Episode 2 - Ancient Faith Chat: What Happens After I Die? Pt 2

STSA Church Podcast · Dec 27, 2023

Transcript

All right. Well, good evening to everyone. Good evening. My name is Father Anthony Mesa, and thank you so much for joining us here on our second Ancient Faith Chat. If you were not here with us a month ago when we started this, what Ancient Faith Chats are, they are brought to you by STSA Ministries, okay? And in case those who don't know what STSA Ministries is, this is, it's our way here at STSA Church of helping you to bring an ancient faith to your modern world, okay? Our mission at STSA Church has always been to bring an ancient faith to the modern world, and then we decided that, you know what, we can't just be selfish and focus only on our own situation right here in our own local area. So we created STSA Ministries with the intention of helping you to be able to bring that ancient faith to your modern world as well, regardless of where you live, which part of the world that you're in. We hope that what we have here can be a blessing to you and to your ministry. And those who have never seen our website, I said, let me, I'm going to do this and show you a little bit of what our website looks like. Okay, so you can see for yourself, okay, this is our website, stsaministries.org. And if you go on to stsaministries.org, you will see that we have all kinds of fun stuff. We have seasonal resources, okay, that we, that changed, depending on the season. So now that Pentecost is here and Apostles Fast is here, we had all kinds of fun stuff. We got an article about Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. We got a Bible reading plan that I'm personally using throughout this time of Acts, it's a reading plan on the book of Acts that I'm using throughout this fast, like Bay of Prayers that you can actually listen to, book recommendations, stuff for your children, stuff from the current series that we're doing. So please, after we finish up here, go ahead and check out stsaministries.org

so you can get plugged in as well. What we are doing, okay, again, for those who weren't here last month, once a month, we are joining here on these ancient faith chats. And the goal is that we would take one hard topic or one question that a lot of people have about the faith, and we would try to dig into it and see not just what we believe as Orthodox Christians, but why we believe it and the difference that it makes. You see, my theory is that the more we understand our faith, you know this, the more we understand our faith, the more we'll want to share it and we'll want to spread it and we'll feel like we're equipped to do so. Every time I talk to people from around various churches all over, what I feel is that people love the faith and people love the church, but we just don't feel equipped to share it. And that's what STSA Ministries is all about, okay? It's our goal to help you have the tools and the resources and the support, okay? Just as important as the network of support to be able to take the beauty of our ancient faith and share with others. So that's the goal. It's once a month on Wednesday nights, usually the third Wednesday of the month. So if you have any topics or questions you would like us to answer, then feel free to email us at ministries at stsa.church, that's ministries at stsa.church. All right, so let's jump into our topic for today. As the title of the webinar says that we are going to talk about what happens after I die. Now, if you were here last month, you know that we did part one of this discussion last month. Okay, so today is really a continuation of what we started before. And I'm gonna put inside the chat, you should be able to see it there, a link to a handout that has a lot of the notes that has the high level notes and some of the verses and quotes that I'm gonna be talking about here. So that way you don't feel like you have to write everything down or anything like that. You can click on that and you can pull up the handout with the verses and things like that. Like I said, my goal in these next 20 minutes, I'm gonna talk for 20 minutes, then I'll open it up for questions. You can ask me any question you want about whatever topic it is that you want. The goal of us is to answer the question is what happens after I die? Now, if you missed the first session, like I said, go to stsamministries.org

and there you'll be able to catch up on last month's video. Just by way of review, very quickly, what we talked about last month is that death was never part of God's plan for man. Death was never part of God's plan for man. Death was a consequence of our own free will. God gave man the free will to be able to choose because God treats us like adults, not like children. Children, you take away their will. You say you're not allowed to do this. You take things away from them. Adults, you say you can choose whatever you want, but there's consequences for whatever it is that you choose. That's how God treated us. And the consequence of our decision, not just Adam's decision or Eve's decision, but our decision as humanity was death. And God allowed death out of his mercy for mankind. I don't have time to get into that now, but if that statement kind of shocks you, that God allowed death out of his mercy and compassion for us, go back and check out last month's because we talked about how death was the merciful thing that God did for mankind, not a punishing thing. And then what we also talked about last month is about what happens to us when we die. We kind of opened up the subject there and we talked about how after we die between our death and the second coming of Christ, so anyone who has passed away from the beginning up until Christ returns, that's an intermediate state. They're not in heaven or hell per se, as much as they're in paradise or Hades.

