Click here to listen to this week's episode of Jason's Get Wisdom podcast, and click here for the free study guide for this episode.

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Have you ever become impatient waiting on God to act to help you in a situation? Perhaps you have struggled in school, and prayed that God would help you with your studies. Perhaps a friend or a family member has been sick, and you’ve become discouraged when, despite your prayers, that person did not get well.

Join Father Chris at St. Demetrios for the weekly Orthodox Study Class. This class is part of the series, "So You Think You Are Going to Heaven?" 

Watch Now>>>  Click here to get the study guide that accompanies it!

You can listen to this week's episode of Jason's Get Wisdom podcast by clicking here , and you can click here for the free study guide for this episode.

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Have you ever said something that deeply hurt another person? Have you ever told a story about someone, and learned later that the story had spread around the school? Have you ever been caught lying, or had someone tell you that you complain too much?

This morning we hear our Lord's parable of a wedding. The parable is told as a word about the kingdom of heaven-the parable begins, "the kingdom of heaven is like..." (v2). This image Christ uses in the parable becomes one of the most prominent images for the kingdom of heaven in all of Scripture. The wedding of a Son to His Bride. A beautiful image used extensively in the Church to illustrate the joining of Christ with His Holy Church, the Head with the Body, the Bride with the Bridegroom. "Behold the Bridegroom cometh in the middle of night," we sing in Great Lent. We also have the parable of the wise and the foolish virgins waiting for the Bridegroom. St. Paul uses the image of marriage for our relationship with Christ and the kingdom on several occasions.

This image is so ideal because it helps express to us the potential intimacy of man's relationship with His God. And even this simile of marriage is but a pale image of the reality of Christ's union with His people. In the wedding service, we quote the Scriptures, "and the two become one flesh." This is the image given of the kingdom of heaven; we're to be joined to Christ even more fully than a Bride to her Bridegroom.

So in the parable, the Father has prepared for His Son a wedding, and the Father sends out servants to invite people to attend this great occasion. He sends out servants with invitations not just one time, but three times, and He's even forced to send out the army to punish those who have mistreated some of those servants. To understand this persistency we skip to the last verse of the parable-"for many are called, but few are chosen" (v. 14). The Father has made provision for the Church to be the Bride of Christ. And many are called to the wedding-the Orthodox Study Bible has a footnote that explains that the phrase "for many" is an Aramaic expression meaning "for all." Our Orthodox understanding here is that the Church is established, and all mankind is called to be a part of the Body and Bride of God. God desires that "all men be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Timothy 2:4). So the repeated sending out of servants to call guests to the wedding shows the Father's desire to have His people with Him in the Heavenly Kingdom (the whole parable is told to demonstrate this). God loves us, and wants us for His own.

So the King has sent out three waves of servants with invitations, and the responses are varied. The first group of servants are simply ignored, the invited are not willing to come. The second group of servants are mocked, and some of the invited just leave and go back to their business, and others take the servants and abuse them and even kill them.  The final group is sent to a different audience-instead of a select few being invited to the wedding, these servants are sent on the highways to invite anyone they might see. And finally, the wedding hall is filled with guests.

Click here to listen to this week's episode of Jason's GET WISDOM! podcast on Romans chapter two, and click here to download the free study guide for this episode.

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Have you ever expressed disagreement with a person’s position, or disapproval of a particular type of behavior, and one of your friends responded, “How can you be so judgmental? Didn’t Jesus say you shouldn’t judge people?”

This nicely produced documentary, entitled Living Waters: Saving our Seas and Rivers, looks at the environmental work of His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. It's now available from goarch.org. 

 Watch Now »

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Exaltation of the Precious and Life-giving Cross of our Lord. We enter the Church this morning and we fall on our faces in veneration before the Holy Cross, and in worship before our Saviour who was nailed to the tree and died for our salvation. Everything in the Christian Church points to Christ, and the defining moment in the life of Christ is the Cross. As St. Paul writes, "We preach Christ, and Him crucified" (1 Corinthians 1:23).

This is our message as the Body of Christ to the world. We don't preach health and wealth, we don't preach prosperity, we don't give "feel-good" pep talks, we don't say that everything's all right. We preach the Son of God, incarnate of the Virgin Mary, on the tree of the Cross for our salvation, rising from the dead on the third day, ascending into heaven, and seated even now at the right hand of the Father. This message is our boast.

