A true Christian is a person whose heart is alive and burning – Metropolitan of Strumica, Nahum
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If we accept God’s information that comes from the word of the spiritual father, from the Holy Scripture, from the works of the Holy Fathers only in the field of our reason, without accepting it in the heart, that is, without serious intention to put it into practice, then we only accumulate some kind of “theological” knowledge without grace, and thus we acquire a kind of immunity, a kind of resistance to God’s information, i.e. to the word of God; and worse still, aversion.
Because of this way of life, we remain barren and automatically enter into passive sociopathy, and it does not even occur to us why we are spiritually stagnant.
This demonic kind of resistance, this dangerous insensitivity of our heart to the fulfilment of God’s deed is one of the main characteristics of modern Christians! Instead of our hearts being hardened by the accumulation of knowledge – which instigates conceit, and, by faith, without deeds, our hearts should have been alive and burning within us – when God’s information reached them, together with God’s uncreated energy, to the point where God’s word should have been, with constant longing, turned into action.
A true Christian is a person whose heart is alive and burning. A Christian has a heart that sympathises with the word of God, with the sufferings of people, as well as with their joys, and an external sign of that sympathy is tears and concrete help for those who suffer; he has a heart that warms during the time of composed (focused) prayer; he has a heart in which the impurities burn, that is, the passions are transfigured, whilst (still) inside him, with the energy of his mind, he follows the words of the prayer for all people: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us!”
The weakened one who lay beside the pool of Bethesda, who symbolises modern humanity, laments that he does not have such a man, he laments that he has no man whose heart sympathises and burns, and who can in reality extend a hand to him, to help him in his trouble, and thus to inflame his heart with God’s love – first of all through obedience to the commandments of God, even if it is against all established human schemes of organization and conduct: “He who healed me told me to take up my bed and walk.” A Christian without a heart that burns in prayer, as well as in the fulfilment of God’s commandments, has only the name of being alive, but as a matter of fact he is dead.
Metropolitan of Strumica, Nahum
Divine Liturgy in the Church of “The Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos and Saint Demetrius Martyr” in Pehchevo.
11/05/2025
