Man’s true nature and true life do not emanate from earthly data, but from the Triune God Himself, because man is the image of God. If we want to seek man’s true life, we must draw near to God and savor His life. Only life close to God is “natural,” that is, life that corresponds to man’s true nature. As for distance from God, it is “unnatural.”

The life of the saints is the life of Christ himself, continuing throughout the ages. We are united to them on the basis of the human nature that Christ reformed through his incarnation, death and resurrection. In the divine liturgy, and especially the Eucharist, we participate in the life of Christ and its events and in the life of the saints, because we are all one body, Christ, the saints and ourselves, and we are all “one in Christ Jesus.”

The Word of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, entered the heart of the world, sanctified it, and made it live in a new era or a new age, the age of the Kingdom of God. The Lord Himself confirmed that the Kingdom of God does not pertain to the future alone, but that the believing Christian lives in it from now on. But the present time is different from the comprehensive Kingdom of God, and is only a picture or introduction to it. The Kingdom will shine in its full glory in the last times, at the coming of the Lord.

Death is the result of the new state into which man passed after the fall, and its cause is sin. Thus it became man's enemy. But this life is only an inn. We enter it and spend our whole present life in it. But we strive to leave it with good hope. We must not leave here anything that we might miss there.

The Church's war, then, is not against the body but against its passions. If the man of the new creation is freed from his corrupt passions, his senses and his entire body will become pure and enlightened, and everything around him will shine with the love and glory of God. In the lives of the saints of our Church there are examples of liberation from the slavery of passions.

It is clear that the Old Testament foreshadowings point not only to the event of Christ’s crucifixion, but also to the sign of the cross itself, the “sign of the Son of Man,” which will be the banner of victory at the Lord’s triumphant coming. The cross of the Lord is an expression of God’s infinite love and of man’s infinite value. There is no greater expression of God’s love than the cross, and there is no greater elevation of man than his elevation to the reality of the cross.