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.

Okay, so we'll go ahead and get started.

And when we get started here in just a minute,

we'll be picking up where we left off last time,

which is the beginning of Chapter 2 of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians.

I won't go back through the whole long rambling introduction we had last time.

By the time people are hearing this recording, they'll be able to go and listen to that recording.

So for people who are here tonight and who missed the first one, sorry.

But I'd tread a lot of water if I had to go through that every single time.

But so St. Paul, just to go over that briefly, St. Paul is writing this epistle to Philippi.

This is the Philippi in Macedonia, which at this time had been renamed Julio Augusto Philippi by Octavian,

after he became Caesar Augustus, named it after Julius Caesar and himself, in addition to Philip of Macedon, Alexander the Great's father,

who was named after originally. And this philippe is in the Roman province of Macedonia.

We talked about how this was one of the first churches that St. Paul helped found during that sort of second phase of his ministry

that we saw in Acts, and we talked about a bunch of the events, a bunch of the well-known stories

that the Acts of the Apostles took place in Philippi when St. Paul went there. But the reason it was

the beginning of this sort of second phase is that Philippi was one of the first cities he went to

that was almost completely Gentile, almost completely non-Jewish. Before that, he had been going

mainly to cities that had large Jewish communities, preaching in the synagogues, and then sort of

expanding out from there. Once he went into Macedonia and started getting to cities like Philippi I saw that there were zero

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