Message Info:
- Text: Philemon 1-7, CSB
- Series: Philemon (2020), No. 1
- Date: Sunday evening, January 12, 2020
- Venue: Trinity Baptist Church — Seminole, Oklahoma
- Audio File: Open/Download
Listen Online:
Watch Online:
Video Unavailable
Transcript:
⟦Transcript⟧ Well, would you turn with me tonight to the book of Philemon? Philemon is the shortest of all the books in the New Testament, so it’s easy to overlook. If you’re not familiar with where it is, look for the T-books in the New Testament.
They’re all together. First and second Thessalonians, first and second Timothy, Titus, and then Philemon comes right after the end of the T-books, right before you get to Hebrews, the book of Philemon. Like I said, it’s the shortest book in the New Testament, and I think we can get through it in a couple weeks.
So we’re going to spend the next few weeks looking through it and seeing what God has there for us. And tonight we’re going to look at verses 1 through 7. There’s only one chapter.
We’re going to look at verses 1 through 7 tonight. It says, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, our brother, to Philemon, or Philemon, I still don’t know for sure how people pronounce it. But as I’ve said before, even if I get it wrong, he wouldn’t have been able to pronounce my name either.
So it’s all right. To Philemon, our dear friend and co-worker, to Aphia, our sister, to Archippus, our fellow soldier, and to the church that meets in your home, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God when I mention you in my prayers, because I hear of your love for all the saints and the faith that you have in the Lord Jesus. I pray that your participation in the faith may become effective through knowing every good thing that is in us for the glory of Christ. For I have great joy and encouragement from your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother.
So this is a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote. It was a personal letter, not specifically one that he had written to a church, but it was a personal letter to an individual that he knew, a person by the name of Philemon. And Philemon was a church leader in the area of around Colossae and Laodicea, somewhere in that area.
He was a church leader, and there’s a pretty solid consensus that Aphia was his wife, and Archippus was their son, who also worked in some way in the ministry. And this is how Paul had come to know them, and had come to know them well, not just to know of them, but to know them as friends, really. That’s the tone that a lot of this letter takes, is Paul as a friend writing to Philemon and in treating him as a friend to do what it is that he needs him to do.
And he refers to the church that meets in their home, because in that day, there weren’t purpose-built church buildings. During that day, Christianity was still heavily persecuted, and it was illegal in the Roman Empire at many times. And so they didn’t have big buildings that they’d go meet in once a week.
They would meet in somebody’s house. Usually, the ideal was hopefully you had somebody in your church who had a little bit of wealth. I mean, they may not have been a millionaire, but they had enough wealth that they either had a big house with a courtyard where you could meet, or they had a room on their house that they could set aside just for the church to meet in.
But, you know, they did what they had to do, whether somebody had that much space available or not. And Philemon and Aphia had welcomed the church in, and they were evidently providing some sort of leadership to the church. And even their son, as I said, was called by Paul their fellow soldier.
He was somebody who was out on the front lines of advancing the kingdom. They were all working together in ministry. And Paul writes to this man, if you’re not familiar with the book of Philemon, Paul writes to this man, and the purpose of his letter is to plead for mercy on behalf of an escaped slave.
Philemon, in spite of being a church leader, a church member and a church leader, owned a slave named Onesimus. At least one slave. There may have been more, but we know that he owned Onesimus at one point.
And I’m going to get into the specifics of that in just a moment. But evidently, Onesimus had escaped from Philemon, as you can imagine. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be free if you had the opportunity?
But Onesimus had escaped from Philemon. He had made his way to Rome and evidently had become a Christian while he was there. And we don’t know for sure whether Onesimus became a Christian because he came in contact with the Apostle Paul, or if he came into contact with the Apostle Paul because he became a Christian.
So in other words, we don’t know whether Paul led him to Christ, or whether he came to Christ in some other way in Rome, and then sought out the Apostle Paul for his guidance. But either way, those two things had happened. He had become a Christian, and he had gotten acquainted with the Apostle Paul.
Well, as Onesimus began to grow as a believer, However, he evidently had confided in Paul about his situation, and Paul had challenged Onesimus to go back and make things right. And even though we would look at the institution of slavery as being wrong, as being certainly wrong, Paul said there was a rift now between Onesimus and Philemon that needed to be fixed. You know, this is something that ought to happen when we become Christians, that we ought to look for where those areas are that need reconciliation and seek after.
I remember a few years ago, there was a man that I can’t remember if I actually led him to Christ, like if I was there and spoke to him at that time. I can’t remember if I was involved in that instance, but I know I was involved in talking to him about Christ for many times. I know I was involved in discipling the man, but there were a few of us who were involved.
Anyway, come to find out once this man had come to Christ and had been baptized, we found out that he had a criminal record. It didn’t change anything as far as we were concerned. We had seen the change in him.
