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 St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston,

West Virginia.

We'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started, in just a minute here we'll be picking up in Gospel According to St. John, Chapter 17, verse 20.

And as usual, because it's now actually there there if you'd like to go back to way back when we started

the gospel of john the introduction is is on the posted on the internet so you can listen to that

podcast because it's been a while.

So if you've forgotten everything that we said before,

you can go back and refresh.

But to get us caught up to where we are right now,

that we've, we're in the middle of sort of a long discourse a long final discourse

by Christ before his arrest that really began at the last supper the mystical supper when

right after Judas left, Jesus began speaking.

Then we had sort of a change of setting as the disciples went out to the Mount of Olives,

where they were staying in the evening.

And then last time we saw there was yet another transition where Jesus went from speaking to the disciples

directly to praying to his father sort of in front of his disciples.

So this is still a public prayer.

But he's been speaking to his father primarily so far about his disciples and we saw that in the earlier part of this prayer he was talking about both the importance of unity among

the church that was going to be established by the coming of the Holy Spirit. We talked

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