Hello everyone. Thanks for listening to Come Follow Me Insights with Taylor and Tyler presented by Scripture Central.

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I'm Taylor. And I'm Tyler. This is Scripture Centrals. Come follow me insights. This week, Paul's epistle to the Philippians and to the Colossians.

So let's set the stage for today's scripture verses that we're going to cover with a quick review.

Philippi, remember, is where Paul baptized Lydia. She was our first known European convert. And it's in northern

Greece and it is a metropolitan city. It's a happening place in the first century. And keep in mind, there is an incredible sense of

national pride and identity rooted in their Roman citizenship. Now, it might sound strange that

here we are in northern Greece talking about Roman citizenship,

but remember that as the Romans are taking over, they're having massive wars, not just in Italy,

but they're having civil wars in Greece and in parts of Turkey and in other places in the

Mediterranean region as well, Northern Africa.

And what happens is when those wars end, they leave behind all of these soldiers and these captains and generals and these powerful people.

And they don't want them rising up in rebellion, so they give citizenship and set them up with power to be under control of Rome, but give them just enough power to say, okay, you've got your own domain here.

And they're very loyal to the office of Caesar.

The Caesar is the name of the man, Augustus, who transitions the Roman Empire from a republic,

what we might call a democracy, into essentially a dictatorship, although they would never

use a word like that.

They wanted to convince

themselves that they still had some sense of liberty. And so these people in Philippi, particularly

the people in power, were deeply aligned and loyal to the king or Caesar. Now again, they never used the word king. That was like the bad word,

but the person who was in power essentially acted like the king. So, so I'm trying, I'm not a great artist.

I'm trying very hard to draw a very simple throne to symbolize this, this power that emanates out from Rome throughout that that Mediterranean region.

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