Audiobook: Remember Thy First Love

Remember Thy First Love is a graphic description of the three stages in Christian life according to Saint Sophrony the Athonite (1896-1993), disciple of St Silouan the Athonite (1866-1938) and founder of the Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist in Essex, England.

In Remember Thy First Love, which complements The Enlargement of the Heart (2006) and The Hidden Man of the Heart (2008), Archimandrite Zacharias details the nature and purpose of the first grace given at the beginning of the Christian spiritual odyssey, the experience of the apparent withdrawal of grace, and then our final adoption as children, by which we become heirs of God and joint-heirs of Christ (cf. Rom. 8:17).

“The writings of Archimandrite Zacharias evince that inspiration which is born of an undistorted vision of Christ in glory.”
Christopher Veniamin
Professor of Patristics Saint Tikhon’s Seminary, USA

— From: Remember Thy First Love

Our faith is not simply an inner matter; it always reflects the times we live in as Christians.

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.

… We see that God judges us with respect to the generation in which we live.

… So if our time is characterised by a general falling away from the faith of our Fathers, our success in preserving it will be the more sublime because of the apostasy surrounding us.

… In our day, we are witnessing a dynamic increase of evil, and we find ourselves caught in a surge of iniquity even as it gathers force. As Christians we must place ourselves in a different, indeed a contrary, dynamic increase which grows not away from but towards God, so that evil itself will spur us on to do good.

— Remember Thy First Love • From Faith to Faith (p. 18-19)