Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll be picking up where we left off at the beginning of the Epistle of St. James

chapter 4 with verse 1.

And I'll do kind of a, I'll try to keep it a quick catch up because we talked about a lot last time,

but I don't want to rehash all that.

And only part of it is going to be really germane to what we're talking about tonight.

So the reason for that is that this chapter break, where we left off last time and where we're picking up this time is actually in a

really good place we've seen a lot of cases on our way through st paul's epistles for example

where the chapter breaks are in kind of weird places and we're not totally sure why they're there

um but this is actually in a really good one because there is actually sort of a shifted topic, not a

complete change of topic, but a shift in what St. James is talking about. So last time we worked

through the second half of chapter two, so we talked a lot about what St. James is doing with

justification in faith and works there.

That's the part that I don't want to rehash all now because we had a really in-depth discussion

of that, but people will be able to listen to that recording.

But then there was sort of a segue from there into a not unrelated but sort of more practical working out of what St. James was talking about.

And that was talking about positions of leadership and authority in the church. This is really what chapter 3 is about.

And how that should work from the perspective of someone who wants to be a leader or an authority in the church, right?

Someone who wants to be in a teaching position or another leadership position.

And he starts out by addressing that from the perspective of there being a whole lot of people

who seem to want those positions, right?

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