KEEPING OUR FATHERS' HERITAGE ALIVE
1 Maccabee 2:50-51 LXX
Therefore, children, be zealous for the law, and offer your lives for the covenant of our fathers; and remember the deeds our fathers did in their generations, and receive great honor and an everlasting name.
Encouraging Words
One of the things that I have thoroughly enjoyed in my conversion to Orthodoxy is the deep heritage that we celebrate that goes all the way back to the Apostles who learned directly from the Lord Jesus Christ. So many of our modern day churches can follow their roots to someone who chose to splinter off from another branch of the tree of the Church and claim that as their heritage. But as Maccabees reminds us, we must be willing to offer our lives up for the heritage that the fathers passed down to us through the ages of time. My Christian heritage traces back to the men who walked with Christ, they dined with Him, they listened to the Him as the living Word and not some translated or interpreted distant copy, they observed His miracles and participated in His humanness and divinity. This is a heritage worth dying for.
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