We knew he had come from a rough background anyway, and we’d seen the change in him when he came to Christ. But we found out he had a criminal record from before he had come among us and before he had come to Christ. After he was saved and after he was baptized and we found out about the criminal record, we found out that he had outstanding warrants at the time. And I said to him, you need to go back to a different town. I said, you need to go back.
You need to turn yourself in and you need to deal with this. I said, I’m not telling you that because I want you to be in jail. I said, but you need to do the right thing.
God has forgiven you for all of this, but you’ve got to go make things right with the authorities. And so he said, I will, I will. He said, I’ve got a few things to take care of first, and then I will do that.
And I believed him, and he did. It took him a couple of weeks to get some things straightened out financially so that he could go down there, turn himself in, pay his, I don’t know how all that works, but pay what he needed to pay, go before the judge and get that taken care of. And you know that some people would let something like that keep them away from coming to Christ, the expectation that you need to get things right, not in order to be saved, but in order to bring glory to Christ, you need to get all this reconciled.
I know my father-in-law has, with his ministry to people in Mexico and Nicaragua, He’s had opportunities to minister to people here in our country from that background. And some of them he’s come to find out were in our country illegally. Well, he continued to minister to them, continued to disciple them.
And as these people have come to Christ, he said, you need to go deal with this and make it right. And some of them have gone back and reconciled those things where they were in our country illegally. They’ve gone and dealt with the consequences.
There are things in each of our lives. It may not be legal problems. We may not be escaped slaves. But each of us, when we come to Christ, there’s something in our past, usually, that we ought to think about reconciling if there’s something that needs to be reconciled.
Does it keep us from being saved if we don’t go turn ourselves into the law if you’ve got warrants? No, Jesus doesn’t promise to save only warrantless people. But it does bring him glory.
It does bring him glory when we as Christians say, you know, I want this fixed, whatever the consequences may be. And so now Paul was encouraging Onesimus to go back and deal with where he had run away from. But at the same time, we can’t think, oh, Paul, that’s so awful.
He’s just sending the man back into slavery. He’s writing this letter to Onesimus trying to clear the way for how Onesimus is going to be reconciled to Philemon. Because he’s not just telling Onesimus, you need to go back and deal with this.
We’ll see throughout this letter, he tells Philemon he needs to change in just the way he intends to deal with Philemon. As we get through the letter, we’ll see he doesn’t tell him to deal with him. or he dissuades him from dealing with him as an escaped slave and says instead you need to deal with him as a brother in Christ. So he was looking for both sides to reconcile.
Now, something that’s not expressly mentioned in the text that becomes a question for a lot of people, though, I want to address for just a moment. Why doesn’t the Bible. .
. Why does the Bible seem to regulate slavery instead of commanding it to stop? Because I would hope that we would all look at the history of slavery in our country and condemn that rightly as being in opposition to what God wants.
And unfortunately, for many years, the Bible was misused to try to justify slavery. Thankfully, we have moved past that. Thankfully, we have, I believe, repented of that.
But we would look at slavery now and we would say that’s evil. That’s absolutely evil. and a lot of people get hung up on things like this where God had the opportunity through the apostle Paul to say, you know, you as a Christian need to get out of the slavery enterprise.
And instead, God in the New Testament, through the apostles, told Christians how to treat their slaves and told Christian slaves how to treat their masters instead of ending the practice. And some people say, well, obviously that’s just wrong. How could God do that?
Here’s one attempt at an answer, all right, because I can’t pretend to know everything that’s in the mind of God. But one thing I can tell you is that from what I’ve studied on the subject, slavery in ancient Israel and slavery in ancient Rome, while they were not desirable practices and not something I would like to see us implement here, were not entirely the same thing as the history of slavery in America. This completely involuntary, brutal, race-based slavery, where we’re treating, through the whole system, treating one class of people like they are less than human and misusing the Bible to justify it.
Slavery in the Roman world, slavery in Hebrew society, was not an ideal situation, but it was not quite the same. For one thing, in both Roman society and in Hebrew society, there were people who entered into slavery voluntarily. As hard as that is for us to imagine, we’re Americans, we have that streak of live free or die bred into us at birth, right?
Through generations going back to the people who dumped the tea in the harbor. that’s sort of in the fabric of who we are it’s hard for us to imagine but there were people who entered slavery voluntarily it could have been as a way to pay a debt you had no other way to pay a debt so you agreed to go work as a slave for a certain amount of time for some people they just liked the security of being taken care of by somebody else working for somebody else and not having to worry about where their next meal was going to come from not worrying about where they were going to live they had somebody to take care of them and they’d work in exchange for that. Now, what I don’t want you to hear is the preacher standing up here and justifying slavery.
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Absolutely never.
Especially the slavery that took place in the United States. Absolute, complete evil, down to the fact that God’s Word tells us that all of what we would call the races of men were created from one blood by the Lord. Okay, Acts 17 is clear on that.
