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.

In just a moment, we'll be picking up in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,

chapter one, verse eight.

So the reason we didn't get that far in Romans last time is that we had the introduction to the whole book last time, which at some time in the future for those sitting here with me, but already for those people who might be listening to this recording later, will be available online to listen to.

If you want to go back and hear that introduction, I'll do a little bit of catch-up.

It shouldn't be that much catch-up because we only covered seven verses.

So we talked about just in brief last time that St. Paul is writing this epistle,

this letter to the Christian community in Rome. He's writing it in the mid-50s, AD, probably between 54 and 56, so right in the middle of the decade. And we need to keep in mind

a few things that that means. That means that this is, if we take 56, we take the latest date,

right? That this is about 23 years after Christ's resurrection in the day of Pentecost.

So on the outside, this Christian community in Rome has existed for maybe 20 years.

So this is a nascent Christian community, right?

It's still sort of forming.

And as we talked about last time, you know, there are not two separate religions of Judaism

over here and Christianity over there.

But the Christian community is still a part of the synagogue community at this point in history.

So Christians, people who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah as the Christ, are, for the

most part, going to the synagogues, whether they're people of Jewish ethnicity who have now accepted Jesus as the Messiah or whether they're

Gentiles, non-Jews who have embraced Jesus as the Messiah. They're going on Saturday on

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