These are intermediate states. And the reason why is because those states, because the resurrection of the body has not taken place. When we live in heaven with Christ for all of eternity, we will have resurrected glorified bodies, just like Jesus did after he rose from the dead. He had a body, it was not the same body, but it was the same body. So until we have that, we're in an intermediate state where we live in paradise or Hades. And we talked about that last time, what life is like in theory up there. Now, what I wanna talk about here tonight, I wanna get to the juicy stuff, which is we know that we said we're in paradise or Hades. Everyone is there right now who has passed away. Let's just focus on paradise. Let's focus on the positive.

Let's not focus on the other side. The question is, why do we pray for people who have already died? We know that the church teaches us to pray for the dead, and it teaches us to ask prayers from the dead, intercessions of the saints. Why do we pray for people who are dead, and why do we ask people who are dead to pray for us? And the follow-up question of that is, can my prayers actually make a difference in their lives or for the people who have died? Well, we're gonna answer this question, but before we do that, let's take a small step back and look at kind of a macro level of life and death in general. If I were to ask you, what is the goal of life? What is the goal of everything we do? The reason that we, why do we pray for each other while we're alive? Like, why do I pray for you and why do you pray for me? The real answer, the correct answer, is that the goal of life is to be conformed to the image of Christ, right? And that's from Romans chapter eight, verse 29. You see it there in your handout where it says, for whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. The goal, the vision, the plan is for us to be conformed to the image of Christ. That's the goal of every, that's why we pray. That's why we go to church. That's why we strive. That's why we fast. That's why we pray. It's everything. Now, we get tripped up because we are kind of selfish and we're kind of shortsighted. So we're like, no, pray for me that I get this job and pray for me that my sickness goes away and pray for me that whatever. And we do pray for those things.

There's nothing wrong with that. But the end goal, the end all be all, the goal is that I'm in the image of Christ. And in theory, I want that job because it'll help me conform to Christ's image. I wanna be healed, not because I just, I don't want pain as much as it'll help me conform to Christ's image and serve Christ. That's the goal of why we do everything that we do, okay? At least in theory, again, we all fall short of that theory. So if the goal is to be conformed to the image of Christ, some people on this church, on this earth, let's say some people achieve it, okay? We would call those the saints of the church, the Saint Mary, okay, Saint John the Baptist, okay? They are able to achieve that high, high, high calling and conform to the image of Christ. For those, we ask their prayers, we ask their intercessions, we know that they hear us and we know that they can pray for us just the same way that you and I can pray for each other, okay? Because it's not their flesh that's praying, it's their spirit and their spirit clearly is still alive even though their body is not. So for those who achieve that state, they're the saints, that's fantastic. But what about the rest of us who don't achieve that state? Okay, the rest of us who are still striving, we're living a life of repentance. The question that you have to ask yourself, if the goal is to get to the image of Christ and that's what like it's ever said, is that's what Christ, that's what God who before knew he predestined that we would reach it. If that process is not complete by the time you die, what happens? If that process is not complete by the time you die, what happens? Does it just end? Do we just fall short and we just wherever we are, we are? Or does the process continue as Saint Paul says in Ephesians chapter four, verse 11 through 13, this is an important passage. Ephesians chapter four, verse 11 through 13. It talks about like spiritual gifts and it says, and he himself, meaning Christ gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers for the equipping of the saints for the work of the ministry. Here comes the important part, for the edifying of the body of Christ till we all come to the unity of faith and the knowledge of the son of God to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. The goal is that we would all reach the level of perfection, be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect, that we reach that level of perfection to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. So my question, if someone is on earth and has not reached the fullness, can I pray for them that God through his grace would help them grow in that process?

