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, now an Orthodox priest serving at St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston,

West Virginia.

And tonight we're starting the book of acts, which is really an abbreviated title.

The actual title of the book is the Acts of the Apostles.

And sometimes you'll even see it extended beyond that with some more adjectives, like the acts of the Holy Apostles or the Acts of the Holy and All laudable Apostles, etc., etc.

But Acts of the Apostles is really the title of the book, and that gets abbreviated just to

the Book of the book and that gets abbreviated just to the book of acts.

And this book, the act of the apostles,

acts of the apostles, is a little bit unique in the New Testament.

Most of the books of the New Testament, we've got the four Gospels,

and then we've got St. Paul's

epistles and the other epistles St. John's, Epistles, St. James' Epistle, St. Peter's

epistles. So those are letters, and then we've got Gospels. And then we've also got the

Book of Acts and the Book of Revelation.

The Book of Revelation has letters attached to it, so it's even a little closer.

But the book of Acts is a story, it's a narrative about the beginnings of the church, about

the apostles that's going to pick up where the book of Luke,

where the gospel according to St. Luke left off,

which was with Christ's ascension into heaven.

We're going to pick up again with Christ's ascension into heaven.

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