Christ stayed with His Disciples for forty days after His Resurrection to establish their faith in Him as the Son of God and the God-Man. And when their faith had been firmly established and the Lord Jesus Christ had ascended into Heaven, the Holy Spirit descended upon them and aroused their faith in Christ in such a way that they could now perform miracles and preach the Gospel to the whole world – most of them even gave their lives for Christ.

The Holy Spirit united the Disciples with God and with each other in one single Church, further strengthened their faith in Christ, and made them desire to die like Christ so that they all might live with Christ, if possible.

The Apostles’ work was based on the prayer life provided to them by the Holy Spirit throughout their lives. Prayer in the Holy Spirit, both Eucharistic and personal, gave them the power to perform miracles, teach, and serve. In the Orthodox Church, the Apostolic balance between prayer and deeds is preserved in a remarkable way. We learn from the lives of our Saints that speech which is not born of prayer is destructive rather than constructive, and deeds which do not result from prayer are usually hypocrisy.

When one is in a state of prayer, one sees everything from God’s point of view. In this state, it is not others’ beauty, intelligence, youth, wealth or strength that please us, but the fact that each one of us constitutes an arrow aimed at the great Heart of God, so that every time we approach It, Its love overwhelms us.

When we are in a state of prayer, we weep for our brother’s mistakes as if they were our own, and we rejoice in our brothers’ spiritual progress even more than we do in our own.

Christ is the key to eternal life. Christ reveals His Father to us and overwhelms us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Faith opens our being to the God-Man Christ, and He then comes with His Father and the Holy Spirit to dwell within us and grant us all that He has.

The Christian life is not an easy matter, for to become a person of God, anything that separates one from Him must die within. The necessary surgical operations are a painful process because the spiritually ill person must remain awake to cooperate with the Healer God. In this case, the Holy Spirit acts as a sweet anaesthetic, helping the patient not only to endure the necessary pain, but also increasingly to desire complete healing more and more after each surgery. A person who sees the Love of Christ healing their wounds one by one experiences their own Pentecost, being focused only on Christ, who then gives them love drawn from His own love for the whole world along with a deep desire for the whole world to love Christ.

Archpriest Dr Georgios Lekkas is a priest of the Holy Orthodox Metropolis of Belgium.