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 Epistle to the

Philippians Chapter 2, verse 17, where we left off last time.

And to do a little bit of catch up,

last time we talked about the first, roughly the first half of chapter two,

which, as we talked about, is one of the most important passages in the New Testament. And I'm not just

saying that to the folks who weren't here last time to be mean. It just happens to be the case.

But it'll all be online eventually. And the main reason that was important is that it was a place where St. Paul was

recording was probably a pre-existing him or other creedal piece talking about the incarnation

of Christ. And we showed how there St. Paul affirmed as one of the earliest writer of the New

Testament Christ's pre-existence before his incarnation is God, his incarnation, his incarnation,

his exaltation and his status as the second person of the Trinity, which makes it very important.

St. Paul, of course, as we've talked about before, his epistles are not theological treatises.

He's not just like, here, let me give you some cool theology about the incarnation or about the

Holy Trinity, but he was using that and this theology that,

in his mind, they had already accepted, that was already part of their faith and their worship

in Philippi. He was using that to argue actually a very practical point to them about humility

and about not exalting themselves

above other people, not considering themselves better than other people, but serving each

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