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

For you are our glory and our joy.

¹Therefore when we couldn’t stand it any longer, we thought it good to be left behind at Athens alone, ²and sent Timothy, our brother and God’s servant in the Good News of Christ, to establish you and to comfort you concerning your faith, ³that no one would be moved by these afflictions. For you know that we are appointed to this task. ⁴For most certainly, when we were with you, we told you beforehand that we are to suffer affliction, even as it happened, and you know. ⁵For this cause I also, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, sent that I might know your faith, for fear that by any means the tempter had tempted you, and our labor would have been in vain.

⁶But Timothy has just now come to us from you, and brought us glad news of your faith and love, and that you have good memories of us always, longing to see us, even as we also long to see you. ⁷For this cause, brothers, we were comforted over you in all our distress and affliction through your faith. ⁸For now we live, if you stand fast in the Lord.

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!”