You will get old and think that you’re a Christian,

You will get old and think that you’re a Christian,

And when you approach death, you’ll discover that you don’t even know who Christ is.

You won’t even know that He is the Life.

You won’t feel or experience that you miss Him, that you love Him, that you want to be with Him.

You won’t feel or experience any of this.

Instead, what will you experience?

You’ll experience that you are losing this world, and you’ll have the fear, animal-like fear and an instinct of survival.

However, this will not save you, because you’ll be in the process of dying…

We must upbring in ourselves the love of Christ.

Formal religiousness and formal Christianity will not help us at the time of death. 

It will be of absolutely no use, because at the time, a human being is clinging on to life; life that he knows is slipping away from him and he doesn’t know any other life.

It’s because knowing this other life, knowing Christ  - is only possible through love and not through formalism. 

When worse comes to worst, when the biological life is slipping away from you and you don’t know any other life, you will find yourself in a catastrophic condition, in despair and in tremendous fear.

This will certainly be used by the devil to impede you from going to Christ and from passing away into Him. 

Therefore, while we are still alive, everything we hear and do here must inspire us to learn to love Christ.  

And if we learn to love Christ, we will no longer need the commandments. 

We will naturally be fulfillers of all the commandments of the New Testament, the commandments that exist in the Church of the New Testament, because we will be unable to live in any other way. We will only be able to live in martyric and fervent loyalty to Christ. 

Our hearts will beat with the name of Christ.

We will breathe by the name of Christ.

, 

Do you know why we find it so difficult to pray the noetic prayer?

We don’t love Christ. That’s why!

We must not allow ourselves not to love Christ!

The necessity of the noetic prayer lies also in the fact that the real state of our fallen nature must be exposed.

When you sit down and this catastrophe begins, when you don’t want to fight this battle, when you don’t want to struggle… 

Why should it be this way? Why should this be something so difficult? You’re actually entering Life!

Here we can see the true face of our fallen nature.

We must not allow our fallen nature not to love Christ!

Loving Christ is our obligation, which has not yet become something we experience.

Archpriest Theodore Gignadze