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 start recording.

Okay.

So we get started here in just a minute.

We're going to be picking up in Romans chapter 8.

I know it's been like a couple of months since we had a Bible study.

And I'm not even sure who here was there.

In fact, some of you I know weren't here two months ago.

So by way of catch up and sort of reintroduction,

and by the time, as I usually say, by the time this is on ancient faith radio, people who need to catch up will be able to go back and listen to my original introduction to the book of Romans.

But for folks here who can't listen to it yet, because there's some lag time.

I think this week they posted the beginning of Acts chapter 19. So that gives you

an idea of how far ahead we are. So St. Paul writes his epistle, his letter to the church in Rome,

following, even though he has not been there himself yet, he's still hoping to get there at this point.

Because of some things that have happened under the Emperor Claudius, the Jews were expelled from the city of Rome for about a year.

And so the Gentile Christians sort of continued to have keep the church functioning while they were gone

and then now a year later they've come back into the city and so one of St. Paul's primary concerns

with the church in Rome is that with this group

that's been gone now coming back in, that the church get reintegrated, that they're not

end up being sort of a Jewish Christian group over here and then a Gentile Christian group

...