Come and study Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches 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 will go ahead and get started, and we'll get started.

In just a moment, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's epistle to the Colossians chapter

2, verse 6.

And I won't go through the big long introduction. You cannot yet at this point

listen to it on ancient faith, but by the time anyone is hearing this recording, you'll be

able to go back and listen to it on ancient faith. But I'll get us caught up a little.

We're fairly early in the epistle, so there's not a huge amount to get caught up on.

But as we're going to see, we're going to start tonight with a therefore.

So we kind of need to pick up at least a little of where we were so that we know what the therefore is therefore.

And so, um, St. Paul is writing his epistle to the Colossians, uh, directly to the city of

Colossi, which was, as we've talked about before, a smaller town, but it was near bigger cities, including most prominently Laodicea.

We talked a little bit about the region, that this region is an important region, even though Colossi is not sort of one of the big famous cities the way.

Thessalonica, which we're going to read St. Paul's epistles to next, right?

Or Ephesus that we read previously.

So this epistle sort of splits the difference between an epistle to a particular

community and a circular letter in that, as we've already seen, St. Paul is writing it to a

particular community in Colossi, but he's also clearly expecting it

and he's mentioned already that this is going to end up going to Laodicea and to

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