The answer is yes. Well, the same is true even after the person has died. As long as the process isn't done, as long as there's still work to be done, the process continues because perfection, as I wrote in your handout, perfection is not a static point end state. Perfection is a process. Perfection is a process that begins here on earth, but it doesn't end here on earth. Again, for some, if you're a saint, it ended here on earth, more power to you. But for the rest of us, it's the process that begins here, but it doesn't end here. It ends when we reach that level of the stature of Christ. So for those who have lived their life and repentance and striving, but didn't hit that full measure, then we pray for them that the grace of God, okay, would continue to work in their life. Just as I pray it continues to work in your life because it's not really me. Okay, it's really the grace of God that perfects me. So in the same way I'm praying for you that the grace of God would continue, I'm praying for them the grace of God would continue as well until they reach that place. Now you say, well, that's kind of tough because usually when we think about prayer, we think about prayer to change people's actions, but that's not the true, the truly the true prayer that we're praying is for the grace of God to act in that person's life. Okay, I'm gonna give you a quote right now from a respected church hierarch. His name is Metropolitan Callisto Swear. He's written many books about the Orthodox church. And he talks about how, it's a little bit of a long quote.

I hope you pulled up the handout in front of you because it's a little bit long. He talks about how there is no distinction between the church before death or after death, the church before death and after death. We don't have this idea that the church in heaven, okay, the church militant or the church militant on earth and the church victorious in heaven, we don't have that. We have the one body of Christ, right? And it may be a thin veil that separates us, which is life and death, but the same way that there's unity between us even though we don't live on the same continent, on the same country, in the same state, okay, there's still a unified body even before and after death. That's what Christ gave to us. Listen to this quote. He says, in God and in his church, there is no division between the living and the departed, but all are one in the love of the Father, whether we are alive or whether we are dead. Whether we are alive or whether we are dead, as members of the church, we still belong to the same family, and we still have a duty to bear one another's burdens. That's a good quote. Therefore, just as Orthodox Christians here on earth, pray for one another and ask for one another's prayers, so they also pray for the faithful departed and ask the faithful departed to pray for them. Death cannot sever the bond of mutual love, which links the members of the church together. That's a great quote. Death cannot sever the bond of mutual love, which links the members of the church together. In other words, prayer is a relationship of love. Prayer is not about, give me this job. Prayer is not about help fix this illness. Prayer is love for one another. And when there's love, okay, that love continues even beyond death.

And you know what, to be honest, like you don't have to think very hard about this one. I guarantee you, your human nature, our human nature, if somebody dies, somebody close to you dies today, like somebody close to you died right now, like five minutes ago, that person died, it would be a very unnatural thing for you to completely forget about them when you pray. Be very unnatural for you to say, I don't think about that person anymore. I don't pray for that person. Like you spent your whole life, let's say it's a mom or a dad, okay? I, about two years ago, I lost my mom. She passed away. And I remember I told this to everyone, the prayers of the saints, the prayers of the departed, praying for the departed and the departed praying for us made a lot more sense to me when it was my own mom who passed away. Because now I'm not talking about someone who lived 2000 years ago. Now I'm talking about it's my mom. And you can't tell me, like it would be the most unnatural thing for me to pray for my mom and pray for my mom and pray for my mom. Then she dies, say, okay, I don't pray for her anymore. I'm done thinking about her. I'm done. That's not humanity. And in fact, C.S. Lewis, okay, said a similar thing.

