Standing Together in Prayer - Beginning of the Christmas Lent at the Orthodox Church

Fasting is acceptable to God when abstention from food is accompanied by refraining from sins, from envy, from hatred, from calumny, from vainglory, from other evils. He who is fasting the true fast that is agreeable to God ought to shun all these things with all his strength and zeal, and remain impregnable and unshakeable against all the attacks of the Evil one (The Homilies of Saint Photios the Great, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople).