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, and when we get started, we'll be picking up

at the beginning of Chapter 5 of St. Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians

by way of sort of a quick catch-up to where we were last time in terms of the first four chapters,

we've talked now a couple times about how this is at least St. Paul's fourth letter to the church at Corinth, technically speaking, because we saw in

1st Corinthians that he referred to a letter he had written before that, and here in 2nd

Corinthians he's referred to a letter that he wrote in between the two. So this is the second

one that we have, not the second one that he wrote.

And so in First Corinthians, St. Paul, one of the things he talked about was his intent to come and

visit them, his hope that would be a good visit, not a bad visit. We know from what we've read already in

2 Corinthians that unfortunately it was a bad visit. And that the letter he wrote in between

that he calls the sorrowful letter was a sorrowful letter because of how badly things had gone

when he visited. So we've seen so far that one of his major themes,

and we'll see tonight, he's going to continue to talk about that theme,

one of his major themes so far in 2 Corinthians has been about reconciliation,

about reconciling himself to them, them to himself, them to each other,

and sort of everyone to God.

Right?

And now that, you know, there were disciplinary actions that had to be taken against some people in the community who were in unrepentant sin, and now we need to try to heal that and try

to restore those people, and that means we need

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