1. We should often, if not daily, examine our souls and repent of the sins we find there. St. Mark the Ascetic writes: “The conscience is nature’s book. He who applies what he reads there experiences God’s help.” …And then, as Blessed Theophan the Recluse counsels:

“Repent, and turn to the Lord, admit your sins, weep for them with heartfelt contrition, and confess them before your spiritual father.” St. Hesychios the Priest tells us that according to St. Basil the Great, “a great help towards not sinning and not committing daily the same faults is for us to review in our conscience at the end of each day what we have done wrong and what we have done right. Job did this with regard to both himself and to his children [cf. Job 1:5], These daily reckonings illumine a man’s hour-by-hour behaviour.”

  1. Struggle mightily to avoid judging others. God alone has the right to judge, for as St. Tikhon of Zadonsk says:

“Do not judge others, for you cannot know what is inside the other man. Do not condemn, for he may still rise whilst you may fall. Be-ware of even talking about others, lest you start judging them. Enquiring into other people’s sin is a curiosity hateful to God and man…because, by judging, man usurps the powers of the only judge, Christ …. Above all, when judging another we cannot know whether perchance he has not already repented and been forgiven by God.”

– Orthodox America Vol 1 Issue 6