Our Venerable Father Paisius Velichkovsky (1794); Begin Nativity Fast; Guria, Shamuna, and Habib, Martyrs and Confessors of Edessa

You were dead through your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh. He made you alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, ¹⁴wiping out the handwriting in ordinances which was against us. He has taken it out of the way, nailing it to the cross. ¹⁵Having stripped the principalities and the powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.

¹⁶Let no one therefore judge you in eating or drinking, or with respect to a feast day or a new moon or a Sabbath day, ¹⁷which are a shadow of the things to come; but the body is Christ’s. ¹⁸Let no one rob you of your prize by self-abasement and worshiping of the angels, dwelling in the things which he has not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind, ¹⁹and not holding firmly to the Head, from whom all the body, being supplied and knit together through the joints and ligaments, grows with God’s growth.

²⁰If you died with Christ from the elemental spirits of the world, why, as though living in the world, do you subject yourselves to ordinances,

When he went into the house of one of the rulers of the Pharisees on a Sabbath to eat bread, they were watching him.

¹²He also said to the one who had invited him, “When you make a dinner or a supper, don’t call your friends, nor your brothers, nor your kinsmen, nor rich neighbors, or perhaps they might also return the favor, and pay you back. ¹³But when you make a feast, ask the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind; ¹⁴and you will be blessed, because they don’t have the resources to repay you. For you will be repaid in the resurrection of the righteous.”

¹⁵When one of those who sat at the table with him heard these things, he said to him, “Blessed is he who will feast in God’s Kingdom!”