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.

We'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started, we're going to be picking up at the beginning of St. Paul's second epistle to the Corinthians chapter 6.

And just by quick catch-up, because now we've gone through this several times.

St. Paul is, this is actually at least his fourth letter that he's written to the church at Corinth.

This letter that we're reading as 2nd Corinthians is probably, as we also mentioned, made up of more than one letter that's been put together.

But this is being written after a visit from St. Paul and then another letter that did not go so well.

Corinth is still having a lot of problems.

He's been trying to work with them to resolve those problems and things got very messy. And so we've seen that one of, if not the main

theme that St. Paul is getting at in this letter is trying to talk to them about reconciliation,

primarily being reconciled with each other. He said over and over again that it's not that he's mad or upset at anyone

or offended at anyone, but that they need to be reconciled to one another and come back together

as one as one church.

And that's actually been his main focus.

Last time, as we went through chapter 5, we saw how St. Paul was talking to them.

He's really further developing some themes that we saw in First Corinthians, both in terms

of spiritual gifts and abilities and capacities that God has given us, and then the reality of

Christ's return and the last judgment, and that we're going to be held accountable for

sort of how we used those faculties and abilities and gifts that God has given us in this world.

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