C.S. Lewis, who was not an Orthodox Christian, who in theory, you know, most non-Orthodox churches struggle with his prayers of the departed or praying for those who have died. He said, of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age, the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to him? That's beautiful. What kind of relationship could I have with God if I can't mention the things and the people that are most important to me? Again, if someone dies this morning, no problem to pray for them. Our problem is, okay, what if they died 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, 40 years ago? But the truth of the matter is if someone died a minute ago, or a year ago, or a hundred years ago, once they're outside of time here, there's no time. Like I said another way, the person who died a year ago and the person who died a hundred years ago are both gonna quote, wait the same amount of time until the second coming. There's no time up there. If you remove the time element, it just becomes intuitive and inevitable that you would pray for someone who departed. Now the next question, what would you pray for a non-Christian as well? Could you still pray like, okay, we can pray for other believers that the grace of God would continue to work. What about someone who doesn't believe in God? What about a non-Christian? Can we pray for them as well? The answer is absolutely we can pray for them. Here's the thing, our problem is we put so much on ourselves like, can I make this person go to heaven? I'm not saying you can make the person go to heaven. No one can make another person repent. But all I'm saying is it's not my job to figure out which side of the line these people fall on. My job is to pray. And same thing with you. Like my job is not, like you asked me for prayers. I don't say, well, I think this person is gonna go to hell anyway, so why pray for them? Like who in their right mind would do that? We pray for everyone and then we leave it to God to judge. It's not my job is to assume the best about every person. And then leave it to God, final judgment is his.

Again, St. Anthony one time was being asked about this, about praying for people. And he said, like it's something he wrote about him, like he was talking to himself. He said he heard a voice saying, Anthony, attend to yourself. Anthony, attend to yourself for these are the judgments of God and it is not for you to know them, period, full stop. That's the end of the story. My job is to pray and I leave judgment to God, okay? I'm not saying my prayers will, I don't know what my prayers will do, but I heard this said one time by a priest up in New Jersey, Father Athanasius Farag, he said, look, when it comes to the prayers of the saint, prayers for the departed and departed for us, we don't know everything exactly, but we know for sure. Our prayers help them and their prayers help us.

That's good enough for me. So why do we pray for the dead? Because perfection is a process, it's not an end state. All right, and that process begins on earth for sure, but it doesn't end here. Now, the last question I wanna answer is let's go to the negative side, okay? Let's go to the non-heaven side, let's go to the basement of eternity, the downstairs, which is hell. Why would a loving God create hell and why would he send people there? I know you've heard people ask this question, you may have asked it yourself, and it's a valid question. Why if he's God, why does it have to be a hell? Why can't it just be everyone goes to heaven? Why does it have to be a place of eternal punishment?

Well, let's start with the first question. Why would God create hell? The answer to that question is God did not create hell for you or for me. Matthew chapter 25 verse 41, Jesus says very clearly, depart from me, you cursed into the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. Prepared for the devil and his angels. Hell was not prepared for man, hell was prepared for the devil. That's why we have this idea, like the cartoon idea of hell is like this place where the devil is like the king and he has the pitchfork and like the black tights and he like punishes everyone. He's like, ha ha ha, I'm your slave master now. That's not true. According to Christ, hell is not a place where devil is torturing people. He himself, like it's a prison made for him, where he himself is to suffer for all of eternity. But the dumb thing is that me and you, we weren't made for hell, but all of a sudden we jumped on board and we saw this place called hell where the devil is going and Jesus says, come this way and I'll take you to life. And we're like, no, no, no, we wanna go that way because we were given free will, God allowed it. Read you a quote from a Russian theologian, his name is Vladimir Lasky. He says, hell is not so much a place where God imprisons man as a place where man by misusing his free will chooses to imprison himself. Even in hell, the wicked are not deprived of the love of God, but by their own choice, they experience a suffering with the saints experience as joy. The love of God will be an intolerable torment for those who have not acquired it within themselves. Now that requires a little bit of an explanation. Okay, in order to explain that, I wanna show you a icon, all right. I wanna show you an icon, an icon of the second coming. Here's an Orthodox icon of the second coming of Christ. And what you will notice is very clear is that Christ is there in the center, okay, at the top and on his right are the righteous. Okay, you see his mother, okay, sitting right there. You see the apostles, okay, on the apostles and John the Baptist actually on both sides at the top there. You see on the right side, other than the top line, you see the righteous in light. And then on the other side, you see the wicked, the condemned, and you see fire. Now here's the thing that I want you to see. Christ is one, okay, Christ is one. Come on, let me get this off here. Yeah, Christ is, wait, you guys can see my screen here, right, yeah, let me take this off.

