Remember Thy First Love Quotes

“Sometimes our heart is moved to tenderness when we consider God's great wisdom with regard to each of us. At other times we can be softened only through suffering. We may then feel utterly destroyed to the point of despairing of life itself. But if, with help from on high, we gather the strength to turn to God at that point, He will find an opening so as to enter our heart with His grace. Nowadays, people are familiar with acute suffering of one kind or another. Pain and suffering have become the common language of humankind. God may well be using this to break through into our hardened and loveless world with His grace and the result would be a spiritual renaissance. He has already changed the lives of so many people, and He can easily change many more, and even extend it to the whole world.

We might also be moved by the thought that our life has been nothing but a chain of errors, a chain of betrayals, a long series of failures. We see that nothing in our life is worthy of God and nothing in us is fit to look upon the Face of God. Neither can He look upon us, nor can we stand in His presence. If we turn to God with such awareness He will unfailingly find and opening for His grace. In this way, we can make a new start at any moment of our life, for we know that our God will respond. But if He is to visit man with His grace, He will first require our cooperation. He requires the presence of our human factor, little and weak though it is. He created us out of nothing, but He does not create us anew unless we consent to work with Him. Our tiny human factor is absolutely necessary to Him, so we need to align it with His infinitely great and divine factor, and the miracle of the union of our heart with His grace will then take place.”
― Archimandrite Zacharias, Remember Thy First Love (Revelation 2:4-5): The Three Stages of the Spiritual Life in the Theology of Elder Sophrony

“The Fathers of the fourth century – a time of great flowering for the Church – repeatedly said that the Christians of the last times would neither have the strength to endure ascetic hardship nor be able to perform the godly works of the Fathers of old. But they added that those who would succeed in simply keeping the faith would be more greatly glorified in heaven than those Fathers who had worked miracles and even raised the dead to life.”
― Zacharias Zacharou, Remember Thy First Love

“The Fathers of the fourth century – a time of great flowering for the Church – repeatedly said that the Christians of the last times would neither have the strength to endure ascetic hardship nor be able to perform the godly works of the Fathers of old. But they added that those who would succeed in simply keeping the faith would be more greatly glorified in heaven than those Fathers who had worked miracles and even raised the dead to life. In other words, it is the privilege of our time to preserve the fulness of our faith, and this requires a greater measure of grace than that by which our Fathers raised the dead. The Lord Himself asked, ‘when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?’2 His words reflect the same thing: if faith be found among men at His Second Coming, this will be”
― Zacharias Zacharou, Remember Thy First Love

“When St Paul speaks about the resurrection of the dead, he does not describe paradise in earthly terms. He says that we will be ‘caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.’31 This is eternal life: to be for ever with the Lord. And there is nothing more to be added to this. To be with the Lord is far above any possible description. The truly important thing is to belong to the Lord, whether we live or die.32 Whether we are in the body or whether we depart from the body, our only purpose is to be pleasing to the Lord so as to be with Him.33”
― Zacharias Zacharou, Remember Thy First Love