Kiev, August 3, 2023
Photo: news.church.ua
The holy Prophet Elias fervently prays to God for those who zealously glorify God rather than themselves, and God in turn blesses the earthly lives of those who live for eternity, the primate of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church preached yesterday.
His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kiev and All Ukraine celebrated the feast of the Prophet Elias at the church named for the great prophet in Kiev. He was joined by several of his vicar bishops, a number of clergy, and hundreds of faithful, reports the Information-Education Department of the UOC.
The original Church of the Prophet Elias is the oldest known church in Kiev. It was mentioned in The Tale of Bygone Years in the story of Prince Igor’s treaty with Byzantium in 944—more than 40 years prior to the Baptism of Rus’ in 988.
After the reading of the Holy Gospel, His Beatitude addressed the faithful with a primatial word:
The holy Prophet Elias, a great zealot of the glory of God, today prays before God for those who are also zealous to glorify not themselves or someone else with their lives, but God. The correct life is when people look at us and say: “Yes, there is a true God Who created Heaven and Earth; I see this in this person’s life, because he is a preacher, a witness of this true God.
According to Met. Onuphry we witness to God by fulling the divine commandments. This is “When a man does not live by the elements, the interests of this world, which are one thing today, another tomorrow, but lives by the interests of Heaven, the interests of eternity,” he explained.
Photo: news.church.ua
“We don’t forget about the Earth, we care about our earthly life, but we know that the Earth is our temporary place of residence, and the eternal life of man awaits us in Heaven.”
And the quality of our earthly life is determined by how devoted we are to God:
If we love and honor God, pray to Him, then God gives a blessing for our earthly life and it is happy, peaceful, and joyful for us. If we don’t honor God, if we offend God with our behavior, words, actions, then our life becomes difficult, complicated, filled with sorrows and illnesses.
His Beatitude encouraged everyone to build their lives according to God’s laws,
so that God’s blessing would be on our land, so that the bloodshed would stop, so that the war would stop, so that the Lord would bless our land with peace, so that we would spend our days in peace and joy, and be worthy in the next age to be where the holy Prophet Elias is today, together with all the saints glorifying the one God in the Trinity.
After the Liturgy, special prayers were read for peace in Ukraine and that God would bless the needy and the suffering.
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