Haven’t you met Christians, for whom life is a set of prohibitions: needed not this needed not that? For people, the outside image of an "ideal" Christian is formed from solid negations: don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t walk ", don’t…, don’t…, don’t... And although all these negations are right, but is it that the main point is in the submission to these prohibitions?

But there is another side. Haven’t you met Christians seriously believing in astrology, occultism, yoga, the metempsychosis, the UFO etc., and besides, he {the Christian} is not just interested, but believes? Some people will say that it is "so interesting", the others - that it is useful for health, others again - that it is "spiritual"...

A big happiness is given to us to communicate with God, to participate in His eternal life already here and now. Is it necessary to reduce this life to prohibitions and the interests, it is necessary to be bound to them?

One common way of reading and understanding the Gospel is to try to find one's own place in one passage or another, to identify what applies to you personally. It is not always possible, or necessary, to do this, but in today's readings it is natural.

The foot of the Cross is the only "right" place for each of us, because it is precisely in the Savior's death on the Cross that the salvation of the world is accomplished and life is given to all of us, even if this never enters our minds. The world is full of suffering, some explainable and more often inexplicable, and this mystery cannot fail to concern a person. It is hard for us, so our desire to hide from suffering, to turn away from it if it does not touch us personally, is understandable. But the Gospel tells us that every genuine, unimagined human suffering is a place of Christ's special presence. It is He who suffers in every person, and it is exactly here that we meet Him.

Human nature is contradictory. And the point here is not only the features of human thinking or human feelings. The point is above all the weakness of the human will. What is a human being? God's "breath of life," giving life to nature and turning it into that flow of human existence which the Bible calls a "living soul." The "breath of life," God's presence in us, makes us human beings, possessing will and self-awareness.

But God is unobtrusive; He will let us forget His presence altogether if that is what we want. And then He will cease to be the master of our life. We ourselves become the masters of our life, and the flow of life overwhelms us. Nature becomes self-sufficient, beginning to determine our life, if not completely, then predominantly. That is what happened at the fall into sin, and now we, fallen human beings, submit to our nature. Our will has grown weak; it is no longer able to stand against that natural flow which was given to us by God as the environment and building material for our life, but which for us after the fall became an irresistible force, often dragging us where we do not want to go at all. This weak will became the main obstacle to full spiritual life.

That is why, when making decisions vital for us and making a decisive spiritual choice, we make it with reservations. Our "yes" is always accompanied by one "but" or another. And there is an objective reason for this: in our present state we really cannot vouch for ourselves, more precisely, for our human nature, which can fail us at the most unsuitable moment. Nature in the fallen world is often not subject to the spirit, not because of the properties God placed in it, but because of the abnormal position in which it found itself after the fall. In the fall, the human being freed both his own nature and, at least in part, nature as a whole from the authority of the One who alone can govern it, and he himself took hold of controls that he proved unable to manage.

In the Kingdom of God it is not so. There everything is in order with governance. Normal human nature, unspoiled by sin, is completely subject to the spirit; therefore the Savior has only "yes" for His Heavenly Father. And in everyone who has shared in the life of the Kingdom, human nature becomes obedient to the human spirit to the extent that the person's life becomes part of the life of the Kingdom. Therefore such a person also has nothing for God except "yes." For "no" to God in any case means a break in relations with Him. And therefore this "no" becomes at the same time "no" to Christ and to the Kingdom.