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

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

So we'll go ahead and get started when we start here.

In just a moment, we're going to be picking up in the first epistle of St. John

chapter 3, verse 10, where we left off last time.

And as I believe I mentioned last time when I was summarizing,

St. John's epistles are a little harder, well, second and third John are like a paragraph,

so you don't have to do a lot of summarizing.

But First John is a little harder to summarize than St. Paul's epistles because St.

Paul very much, as we said, sort of makes an argument, right?

He goes from like point A to point B.

And sometimes he'll make several points in an epistle, but it's like he has one topic.

And then he'll say, now concerning, next topic.

You get argument from A to B.

Whereas St. John writes in this sort of cyclical or spiral sort of way, where he'll sort of introduce a topic, come back around to it from another perspective, come back around again and add a few

words or add another idea to it, right? It just kind of loop around and spiral forward. So that

makes it harder to sort of say, well, here's where we are in the argument, right? To like just

summarize where we are. But at least to talk about the last

sort of set of ideas before we left off last time, St. John was talking about that we can either

abide in sin or abide in Christ, essentially, as these two alternatives.

And we talked about how that idea of abiding or remaining is important to this, right?

Because he's not saying, if you ever commit a sin, then you're not a Christian, you're evil, right?

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