Through faith, You have justified Your Ancestors, O Christ our God, and through them You have espoused in advance the Church set apart from The Gentiles. The saints rejoice in glory because, from the seed of These Ancestors, has come fort the glorious fruit, who gave You birth without seed. Through their intercession, O Christ God, save our souls. Tropar
This weekend the Church begins to prepare us for the celebration of several feasts that recount God’s manifestation of Himself to humankind. She does this by first remembering the Forefathers of Jesus Christ – His Ancestors.
The Church intends, by this remembrance, to tell us that God has, since the very beginning of human creation, attempted to find ways to help men and women understand the meaning and purpose of earthly existence. He has constantly attempted to reveal to humanity what this life on earth is all about.
In today’s Epistle, which is taken from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, we are reminded that this earthly life is all about putting on a new man, one who grows in knowledge as he is formed anew in the image of his Creator. Hopefully all who hear this sense the import of this statement.
Life on earth is meant to help us grow in the likeness of God – to come to an understanding of what it means to be the type of human being that God intended when He created us.
In order to have beings who voluntarily and freely return His love, God had to create us with a free will and the potential to grow in His likeness. Life here on earth provides us all the unique opportunities we need to become more like God, as seen in His human manifestation, the Person of Jesus Christ.
Salvation, which is the process of becoming a spiritual being in the likeness of Jesus, requires that we cooperate with God’s gift of life and all the challenges that it presents to us, so that we might actualize our lives as spiritual beings who are also physical.
Like Jesus Christ, we are spiritual and physical beings who need to learn, from the challenges of this life, how to be more like our God-Incarnate, Jesus Christ. We are called to freely embrace a life of personal transformation so that we might be all who we were created to be. Ask yourself: What is the meaning of my life?