Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen is a former Protestant pastor and Bible teacher in the Reformed Church, but now an Orthodox priest,

serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

We're going to get started in just a moment.

We'll be picking up with St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians chapter 12, right

at the beginning, chapter 12 verse 1.

And we left off a little early last time because we kind of got here, and this is sort of a

major break in that St. Paul is sort of now shifting topics.

We just finished a sort of large section where St. Paul was talking about worship and that mainly focused on the Eucharist,

then other related things that had to do with mostly contrasting, though in a couple cases

comparing, the worship of the church centered in the Eucharist with the pagan worship in

Corinth out of which the Christians in Corinth had come or needed to come, as the case may be,

because some of them were still sort of half in the pagan world and half in the Christian world

and were trying to sort of do both at pagan world and half in the Christian world, and we're trying to

sort of do both at the same time. So in some cases, similarities meant that they needed to stop,

because, for example, as St. Paul pointed out, both the Eucharist and the pagan sacrifices were doing

the same thing in the sense of connecting a community together and connecting that

community to a God who is being worshipped. And so you couldn't worship both demons and God at the same

time. And so they had to stop participating in both. And sometimes the differences meant

they had to stop participating in both.

Because one of the other related themes was the sexual immorality that was very common in pagan worship at the time. And so because that sexual immorality was unacceptable for Christians, that was another reason why they needed to remove themselves from the world of pagan worship.

...