus is with us in every problem, we only need to be aware of it. We will experience that He gives us the strength, relieves us from our fear and makes us see things in a completely different light.

God’s almighty power is connected with obedience to the Word of God, as we can see it in the case of the prophet Elijah: I have done all these things at Your word. God sent him to the Brook Cherith, so he did go there; when God sent him to Zarephath, he did go to Zarephath; when God told him what to do on Mount Carmel, he said: Let this people know that I have done all these things at Your word! So the essence of the prophetic spirit is the obedience of faith and obedience to the Word of God. God wants us all to be prophets. He wants to speak through every one of us. We should learn, too, the obedience to God’s Word so that we may unite to the almighty power of God in a prayer of faith.

What does every nation need most? It needs the Spirit of prophecy, the Spirit of truth. It needs prophets. And who is to be a prophet? In chapter 14 of the Epistle to the Corinthians, we read clearly that we should earnestly pray for the gift of prophecy. All of us. And who is behind the gift of prophecy? The Holy Spirit. We confess in The Creed that the Holy Spirit worked through the prophets – through the prophet Elisha who followed the prophet Elijah and through other prophets of those times, but He worked most through John the Baptist who came before the first coming of Christ in the power of Elijah.

“Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, led them up on a high mountain by themselves; and He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with Him. …behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud, saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!’” (Mt 17:1-5)

Three disciples, Peter, James and John, were witnesses of Jesus’ transfiguration on Mount Tabor in Galilee. The light of Jesus’ Divinity shone on them. It was a great experience for them. At the close of chapter 16, Jesus says: “Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom.” (Mt 16:28) On Mount Tabor, they saw a flash of Jesus’ glory.

You think to yourself: If I had a vision, my faith would deepen. But we can see what an impact that vision had on the apostles. After a few days these three disciples were on the Mount of Olives in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed: “O My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.” (Mt 26:39)

“Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am,

that they may behold My glory which You have given Me;

for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.”

Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am, that they may behold My glory which You have given Me; for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.

These are the next words of Jesus’ prayer before He left the upper room where He instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

Jesus now speaks to His Father in heaven: “Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me…” Who are they? The apostles and all who have believed in Christ and received Him.

“…that they may be with Me…” Where? Jesus lets us into a secret: “…where I am…”. And where is Jesus? When He was praying, He was physically present in Jerusalem, in the upper room, but through prayer He was in union with His Father. Now Jesus is in glory but at the same time He is mysteriously present in all who received Him. We can live this unity in prayer, realizing the deep truth of unity with Christ, which He speaks about and emphasizes in many places.

Jesus is the Judge. The Father has given all judgment to the Son. When He sits on the throne on the Day of Judgment, the sheep will stand on His right and the goats on His left. And the latter will go away to eternal damnation. He will separate the good from the evil. Wheat is mixed with tares on earth. God allows it and one can hardly separate it. We cannot remove evil from this world, because evil is in our hearts as well. The kingdoms or countries throughout history have always had their laws, courts and punishments which they applied to people who committed crimes; nevertheless, they will never be able to uproot evil completely, they can just reduce it so as to prevent total devastation. All people have a conscience, the voice of God, and understand what is good and what is bad.

On Monday 22 June 2015, a group of men in masks made an armed attack on the women’s Monastery of St Elijah the Prophet in Bryukhovychi near Lvov on the orders of the UGCC (Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) hierarchy. The Monastery, which was established by the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytskyi in 1925, went through the communist era, when the Church went underground and suffered persecution, and it preserved the true Catholic faith.

This monastery of contemplative sisters belongs to the Ukrainian orthodox Greek Catholic Church (UO GCC) which preserves the heritage of the true Catholic faith of the Metropolitan A. Sheptytskyi and dissociates itself from modern heresies. In contrast to it, Cardinal Husar proclaims heresies – he questions the Divinity of Jesus Christ, denies the eternity of hell, approves of homosexuality, promotes sorcery and he himself divines by pendulum.

On 22 June 2015, a barbaric armed raid was made on our monastery in Bryukhovychi at 6:20 a.m. There were about 200 men.

They jumped over the fence, dressed in black and green and wearing black or green masks. They had guns. They broke the doors with axes.

I saw a group of men in disguise at the door. They wore masks and you could only see their eyes. They had guns and pistols. They pointed the weapons at us, shouted at us and commanded us to go out. Another group of men was standing behind them and flashing torches in our eyes. They did not allow us to say anything. They showed no official documents nor explained what right they had to encroach on a private territory.

In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life. The Son of God became man to deliver us from our sins: “You shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins.” (Mt 1:21) “There is born to you this day in the city of David the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.” (Lk 2:11) Fallen man cannot save himself. After the first sin of our first parents we cannot open the heaven by ourselves. No teaching of self-redemption, as promoted by Hindus or Buddhists, no human methods can save anyone or deliver one from sins. Between us and God there is a great chasm. Fallen man is on one side and holy God on the other. No human efforts, good works, self-redemptive religions or meditations can bridge this chasm. The only bridge is the cross of Christ. By crossing over this bridge, a sinful man can unite to holy God. These are the simple truths of Christianity.

If Christ has not died for our sins, we all are going to hell. If there is no forgiveness of sins, Christianity is good for nothing. Christ did die for our sins! This is the main thing! The very first sermon of the Apostles was about this. This is the essence of the proclamation of the Gospel. The two sentences that were preached by all the Apostles: 1) He died for our sins, 2) He was raised from the dead and we are witnesses of this. Today this all is being denied masterfully! One can hardly believe that such is the state of the organization which still calls itself the Church.

“That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You;

that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.”

In this verse, Jesus prays for the present and future apostles and disciples and for their internal unity. This unity is no legal unity or unity within a structure. The condition of true unity is that every disciple of Christ must first be in unity with the Father through sincere repentance and saving faith. Prayers for a kind of globalization of Christians in the spirit of New Age with the aim of establishing a unified structure is the exact opposite of what Jesus prayed for.