I always get messed up with the sharing of the screen. So let's just remove it just to be on the same time. Yeah, Christ is one and Christ is in the middle and out of Christ light comes. And those who are the righteous are drawn by that light and those who are the wicked are burned by that light. Think of it this way. Think of it when, you know, sometimes you wake up in the morning and your eyes are not accustomed to the light, so you're like, oh, the light, it burns, it burns, it burns. Well, but once you get used to the light, the light, you like it. Think of someone who lives their whole life in darkness, their whole life in darkness, and then all of a sudden they see Christ at the end and it's, ah, it's light and it's burning, but it never goes away. Like the eyes never come back out and it's burning, it's burning. Because some say that's how hell is, okay, in that it's not God punishing, it's God revealing himself. It's the light of Christ, but the light is a burning light because that person lived in unrepentance and that person lived in wickedness and in darkness. Whereas the one who has lived in the light is drawn to the light and the light is beautiful. But why this image is very important is because Christ is the same. Christ is not like hugging one and punishing the other. Christ is not like, you know what, like you guys, okay, I like you guys. He's not saying different things to different people.

He is one. God loves all equally and not even loves all equally. God is love. God is like the only choice when you see God is perfect love and perfect light. The difference is the response from us. And the example that you can think of here is communion. We take communion in the church. Every single person takes the same communion. Every single person. It's not like some people got like more Jesus than others, or some people got like, you know, like the muscle of Jesus. Some people got like the fingernail of Jesus or something like that. Everyone gets the same Jesus. But what happens on the inside is based on our response, based on who we are, okay? And for some, that communion is eternal life. But to some, that same body and blood is condemnation to those who eat and drink in an unrighteous manner, okay? So God does not create hell for people. And in fact, I would say God doesn't send anyone to hell. God doesn't send, get rid of the expression, God sends people to hell. No, God doesn't send people to hell. If you wanna know what God sent, God sent his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. God does everything in his power to save man from death. Think of it like a guy drowning in a river and the lifeguard jumping in to save him and grab him. Say, come with me, come with me. And the guy's like, no, I like it here. I'm having fun in the river.

Other people are partying. And you're like, but guy, the river is gonna end and the waterfall is gonna crash. You're like, but I like it here. It's not the lifeguard who's killing the guy. The lifeguard is doing his best to save the guy. But if in the end, we refuse the gift of God, we refuse to live a life of repentance, we refuse to strive and live in the light, all God can do is honor our free will. Okay, God will not take back our free will. He will not take back our free will. He will honor it because he treats us like adults. So in the end, God does not desire the death of a sinner but rather that he returns and lives and he does everything in his power to get us there. But in the end, heaven and hell, eternity is simply a magnification of our decisions here on this earth. Those who choose to live close to God will get to be very close to God, will be drawn to him. Those who choose to live far from God will suffer in far away and distance from God for all of eternity, okay? So that is what I got right here. Now, what I will do is I will open it up for questions. I see some questions in the chat. I see some questions in the Q and A, all right? And I will do my best to answer as many of them as I can. Anyone is certainly welcome to put another question up there as well and I'll do my best. Let's start with this one. Okay, so this is from Arson. Does that mean that if a person dies and is heading to Hades, God can save them? So anything that says, can God save them? The answer is 100%, yes. Okay, so can God save them?

