||    Pope Shenouda    ||    Father Matta    ||    Bishop Mattaous    ||    Fr. Tadros Malaty    ||    Bishop Moussa    ||    Bishop Alexander    ||    Habib Gerguis    ||    Bishop Angealos    ||    Metropolitan Bishoy    ||

 

 “Do you not know that you are the temple of God

and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”

1Corinthians 3:16

 

Father Matta El-Meskeen (Matthew the Poor)


FOR SURE we must know that God gave us His holy body, in which the Holy Spirit lives, to become a body for us. When He became incarnate in the body of man, and filled it with His divinity the Holy Spirit descended upon Him to abide continually in Him. On that day He descended with His divinity into the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary taking His body from her through the Holy Spirit. At Christ’s birth His incarnation was God’s greatest gift to man who consequently is considered as reborn, receiving the Holy Spirit with the body. Hence the body of the believer in Christ became a new temple for the Holy Spirit. Everything of Christ was for our sake as He became incarnate for our sake, the Holy Spirit descended on Him for our sake, and He was born for our sake. The awesome mystery of Christianity is that we took for ourselves the body of Christ with its divinity and the fullness of the Holy Spirit. This is because the Son of God is eternal and has no need neither for the incarnation, nor death, nor resurrection. When God the Father was pleased with His creation of man He decided to make it inherit His divinity and give it His Holy Spirit, therefore sending His only Son to accomplish God’s will in us.

Thus the Gospel appeared and God’s great will was revealed, man gaining this unsurpassed heavenly gift in which neither angel nor any heavenly divine being shared. Nay, He gave us by birth through the Holy Spirit and water a fellowship with Jesus Christ bodily, fulfilling for us and in us His death on the cross for a redemption that is a valuable possession to be possessed as is an everlasting life compared to death. For us and with us He resurrected to offer us to His Father as heavenly beings having the inheritance that is His, with the consequence of becoming fellows of Christ in the incarnation, death, resurrection and inheritance. God thus fulfilled for us in Christ all His eternal intentions.

We must now attain this intention through faith and a living hope this being the true Christianity; which is to respond to God’s will in us. For it is not for free that we gained the cross, resurrection, and the fullness of the Holy Spirit, but at the highest cost of all that exists, both spiritually and bodily. This cost was paid once, Christ buying it for God His Father, which is His shed blood on the cross, His holy blood, the blood of the Son of God whom heaven and all earth fear. He shed it at the hands of the High Priests, their assistants and Roman soldiers, in front of the world after being tortured, scourged, beaten with sticks on His head, and spat upon. That was the precious cost the Son of God paid with the agreement of His Father and before the whole of heavenly creation.

We consequently did not receive salvation, redemption, and fellowship in the body of Christ for free but at the exorbitant cost which our earthly mentalities cannot perceive. The Bible says that if we realize it then we must consider that our bodies which are inhabited by the Holy Spirit in a true most elevated fellowship with the body of Christ now living in glory, are also holy, and valued at a price higher than perishable gold and must be respected as the body of Christ and kept pure in honor of the body of Christ. We must keep them away from the futility and corruption of the world, not mixing with those who are dissipated, nor being friends with unbelievers, and must not allow any one to touch them with evil, in honor of the Holy Spirit that fills them. And so, the Spirit of God is revived in us and is pleased and joyful when we stand up praying and lifting our voices to glorify God.

If the angels appointed to protect us and take care of us stand before us supporting us in the difficult situations of life it is in honor of Christ who is in us, and to honor the Holy Spirit filling the temple of our bodies. We thus live throughout the days of our sojourn on earth aided and honored by the angels due to our fellowship in the body of Christ and in His blood, His death, His resurrection and sitting at the right hand of the Father.

We are as a new creation honored in the eyes of God, the Holy, accepted before Him in glory. We must therefore always be in the state of prayer, our heart elevated before God, and our eyes looking to our Savior who awaits our victory and us overcoming the world, to offer us to His Father a renewed creation in Jesus Christ.

July 2, 2005

 

1 Heb 11:1.

2 1Tim 1:1; Col 1:27.

3 Luke 2:14.

4 Col 3:4. 5

 

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