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.

We'll get started here in just a moment when we do in St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,

beginning of chapter 13, and this catch-up will be short because we just started the second part of the book of Romans, and not the second half, because if you looked ahead,

you'll see that this last portion, chapters 12 through 16, is actually much shorter than the

preceding portion. Even the chapters are shorter than the earlier chapters, so it's considerably shorter.

But that's because, as we mentioned, in all of St. Paul's epistles in the first portion,

he's laying all the groundwork, building out all the theology, all the principles.

And then in the second part, he's sort of applying those things.

And we saw that last time as we were going through Chapter 12,

where he started focusing more directly on unity and love within the community

and concrete ways of showing that love.

That's sort of the application of all the work he did about their community being one. and concrete ways of showing that love.

That's sort of the application of all the work he did about their community being,

one, in theological principle,

rather than divided into Jews and Gentiles or any other sort of division that they might be carrying over from their life in the capital of the Roman Empire.

And so we're going through that.

While there are certain themes that wrap through this latter section, it's sort of not like the first section.

The first section, you know, he was sort of building careful arguments and there was a lot of context.

And so we had to keep

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