St. Paul also writes to the Romans, "I am not ashamed of the Gospel" (Romans 1:16). The Cross is just as much a stumbling block or folly for people today as it was 2,000 years ago. The mindset of the world wants us to preach Christ the Philosopher, Christ the Wise Man, Christ the Healer. Anything but Christ the Crucified Son of God. This is a great temptation for the Church today-to modify the message of Christ to be more appealing to modern ears, to present Christ as people want Him to be. But carrying the message of the Cross to the world is the only way to truly give them Christ. The Cross is the message of God for the world.

The Cross shows us that the world is broken; the world is evil; terrible things happen in this fallen world. The fulfillment of man is not to be found in the fleeting pleasures and desires of this life. God came into the world, lived a perfect life, revealed Himself to mankind, and the result is the Cross. Of all of the things that have happened over the course of human history, the Cross points most clearly to the fallen-ness of the world.

One of the greatest arguments, in the secular world, against the existence of God is the so-called "problem of evil." This problem asks the question "with a God Who is good and loving, how can evil exist in the world?" Why does a God who is love allow evil? And to be very timely, the specific question of natural disasters-why does God's creation cause such evil (death from earthquakes, floods, hurricanes)? In another phrasing, where was God as people died in Hurricane Gustav, or Hurricane Katrina, or any of the other terrible natural disasters that claim the lives of so many people in the world today? As people who have recently been affected by Hurricane Gustav, some much more than others, that question very often comes to mind-what is God's role is causing or preventing these tragedies?

The Orthodox Church doesn't try to answer that question in a way that would provide solutions to all the various aspects of the questions. That would be nonsense; as we hear expressed in the Scriptures: who is man to question God (Job); who is man to understand the mind of God (His ways are not our ways). It would be foolish to think that we can understand and explain God. But there are some things we can definitely say, beginning with placing all events in the context of God's revelation to man, using the two feasts we celebrate this month-

Nativity of the Theotokos
On this day the woman who is to be the mother of the Promised Messiah is born. The fullness of time is fulfilled, God's promise to His creation for redemption has begun, and is completed with the birth of Jesus Christ. From this feast we very clearly see that God's concern is for His creation, and for our betterment, salvation. With sin, death and decay and destruction enter the world, but the promise and eventual fulfillment of the Messiah is God's word to His suffering creation-what we suffer in this life is not of God's plan, and it won't be like this forever, a new heaven and a new earth are promised.

The Exaltation of the Cross
The Nativity of the Theotokos shows God's concern and His care for our salvation, and the Cross shows how far God is willing to go for our sake. He takes on our humanity, lives our life, and even experiences death. God, Who would never undergo suffering, allows Himself to suffer as we suffer. We don't have a God high in the sky, oblivious to our sufferings and our situations-our God became one of us, and is joined intimately to us for eternity.

Click here to listen to this week's episode of Jason's GET WISDOM! podcast on Romans chapter one, and click here to download the free study guide for this episode.

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Orthodox Christian worship involves praying to God; in fact, as Vasili Rozanov writes, “The soul of Orthodoxy consists in the gift of prayer.”

As we strive to surrender our wills more and more to God, as we struggle to trust in God and to lean not on our own understandings (Proverbs 3:5-6), it's important for us to be reminded of how God has cared for His people throughout human history. We can see this fact in so many places in the Holy Scriptures, but perhaps no more beautifully than in the person of the Mother of God. She is for us a part of the fulfillment of God's plan for His people, and a magnificent image to us of how God cares for those who submit to Him.

The Theotokos as a fulfillment of God's plan
As Christians, we would first and foremost say that God's plan for mankind, expressed from the beginnings of the Scriptures, is for man to be with God. Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of God's plan for fallen man to be healed. But in the fulfillment of that plan, many other pieces had to be laid, and none more important that she who was to be the Mother of the Messiah.

The woman who would be chosen to give birth to God Incarnate, to carry God within her womb, to nurse Him, to raise Him from a child, to teach Him and nurture Him, the woman who would be chosen for this privilege was an incredibly important part of God's plan. It had to be the right woman. She would be bless-ed among all women and all generations (from Luke 1:42-55). And so when we speak of the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Fathers of the Church profoundly say that her birth is the "fullness of time" prophesied in the Old Testament. God told the prophets that the Messiah would come to save His people "in the fullness of time." The Fathers teach us that the fullness of time would be fulfilled when the woman who would be worthy to be the Mother of God would be born. And so when the fullness of time was come, we celebrate the Nativity of the Mother of God.

What would be so special about one woman born of mankind, that she would be graced to be the Mother of God in the flesh? This is an answer, hidden in the mind of God. The Fathers point out her purity, her humility, her beauty, her virtue. But really, we look to her total submission to the will of God in all things; this is the single attribute that allows her to grow in all godliness and virtue.