Yes. Now, the problem with the question that you're asking here, Arson, is if a person dies and is heading here, all right, we're adding a human time element to the process which truthfully doesn't exist, okay? We're saying like, okay, if I'm on my way to Miami and I haven't reached it yet, can I still change course along the way? We wouldn't say that in heaven and hell and paradise and Hades, that there's that time element in the same way. What we know is, is that the grace of God is always working to save every single person. The grace of God is working to save every single person. So until we know that a person is on that side for all of eternity, there's always grace of God can work. Okay, I know I didn't really answer your question, but truthfully, I'm always hesitant when it comes to heaven and hell and paradise and Hades to speak, okay, because truthfully, we don't know all the answers. We don't know all the answers. And there's for sure more questions, but what I would say to you is remove the human time element from it.

Maybe that will help. Next question is from anonymous. It says, in my experience, many cops take it upon themselves to judge righteously, but honestly, it just feels like judgment and consternation towards others rather than putting themselves in the spotlight and focusing on their own sins rather than those of others. How do we respond to those who exercise judgment towards others unabashedly? So anonymous, I don't know who you are, so please don't be offended by what I'm gonna say here, but like in the same way that we don't want others to judge, we're not gonna judge others. So we're not gonna say that many, anything judge or judgemental, okay? I would say people, a lot of times people are judgemental and that's probably made in this faith and that faith and that church and that church. So, cause I know many cops who are very unjudgmental. So I'm not gonna, and I'm not blaming you or anything like that, but I guess what I'm saying is we're gonna practice what we want others to practice and we're gonna give everyone the benefit of the doubt. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna pray for everyone and we're gonna know that we ourselves fall short in so many different ways, okay? So yeah, we'll lead by example is what I would say. If someone wants to, someone says they wanna ask a question by with their voice, absolutely. What you can do is try to hit raise hand, hit the raise hand button. I will let you answer your question. Okay, out loud, I'll let you ask it right here, okay? Hit the raise hand button, I'll be happy to do that.

I think that's how it works. I raised my hand, okay, hold on. Hold on here, hold on, hold on, let me see. All right. No, you're right, you did raise your hand. Allow to talk. Arson, are you there? Yes, I'm here. All right. Thanks a lot for the everything you do and for your videos that you do on YouTube. They help a lot to have practical, how to practice faith in daily life. I really appreciate everything. Oh, thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you for being part of the Ancient Faith Chat tonight. So I just want to ask you two quick questions. So the first part is that, you know when children, they are behaving bad. So fathers, parents sometimes tell them like, go to your room for 15 minutes because you have been, you haven't been behaving good. So is it also like, since everyone who is going to paradise, I mean, every one of them has sinned. Some of them, some of them lit small sins, but some of them have sinned a lot. So does like God tell those who go to paradise, like you sinned, you didn't sin so much, so you are okay. But you sinned a lot.

So like, go do this for like this amount of time. And then you are like everyone going to paradise. And then the second question is like, those who are in Hades or are in paradise, how much of a free will do they have? Can their spirits like walk around in the universe just for fun and then like go to other planets and stuff, or are they locked in where they are? Okay, two good questions. No, my pleasure. Thank you for asking. Two good questions. So the first one, well, let me say the second one because that one's in my mind. Those who are in paradise or Hades, okay, they are, as we talked about last time, they are aware of what's happening here for sure. And that was the passage from Luke chapter 16 with the beggar and the rich man. So those who have passed on are aware. I don't think that means they have freedom to travel as they want. Don't think that means like they're still under the sovereign will of God in the sense that God allows them to see certain things, but he doesn't allow them to be right. He may allow, obviously, people who have died can appear things like that, but they're not in the way of, they're not Christ himself where they are everywhere and they're not like that. They're aware, but that doesn't mean that they are acting, okay, at all times here on this earth. Okay, the first question, your question about, how does God look at us? We as human beings, we only know what it means to be a human being. So we tend to look at God in human terms. And we say like, this is bad, this is worse, this is not as bad. So like, where's the line? Truthfully, actually, this is a good plug for our next Ancient Faith Chat, which will be in July, on July 20th, we're actually gonna talk about this. The subject is gonna be, are some sins worse than others? Are some sins worse than others? Because we know that in the church, there's certain sins. Remember reading a book one time, it's called respectable sins. We know there's certain sins that are like really bad and those are not allowed in church, but then other ones are like, it's not that big a deal. Like gluttony, very few people would get kicked out of church for gluttony.

