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.

When we get started in just a moment, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's first epistle to

Timothy chapter 3 verse 1.

And so we'll do a brief catch-up introduction.

We covered the completely non-controversial part last time.

So this is going to be less controversial, therefore perhaps less exciting from here on out.

I don't know.

I say controversy.

Well, yeah, chapter three is slightly,

but not as controversial as the,

I command women to remain silent.

That pretty much takes the cake for controversial in First Timothy.

But so this, as we've mentioned now um this is the first of several epistles several

letters from st paul that we're going to be reading that are now that are directed towards

individuals rather than communities um and uh the ones who were previous to this were directed to a church like the Christian

community in Corinth, or they were directed to the Christian communities of a region like Galatia

or St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians that was sort of a circular letter for the area around

Ephesus. Whereas this one obviously was written directly to St. Timothy. And we've already

seen how St. Paul has frequently used this sort of father-son language to describe his relationship to St. Timothy.

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