Hey!
I gues you could say that ''Sacrifice'' has been in many religious systems....
The Blood is because of the Old Testament.......The Sacrificial Lamb for the Atonnement of sins........
In the New Testament, Jesus Christ offers Himself as the ''Sacrifice'' for the World.....
Quote/
Instead of the lamb, Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice ‘like that of a lamb without blemish or spot’, ‘He was destined before the foundation
of the world’ for the salvation of people (1 Peter 1:19-20).
Quote///In the Eucharist we become of the same body with Christ, Who enters us as He entered the womb of the Virgin Mary.
Our flesh in the Eucharist receives a leaven of incorruption,
it becomes deified,
and when it dies and becomes subject to corruption,
this leaven becomes the pledge of its future resurrection.(For the Final Judgement of the world....End of the World.....the Resurrection of
mankind.)
Beyond the Eucharist there can be no salvation, no deification, no true life, no resurrection in eternity: ‘Unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of
man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you; he who eats My Flesh and drinks My Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last
day’ (John 6:53-54).
AND
The words from the Lord’s prayer ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ (Matt.6:11)
The Church existed in the Old Testament.....
quote//
From apostolic times there existed in the Church a hierarchical priesthood: certain men chosen to celebrate the Eucharist and lead the people.
The Book of Acts (6:6) speaks of the election of seven deacons (Greek diakonos, ‘servant’, or ‘minister’) and their being set aside to serve.
The apostles founded Christian communities in the various cities of the Roman Empire where they preached and ordained bishops and presbyters to lead
these communities.
AND again...
The first to refer to the Church as the body of Christ was St Paul: ‘For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves
or free - and all were made to drink of one Spirit... Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (1 Cor.12:13; 27).
Through the sacraments, and especially the sacrament of communion in the Body and Blood of Christ through the eucharistic bread and wine, we are
united with Him and we become one body in Him: ‘Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread’ (1
Cor.10:17
The mystery of the Church was prefigured in the people of Israel, who was chosen and set apart from the other peoples.
According to its own understanding, the Christian Church is the only legitimate heir to the biblical religion of revelation.
This revelation is preserved and continued in the Church’s Tradition, which includes both the Old and the New Testaments,
the memory of Jesus Christ’s earthly life, of His miracles and teaching, His death and resurrection.
It also includes the experience of the primitive Church, the teachings of early Fathers and Ecumenical Councils,
the lives of Christian saints and martyrs, the liturgy, the sacraments, and the entirety of spiritual and mystical experience, transmitted from
generation to generation.
In other words, Tradition in Orthodox understanding means the continuity of theological teaching and spiritual experience within the Church from Old
Testament times up to the present.
All the sacraments which we perform in the Christian Church have reference to the Sacraments and rites of the Old Testament.
We can take the Sacrament of marriage as an example.
During the this ceremony, in the prayers which we address to God, we ask Him to bless the couple, as He blessed Abraham and Sarah, Jakob and Rebecca,
etc.
www.pelagia.org...
The Church is the Body of Christ, which has Christ as its head, and the members of the Church are members of the Body of Christ.
Members of the Church exist in all the ages and will exist until the end of all time.
And when members of the Church cease to exist, the end of the world will come.
Thus we are living with many people.
The people of God manifest the true communion. As we said at the beginning, on the paten during the Liturgy there are many people.
They are the Panagia, the Angels, the Prophets, the holy Fathers, the great martyrs, and, in general, the witnesses of the faith, the saints and
ascetics, the living and the dead who have a share in the purifying, illuminating and deifying uncreated energy of God. We are not alone.
We are not "foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of God's household" (Eph. 2,19).
Im sorry too much info...but in order to understand you have to know the Old to the New....
does that help?
Dbrandt/////
you said / quote..........
Receiving Christ is a spiritual decision that comes from your soul.
That is how someone is saved and becomes a new creation.
It's a conscience decision to accept what Chrsit has done on the cross to remove one's sins.
Then when the Holy Spirit indwells that person,
He guides us and our view toward sin is changed and we live a life that is different.
................
Dbrandt why did Christ say ...And when they had communed of these, the Lord gave them the commandment to always perform this Mystery, Do this in
remembrance of Me (Matt. 26:26-28, Lk. 22:19; I Cor. 11:24).
The Apostles celebrated Holy Communion according to the commandment and example of Jesus Christ and taught all Christians to perform this great and
saving Mystery.
In the earliest times the order and form of celebrating the Liturgy was transmitted orally, and all the prayers and sacred hymns were memorized.
Eventually, written explications of the apostolic Liturgy began to appear.
www.fatheralexander.org...
Jesus Christ said that the Holy Spirit blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes (Jn.
3:8). This means that a person cannot force the Holy Spirit to come to him or predict the time when He may decide to do so.
You can only feel His touch when this happens. Indeed, the book of Acts states that when the Holy Apostles and other Christians received the gifts of
the Holy Spirit, it was always unexpectedly.
the Apostles did not bestow beneficial gifts upon newly baptized Christians immediately,
but only after a certain period of testing and affirmation in the true faith. That is why the Lord called the Holy Spirit the Spirit of Truth, and
His Church, the beatified community of the faithful, is called in Scripture the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15).
www.orthodox.cn...
St. James the Apostle admonishes us to confess our sins to God before the elders, or priests, as they are called today (James 5:16). We are also
exhorted to confess our sins directly to God (I John 1:9).
When Christians depart this life, they remain a vital part of the Church, the body of Christ. They are alive in the Lord and "registered in heaven"
(Hebrews 12:23). They worship God (Revelation 4:10) and inhabit His heavenly dwelling places (John 14:2).
In the Eucharist we come "to the city of the living God" and join in communion with the saints in our worship of God (Hebrews 12:22).
They are that "great cloud of witnesses" which surrounds us, and we seek to imitate them in running "the race set before us" (Hebrews 12:1).
Rejecting or ignoring the communion of saints is a denial of the fact that those who have died in Christ are still part of his holy Church.
"Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God" (John 3:5). From its beginning, the Church has taught that the
water is the baptismal water and the Spirit is the Holy Spirit..
Salvation demands faith in Jesus Christ.
People cannot save themselves by their own good works.
Salvation is "faith working through love."
It is an ongoing, life-long process.
Salvation is past tense in that, through the death and Resurrection of Christ, we have been saved.
It is present tense, for we are "being saved" by our active participation through faith in our union with Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Salvation is also future, for we must yet be saved at His glorious Second Coming.
www.fatheralexander.org...
Dbrandt im not sure if your getting all this......but you are not SAVED by just beleiving in Jesus Christ.......even the devil believes in
Christ.....
anyway....
take care..
IX
helen