In fact, you would get promoted through the ranks. Okay, we practice gluttony, okay? So that's human, that's not God. In God's eyes, and it won't give too much, because again, we'll talk about that on July 20th, make sure you sign up for the next Ancient Faith Chat. All sin, God doesn't view sins in the way we do. This is a minus one, this is a minus two, this is a minus three, this is one's okay. That's a very human way of doing it. God looks at the heart. Okay, 1 Samuel chapter 16, man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. You needn't look no further than like the thief on the cross that was crucified next to Christ. Very bad if you just go outside sins, but the heart, Jesus said today, he'll be with me in paradise. Pharisees, they were pretty good on the outside. They didn't do that many bad stuff on the outside. They fasted, they prayed, but Christ said you all are whitewashed tombs. So we're not gonna look at it as actions or deeds plus minus, we're gonna look at it as the heart. Like I said, come next time, we'll talk more about that. I'm gonna pull some questions here from the chat as well. Does that mean if a person dies and is heading to Hades, God can save, we already got that one. I am curious what you think the Eastern Orthodox teaching on so-called aerial toll houses, feel free to skip if too gnarly. I don't know what that is to be honest.

Aerial toll houses, I know toll house cookies, that's what I thought of, okay. So sorry, not skipping because gnarly, skipping because I don't know what that is. Sally says about quiet time that you talked about last week, I've been doing my quiet time for the past year, but don't feel a difference. Could there be something that I'm doing wrong? There could be, but there could not be. Okay, so the starting point is always to say, I am doing something wrong. And what that means is repentance. Okay, anytime I feel like I'm not hearing the voice of God, then I always start by examining say, is there an unresolved sin that needs to be repented for in my life? With that said, there may come a point in time it's not an unrepented sin, but God just sometimes allows us to be in those dry periods. We're gonna fight through it. So either way, regardless, I don't know the answer, but the starting point number one, repentance. Number two, fight through it. Okay, repentance is driving, okay. Do we pray for cremated persons? Is the spirit of cremated person is there? I mean, I know some people, look, we in the Orthodox Church, we believe that the body is the temple of God. So because of that, we do not prefer cremation. Okay, we do not prefer it because the body is something to be honored. It's not something evil, okay. The spirit is good and the body is evil. We don't believe in that. That was a heresy, you know, the body was created by God. All things were created by God and it's good. So we honor the body for that reason. Some people die in horrific ways. It's not our place to judge. Okay, that's all I'll say about that. Some people die in horrific ways. In fact, some of our saints, okay, their bodies were mangled and crushed and destroyed, okay. So we honor the body as the temple of the living God. The Orthodox Church is a lot less hard and fast like never, okay, or always than we may think, all right.

Let's go back to these questions in the Q&A. Is it fair to think that hell is our soul living far from its creator? You put hell in quotes. So yeah, in quotes, I can say that, yeah, hell is living far from our creator. But, you know, in an eternal sense, hell, you know, we're taught to think of it as a place, not a place like, you know, 100 acres, you know, in the corner of, not like that, as much as a place where God is present in all places. So there's not never a place that's really outside of God, but that person can't receive the love of God, like I showed you in that icon. They receive the light of God in a fire kind of a way, as opposed to light of God in a love kind of a way. So I guess my concern with it, you can never, there's never a place where God is not present, okay. If all of eternity, okay, all of eternity is in God's hand.

