Отвергнись себе и иди сам. Проповедь о. Константина Корепанова (23.07.2026)

Deny Yourself and Go Your Own Way A sermon by Priest Konstantin Korepanov. Recorded at the Divine Liturgy in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Yekaterinburg on July 23, 2026, Thursday of the 8th Sunday after Pentecost. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Today you heard in the Gospel reading the words: "Whoever desires to follow Me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me." "Deny yourself" is a generally understandable word. From this phrase are derived the words "selfless," "selflessness," and "selflessly." In fact, we understand this, and perhaps at one point in our youth, we too wanted to do something selfless, in the spirit of a heroic deed, in the spirit of something great and significant, but then we grew wiser, more mature, and acquired families and worries. And even if such a desire was ever present, it usually evaporates very quickly, because we live in a society for which selflessness is a pleasant thing; we want everyone around us to be selfless, to selflessly fulfill all their duties, but we ourselves do not want this at all. This reluctance on our part to live selflessly is supported and cultivated in every possible way by society itself, because, as you know, we only live once, and we must be delighted with ourselves—and also so that others can be delighted with us too. What selflessness is there in that? But in reality, in the context of the Soviet era, this was a familiar, generally understandable way of life, and anyone who had the opportunity to meet people born in the pre-war or post-war era knows the depth of their selflessness—they were truly capable of accomplishing great things, completely forgetting everything else. However, this selflessness bears no relation to the selflessness prescribed by the Gospel. Those selfless people, who are destined for honor and glory both in life and after death, and the heroic deeds of many of them are immortalized with awards, monuments, and memorials, and the names of the selfless people who won and triumphed in the Great Patriotic War, I hope, will long be remembered. Their heroic deed is immortal because they rejected everything they held dear and gave the only thing they had—their lives—so that we might live under this, today's peaceful, blue, and sunny sky. But the self-denial spoken of in the Gospel is quite different: there one must "deny oneself" in order to follow Christ. And Christ can lead one to the battlefield, or to the rear. He can lead one to a monastery, or to marriage. He can lead a person to study, or to business. He can lead a person to raising children, or to the absence of children, as with John of Kronstadt. He leads each person along his own path, but to walk this path, a person must deny himself—he must renounce his own picture of life, his own ideas about life—not only his own goals and objectives, but also everything he considers right, everything he considers good. Because, as Holy Scripture says, God speaks from heaven: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not My ways." We think: this is good, and that is bad. For one person, going to the hospital is good, for another, it is bad, because God wants him to endure. For one person, getting married is good, for another, it is bad, because God wants him to remain alone. For one person, going to the altar and becoming a priest is good, for another, it is bad—he will become a source of confusion and temptation for many people and will destroy his soul. This rejection of everything I consider right, good, pious, kind, and reasonable, in order to embrace what Christ considers right, reasonable, true, and honest, is called repentance in the truest sense of the word. It is a turning away from the picture I have formed in my mind and toward what Christ offers me. We are all like children whose father drags them by the hand to buy a toy in a good children's store—say, some genuine brand-name Lego set, for 70, 80, or 100 thousand. The child sees a fake ice cream cone in the display case and throws a tantrum, saying, "I want that ice cream cone. When I get home, I'll feed it to my teddy bear (whose mouth has long been sewn shut)." So the child stands there, resisting, refusing to buy it. His father drags him, but he resists, yelling at the top of his lungs, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I want ice cream!" He doesn't know what his father has prepared for him. We are all such screaming, shouting, indignant children, with the only difference being that the father usually drags the child. But God doesn't... The ending is in the first comment on this video. The text was recorded by Elena Plotnikova.