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.

Just a moment, we'll be picking up at the beginning of Acts of the Apostles Chapter 23, where we left off last time, much to the consternation of some folks

sort of in the midst of a story.

In fact, St. Paul was just about to speak, and then we stopped before we got to hear

what he said. As I always say, if you're interested in going back and listening to my introduction

to the book of Acts from the very very first bible study that's now online and

you can go and listen to that to hear it again or if you missed it uh to hear it for the first time but

to get us caught up to where we are right now um we're sort of nearing the end of the book of axe

we've got less to go than we've covered.

But we've read about the beginnings of the church in Jerusalem.

We've read about then known as Saul coming to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and joining the Christian

movement that he had been persecuting, who we now know as Paul.

And we followed St. Paul through three missionary journeys, primarily through Asia Minor,

what's now Turkey, and Macedonia and Greece proper.

After that third missionary journey, he had resolved to return to Jerusalem.

And in so doing, he was warned by just about everyone that that was probably not a good idea.

Because as we saw, there had been trouble in a lot of the cities which he visited on those missionary journeys.

Because of course, there was a segment of the Jewish communities who we went to in those cities that embraced Jesus as the Messiah,

and then there was another segment of those communities that did not.

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