So there's never a place, including hell, that can be outside, if it's outside of God, then he's not God, okay. So in a spiritual sense, okay, but as long as we see that. If God is sovereign, do my prayers for someone else, dead or alive, really matter in regards to their salvation, or is it for my own salvation? Do my prayers for someone else matter? So yes, my prayers always matter. But so like we kind of, again, we think towards extremes, and we say, if I pray, will it change this? And if I don't pray, will it be this? Well, just here on this earth, if I pray, you know, will I get an A, will that person get an A? No, not necessarily, but my prayers could help them. So I'm not focused on the result. I don't know what's gonna happen with the result. The result is in God's hands. My job is to pray for everyone, knowing that everyone needs the grace of God's work in their life, before death and after death. And again, the hard part for us is this element of time. What if they died a year ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago? Outside of life here, there's no time. So a person who died 500, again, if a person died five minutes ago, you would pray for them.

You'd have no problem. You'd actually, you'd be a monster if you said, no, it's wrong to pray for them. They just died five minutes ago. You would pray for them. I'm saying five minutes, five days, five years, five months or five decades, whatever it is, it's the same once you're outside of time, okay? So I'm not gonna say that my prayers will negate God's will, or really it's more, God's will is for them to live. But my prayers will not cause, my prayers cannot force someone to repent who has, chooses not to repent. My prayers can't do that. But my prayers can soften the soil, okay? And pray that the grace of God would work. So it's always a good idea to pray and leave the results to God. Okay, two more questions and then I'm done because I'm running out of time. Mimi asks, is someone that committed suicide any more of a sinner than us? Will the church pray for such individuals? So your question, Mimi, of course, we talk about suicide as the worst of all the sins because it's giving up on God himself. It's saying there's no hope in God.

However, with that said, we know that, I don't wanna say 100%, but the majority of people who commit suicide have a mental illness. So it's not apples to apples. So again, my job is to pray and leave it to God. Okay, the one place I don't ever wanna sit is on the judgment seat of Christ. That's the one place I don't wanna sit. Like I may walk into your house and sit in your favorite chair and be like, oh, sorry, Mimi, I didn't mean to sit in your favorite chair. But I don't wanna walk into Christ's house and sit on his chair. I definitely don't wanna do that. Like, can you imagine walking into a courtroom, you know, if you've ever been in a courtroom and just like, you know what, I'm gonna sit in the judge's seat right now. Imagine how that judge would feel if you walked in and sat there and be like, you judge, yeah, I got a black robe anyway, so you go ahead and take five, I got this one.

No, you don't do that. We don't sit in Christ's seat. Okay, we pray for everyone. We pray for everyone, we pray for everyone, we leave it to God, okay? Last question from Michael. I know we got some more questions here, but this is my last one here. Speaking of the resurrected body, do we have any thoughts on why Mary Magdalene or the other apostle in the Rote Meis could not recognize the Lord or what is the difference in the resurrected body? Yeah, I know the answer to that question. Why they couldn't recognize Jesus? Because Jesus died. And up until Jesus, there had never been a dead person who came back to life. The way I always say is if, like I said, my mom passed away a couple of years ago, I saw someone, okay, if my mom rose from the dead and was walking down the street right here and I saw her face to face, you know what I would come home and say? I'd say, Mary Ann, you never believe this. I saw a lady who looked just like my mom. She looked just like her, she talked just like her. Like it was just like my mom. But I would never think in a million years that that's my mom because my mom died. I saw my mom die. You know what I mean? I was there when she died. There's no way that anyone could have comprehended. There was no such thing as life, like resurrection. There was no such thing. So of course they saw Jesus die and then they saw him there. It must've been, it wasn't even a possibility in their minds, okay? So that's what I would say as the answer. We are up against our time right here, but thank you so, so, so, so, so much everyone for joining us here. Please be sure, like I said, to check out our website, stsaministries.org. That's s-t-s-a-ministries.org. And be sure to sign up for our next Ancient Faith Chat, which will be on Wednesday, July 20th. And we will talk about the subject, as I said, of do some or some sins worse than others, okay? Thank you all so much. Have a great rest of the night and God bless you all.