🕊️ Modern Paraphrase of Chrysostom’s Message:

Let’s stay mindful of the incredible spiritual rebirth we’ve received from the beginning of our faith. Each day, we should set our sights more firmly on the heavenly realm, treating everything in this world as fleeting—like shadows or dreams.

Imagine a king finding you poor and destitute, then suddenly adopting you as his child. You wouldn’t keep longing for your old, shabby cottage, right? But even that transformation—from poverty to royalty—is small compared to what God offers.

So don’t cling to your former life or earthly attachments. You’ve been invited to something far greater. The One who calls you is the Lord of angels, and the gifts He offers go beyond anything words can describe or minds can grasp.

This isn’t just a move from one place on earth to another. It’s a shift from earth to heaven, from mortality to immortality, and into a glory so profound it can only be truly understood when we finally experience it firsthand.

It’s a powerful call to live with eternity in view—Chrysostom’s imagery is vivid, almost cinematic. – Copilot

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Let us then keep watch over that noble birth, which we received from the beginning; and let us every day seek more and more the palaces there, and account all that is here to be a shadow and a dream. For so, had any king among those on each, finding thee poor and a beggar, made thee suddenly his son, never wouldest thou have thought upon thy cottage, and thy cottage’s mean appointments. Yet surely in that case the difference is not much. Do not then either in this case take account of any of the former things, for thou art called unto much greater. For both He who calls is the Lord of the angels, and the good things that are given surpass all both word and thought. Since not from earth to earth doth He remove thee, as the king doth, but from earth to heaven, and from a mortal nature to an immortal, and to glory unspeakable, then only possible to be properly manifested, when we shall actually enjoy it.

John Chrysostom. 1888. “Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople on the Gospel according to St. Matthew.” In Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, edited by Philip Schaff, translated by George Prevost and M. B. Riddle, 10:78. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series. New York: Christian Literature Company.

“But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, Neither have entered into the heart of man, The things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” – 1 Corinthians 2:9