Everyone of us will face God’s judgment. As Christians, we profess—we know—that we are mortal and that our judgment is racing towards us—and yet, how often we live as though we don’t believe this at all. When we look at our lives, how often we have forgotten God, forgotten our mortality. One of our tasks as Christians is to develop the remembrance of God, remembrance of the truth, remembrance that we are to die and face an account for how we have lived. Too often in the modern world the work of the demons is made so easy. Yes, they continue to tempt us to do all kinds of evil, but in many ways they no longer need to tempt us into great evil to condemn us, to lead us astray. So easily we are distracted, so easily the superficial nonsense of this world fills our mind, our soul, and the demons mock and laugh at us.

God has given us a voice, an inner voice, the conscience. The conscience will speak out against us when we die. We must be aware of this. When we die, Elder Ephraim of Mount Athos and Arizona says to us: The conscience will testify before God against us. The conscience that has witnessed everything that we have done, everything that we have said, every thought that we have harbored, every fantasy that we have chased and allowed to develop within us. The conscience will speak before God, naming every one of our sins. And so we must live in preparation for this judgment. We must listen to the voice of our conscience now, in this life, while there is time.

Many modern thinkers, many modern writers, dismiss Church teaching, particularly when it comes to death and what happens to the soul after death. They dismiss these teachings as myths, as fables. Even Orthodox clergy you’ll hear describing Church teaching just as some kind of allegory. But in the writings of our Church Fathers, in the hymns and the prayers of so many of our services, we are warned that when the soul leaves the body at death, it will pass through the aerial examination, the aerial challenges of the demons before it is permitted—if it is permitted—to journey to God. And so we must live to ready ourselves for this.

We must ask ourselves: How do I know if I’ve truly heard and responded to this truth? Well, we simply need to look at our lives, look at the way we are living, look honestly at ourselves. How do I live? Do I live—and there in my life I see this truth, boldly proclaimed in my behavior, in my words, in my thoughts? Do I see this truth boldly proclaimed in my pursuits, my dreams, my goals, the way I treat other people? Is the truth that God has brought to us there, alive, guiding me? Or have I pushed it aside? Have I ignored it? Have I been distracted by so much nonsense in this world?

We are each faced with the eternal consequences of our lives. The judgment is to come. None of us knows how many days or even hours, even hours we have left to live. There is nothing more urgent for us than addressing the condition of our soul. The horror—the horror of hell—is beyond imagination. But we must not allow this truth, this reality, to lead us to despair: this is a demonic trick. We are being warned now. It will not find us surprised or unprepared if we listen to God.

God’s love for us is such that we are celebrating his Nativity. He has come in the flesh to be one of us. His love for us is beyond measure. He comes to be one of us, to unite himself to us, and unite us to him, to show us how to live, to prepare us for this judgment to come. This is God’s love for us. So let us live according to our conscience. When it speaks to us, let us hear and respond. When the conscience says to us, “Go to confession,” let us run to confess and be forgiven. When the conscience prompts us to forgive—forgive our neighbors who have perhaps treated us harshly—let us be the first to rush to reconcile, to seek forgiveness and reconcile.

If we ignore our conscience, it is weakened. Its strength is lessened in our lives until we can barely hear it. And for some the conscience has almost been extinguished. When the conscience dies, when the conscience is silenced within us, we can fall into a condition of living like the animals: hedonistic, chasing after pleasure, avoiding struggle, avoiding hardship. This is a demonic way of life. It is the way of a beast.

The conscience reminds us that we have fallen—but do not despair: when we fall, we are to get up. There is a famous saying in the Church Fathers. They say, “To fall is to be human, but to fall and not get back up is demonic.” To fall is human; to fall and not get back up is demonic. We all fall; we are all sinners. But when we fall, we are to get up, to repent, to confess, to find God’s mercy in confession and find his compassion. However many times we have offended God—and we offend God constantly, every one of us—let us rush to find his mercy. Trust, believe, that he continues to invite us back to him, to receive his forgiveness, like the father of the prodigal son with his arms open wide, to grant us more than we even had before. This is the love of God. Let it wipe away the demonic trick of despair.

“The spiritual life,” a holy nun recently said, “is like living on a knife edge.” The very spiritual life itself is like being on a knife edge. So easily we can look at our sins and fall into despair, so easily we can look at God’s love and become overly confident and not repent. We live on a knife edge, knowing we are sinful, trusting in God’s love and forgiveness, but always knowing that we are unworthy of that love. This knife edge that we follow, the royal way, falling neither to the left nor right.

If we listen to our conscience now in this world, when we die there will be joy in our soul. When we depart this world, there will be joy that is incomparable. Nothing in this world can compare to the joy of the soul that has found salvation. Only one thing is needed, only one thing in this life, and that is to draw closer to Christ and to hear his voice, hear his commandments. Listen to the voice of the conscience to draw closer to Christ.

Again, there is a saying in the Church Fathers. For every single step that we take towards God to find salvation, God takes a hundred towards us. A hundred? A thousand—beyond count. God’s love and his concern for our salvation is beyond our concern for our salvation. His longing for us to be saved is greater than our longing to find paradise. This is his love for us, but we must listen to the conscience. We must respond.

Our trust and belief in his love and mercy must manifest itself in our life, change us. Unless we are changed by our encounter with God, then there is no encounter at all: it is fake; it is an illusion. We have not met God at all if we are not changed by this encounter.

The demons will work above all to distract us now. We live in a world, in a time when both man and the dark spiritual forces are throwing so much into our lives to confuse us, to delay us from responding to God, distracting us from the memory of God, to distract us from our salvation. Let us remember: the devil has no conscience. Remember this. We have been given a conscience; the devil now has no conscience. We who are made in the image of God, we who were made to be sons of God, must listen—listen to that Friend who speaks to save us.