Shalom and welcome back to Scripture Central. I'm Lynn Hilton Wilson, part of the team who are helping with Come Follow Me this year.

We're in the middle of the New Testament, the Pauline epistles, with Philippians and Colossians this week.

These are fabulous books. They both preach a lot about Jesus Christ as our Savior and our Redeemer and our need to sacrifice for salvation.

They're wonderful epistles. Both of them are written during Paul's imprisonment.

Chronologically, on my chart, you can see that they come after Paul's missions and they were

while he was in imprisoned. He has four prison letters and each of them have a lot of

things in common, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. The carriers and the greetings

are consistent with who's there with him. The fact that he's in bonds is consistent and you can see

all this on my handout as well that's attached

to my video at the base of it, or just go back to Scripture Central, to the archive, or to

come follow me, and you'll be able to find all the handouts there.

As you recall, the books were organized by length, not by chronology.

So you have to go back to the book of Acts to find in Acts 16 where he's visiting

the Philippians. Now, he writes Colossians later, but he never visits them. It's one of the

unique things about these two letters. We assume since he's in bonds that he's probably in his

first Roman imprisonment, about 61 AD, give or take a year. It's co-authored

by Timothy and Paul. These audiences, and we'll just start now with the book of Philippians,

are devoted saints who are bishops and deacons, and he has the plural on there, you know, bishops,

deacons, you know, the church is growing in this area.

And Philippians, I think, is one of his favorite sets of communities in the church because he

calls them his jewel and his crown. And it's really a positive letter. And it sounds like

as if his wife were living there as well.

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