Trying to live out a life of faith based solely upon your own actions and personal belief is not good enough my friend.
That’s not how Orthodox Christianity works. Indeed we expressly reject this, instead adhering to the Patristic, Apostolic teaching, which my friend
@Lukaris reflected upon in his post, but I fear you didn’t grasp the point he was making, which was directly related to the idea that an overconfidence in salvation interferes with the necessary repentance for our sins.
The Patristic and Scriptural view my most pious friend
@Lukaris was expressing is very succinctly expressed by St. Silouan the Athonite, who warned that every Christian must flee from two thoughts: that we have already attained holiness, and conversely, that we are beyond hope of salvation. The former leads to dangerous pride, and the latter leads to dangerous despair, causing one to give up, or perhaps live in the world, rather than apart from it, capitulating to the secular, or perhaps otherwise engaging in apostasy, or worst of all, simply languishing in despair over our salvation rather than real dynamic
metanoia, which is life-giving and facilitated by the Holy Spirit.
In the Orthodox Church we regard ourselves as the chief of sinners; we confess this before partaking of the Eucharist. During the Divine Liturgy, the presbyter or bishop begs the congregation for his forgiveness. The Syriac Orthodox liturgy concludes with a request from the celebrating presbyter or bishop that the congregation continually remember him in their prayers. Orthodox Christianity is based on a life of joyful repentance, which is best experienced during the very happy time of year for us known as the Great Lent, during which we celebrate many of our most beautiful liturgies, the use of which continues into Holy Week as we worship Christ our True God praising His sacrifice for us on the Cross and celebrating his victory over death, which turns into incandescent bliss on the night of Pascha, during the midnight liturgy, where the light of the World to Come becomes evident, which in turn is followed by the joyous time of Bright Week, in which the iconostasis is opened and joyous liturgies are celebrated throughout the period of the Pentecost using a hymnal known as the Pentecostarion or Flowery Triodion, which celebrates the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, several Holy Apostles, and the descent of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Trinity on Pentecost Sunday and Holy Spirit Monday, concluding with All Saints Day on the Sunday after Pentecost.
This liturgy is also used by Eastern Rite Catholics who became separated from the Orthodox primarily for political reasons, but whose beliefs are basically the same as ours, and who venerate Orthodox saints not venerated in the larger Roman Catholic Church such as St. Gregory Palamas, and who have married clergy, and also by the Ukrainian Lutheran Church and other Eastern-rite Protestant churches, which are a minority; they mostly only exist in areas with a substantial Eastern Catholic presence, for the Orthodox churches never experienced anything like the Protestant Reformation; indeed the Orthodox Christian will protest changes to the liturgy that move it away from sacred tradition; modifying the traditional liturgy ill-advisedly has caused schisms, which is understandable since the whole point of the Orthodox Church is the idea of Orthodoxy, which literally means “Correct Worship.”
This does not mean “homogenous worship” and indeed Orthodox worship is highly diverse, with Western Rite Orthodox parishes that worship according to the traditions of the Western church which predate the Great Schism and represent the common Patristic inheritance of all Western Christians, and likewise in the Oriental Orthodox, there are distinct and beautiful liturgies for each Oriental Orthodox church (Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian, Indian), and furthermore within Eastern Orthodoxy the Byzantine Rite liturgy is celebrated in a diversity of ways depending on where one is, with several styles of music such as the exquisite four part harmony of the northern Slavonic, Finnish and American church, the moving four part harmony and Syro-Byzantine Chant of the Antiochians, the traditional Byzantine Chant of the Athonite Monks and of a few others (I particularly like Bulgarian Byzantine Chant) and the three part harmony of the Georgian Orthodox.
