Remember Thy first love, Christ our LORD. [source]
TRANSCRIPT: In the Orthodox Church sin that becomes habitual in nature or is deeply rooted in the heart is something that we call the passions. It might be different to understand in an English context because passion is something that we're like passionate about, we're very fired up or whatever but passion here in the Orthodox Church, to understand the word passion really means close to either the word addiction or attachment. Passions are things that we suffer whether we want to or not. And therefore the passions are the things we have developed in our mind, and in our heart, and in our bodies. Through repeated fallings into sin. Sin exposes us to these passions that are deeply rooted within us. We can understand the passions as distorted energies of the soul. If the soul is the thing that animates the body therefore it utilises the body to interact with the world and therefore as we interact with the world we begin to gain pleasure from the things we are interacting with. Whether it's food, or sex, or drugs, or alcohol, or binging on Netflix tv shows or what have you. Those things become attachments to us, and therefore the more we are attached to things, the less we are able to devote our energies back to God. And therefore conquering the passions simply becomes a practice of falling more in love with Christ rather than combatting the passions on their own, we take those energies that are so attached to the passions, we do our best to redirect those energies back to God. In that way, God will fight for us and we'll conquer those passions. We need only but first to fall in love with Christ and everything else will be taken care of.
