"For now salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed." From the moment of our conversion to Christ, we look at the world with different eyes. For each of us something changes in life. And, receiving Communion, we become closer to Christ: we receive Him and the path of salvation that He offers us. And each of us "will be upheld, for God is able to make him stand."

We fall and rise on our path after Christ. A fall in the eyes of this world is prepared for us as the path of salvation. We ourselves will see the depth of our fall in repentance - but He will raise us up by His mercy, raise us on the day of the resurrection of the dead into eternal life.

How does human existence differ from the being of any other created creature? First of all, by the question of meaning: why, for what do I live? A meaningless existence is empty and unworthy of a human being, and the same is true of life for oneself alone: it is the life of a plant or an animal, but not of a human being. A person cannot always say that he has already found and defined this meaning for himself, but the very search for this meaning already fills his life with content.

And today we read what the apostle Paul writes about his life, whose meaning he found on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). For him, the main thing is his relationship with God, his belonging to Him. It is God, who created the world according to His design, who gives meaning to every creature, and our being is meaningful when it corresponds to this divine meaning. Then it turns out that we live not for ourselves, but for the Lord. Every moment of our existence belongs to Him, including death. And this means that death is not a very important event in our life, because it changes nothing in the most important thing: our belonging to God.

Paul always treated with respect people who observed the norms and rules of their religion. On the other hand, in the church communities of those days there were many who "did not distinguish days," Gentiles, and in practice simply, to use modern language, secular people, for whom no religion was interesting in itself. What was to be done in such a situation? For religious people, that attitude toward religion caused, at the very least, bewilderment.

But Paul, as we can see, is in no hurry to support them. That will hardly surprise us if we understand the motives that guided the apostle.

Paul himself was, of course, a religious man; he speaks of himself as "a Pharisee of Pharisees." But he by no means makes his own religiousness absolute. There are reasons for that. If religion could be salvation in itself, if it could open for its adherents the way into the Kingdom, the apostle would no doubt have treated it differently. But he understands perfectly well that, if that were so, Christ would not have needed to come to us in order to save us. And if religion does not save, if it is a human affair, then it must be treated accordingly, as a human affair. If there are people in the church for whom religion is important, that is a matter of their conscience, and of course the apostle was far from wanting to fight anyone's religious devotion. But he also understood very well all the dangers that religion carries for spiritual life.

One of the chief dangers was precisely that religious people could make their religiousness absolute, as the only possible and only acceptable form of Christian life. Such absolutizing not only repelled nonreligious people; it distorted the very essence of Christianity, which under this approach turned into a kind of new religion, thereby being emptied out and losing its spiritual essence. And Paul speaks sharply against this, not against religion as such, but against making any religiousness absolute, including the form of it that he himself bore. There was only one way to avoid such absolutizing: leave the choice of religion to the discretion of each member of the church. In that way, each person could choose for himself the form of life in the Church, and therefore in the Kingdom, that suited him best.