Thursday, March 16, 2023

Elder Ephraim on Spiritual Delusion (video)

How we can distinguish when the Devil wants to deceive us? (at 52:17)

Whenever the devil tries to trick you to things that maybe that was a good sign from Jesus and that really was and was the devil, how can you easily distinguish between the two?

The way to distinguish whether or not these spiritual experiences are from the Lord or from the devil is to see what results of them are, what the fruits of them are in our lives. If the experience that we had is from the Lord, accompanied it will be with humility, peace in our soul, and certain spiritual blessings and fruits that come from that: we feel that it is from the Lord. If on the other hand, if there is something from the devil, the results will be different: there will be an uneasiness about it, there will be a discomfort, there will be a spiritual unrest that will be created by the activity of the devil in our lives and of course that sometimes leads to pride. So when we are not sure about a spiritual experience is to whether or not it is from the devil or not or whether it is from the Lord, we are to go for insurance to our spiritual guide, our spiritual father. We do this in order to check ourselves out. We need to go to somebody who help us make this discernment, to find out whether is something of the Lord. If we only depend on ourselves, if we make our own judgment on this, if we in a sense draw our own conclusions about the validity of the experience, we can easily fool ourselves, thinking that this is from the God while in reality it is not from the God, it could be from the devil. That requires a tremendous amount of spiritual discernment in order to be able to make distinction which one is from the devil and which from the Lord. 

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