There’s no difference there. But the slavery in the ancient world was different. Was it brutal?
Yes, at times it was. Did people mistreat people? Yes, at times they did.
And that’s why in the New Testament, Christians were taught how to deal with their slaves and how to deal with their masters. God could have absolutely commanded Christians to abolish it. Why he did not, I don’t know.
But I choose to defer to the righteousness of God and understand that whatever he does is right. And I have no right to stand in moral judgment over God, whether things seem to make sense or not. But I can also tell you that where Christianity has flourished and where Christian principles have taken root, those have been the places in the world that have been among the first to abolish slavery.
And I hope you realize that. In America, there were a lot of Christians or people claiming to be Christians, maybe some of both, who misused the Bible to justify slavery. But those who fought to abolish slavery almost uniformly were Bible-believing Christians.
In the British Empire, you had extraordinarily committed Christians who fought to abolish slavery. In the Roman Empire, it was the influence of Christianity that abolished slavery. So we need to understand the Bible does teach that we’re all created by God His image that we’re all equal. The Bible is anti-slavery, but in that Roman context, God did tell them how to treat one another.
And we just have to accept that there are some things that we don’t understand that God does. All right? So I wanted to, I maybe spent too much time on that, but I wanted to make that clear because some, especially new believers and skeptics sometimes come to passages like this and say, well, why would a righteous God allow it to continue?
I don’t know. But a righteous God said, if this is going to continue, you need to do it a certain way. Sort of like with divorce.
We know that God doesn’t like divorce. And yet he said, if it’s going to happen, here are the parameters. It’s for your good.
All right, so Paul was writing to Philemon to lay the groundwork for Onesimus to come back and for these two to be able to be reconciled. And so as he gets into this letter, in the first seven verses that we’ve looked at tonight, that we’ve read over tonight. Paul starts talking about the virtues that Philemon possesses.
Now, if we were to do this, we might say we were buttering somebody up. We’re talking about how, before you’re going to go and ask somebody for a loan, you’re going to talk about how generous and how wonderful, maybe even how beautiful they are. You’re going to say some nice things.
We could look at it that way, but I don’t think that Paul was doing anything deceitful. I don’t think he was flattering. I don’t think this was empty flattery toward Philemon.
I think this was Paul speaking on God’s behalf, reminding Philemon of the things that God had done in his life and who God had made Philemon into be, sort of reminding him of the kind of man that God had made him to be so that he would be thinking of those things going into the conversation about Onesimus. Like I said, this is an initial reminder. Here’s who you are.
Here’s who God has made you to be. So this is who you need to be to your new brother, Onesimus. All right.
And we see in verse four, the first three verses really are just introduction. It’s the way they wrote the letter. We might not have all these things in letters that we write today because we have on the outside with the stamp who it’s to and who it’s from.
But in their day, these things were carried as parchment around with messengers and things. So it would say right there in the letter who it was from and who it was to. That Paul was, after this initial introduction, you get into verse 4, and he tells Philemon that he was thankful to God for Philemon’s testimony.
He was thankful to God for the reputation that Philemon had for a number of reasons. For the way it impacted the church there that he served, for the way that it encouraged Paul, for the way that it strengthened the brothers that were around him, for the way it led him to treat others differently, for the glory that it brought to Jesus Christ. There are a number of reasons that come out in the text here. But he just basically tells Philemon that he’s thankful to God for Philemon’s testimony and reputation.
He said, I always thank my God when I mention you in your prayers. And he begins in verse 5 to list what some of those reasons are. But he’s one of those people that Paul said, When I pray about you, I always give thanks, or when I pray for you.
I’ve told you before, there are some people you pray for, and there are some people you pray about, right? And there’s sometimes some overlap there. But any time Philemon came to Paul’s mind in prayer, and they were clearly friends because he’s saying, I’m praying for you, and I think the Apostle Paul meant it, not like we so many times, oh, I’ll pray for that, and then we totally forget.
That’s why a lot of times I like to say, if we’ve got time, let’s just pray about it right here. But every time Paul would, his mind would go to remembrance of Philemon in prayer, he was thankful. Are there any people in your life, you don’t have to name them, but are there any people in your life that every time they come to mind, you’re thankful to God for their presence in your life?
I hope so. Philemon was one of those people for Paul. And part of that was because of Philemon’s reputation.
We get into verse 5, and we see that Philemon had a reputation for faith and for love. He says in verse 5, after saying that he remembered him and gave thanks in his prayers, he says in verse 5, because I hear of your love for all the saints and the faith that you have in the Lord Jesus. So it was the love and it was the faith that Philemon showed that were at the heart of who he was and his reputation, and they were the reason why Paul gave thanks when he thought about Philemon.
He had this faith and he had this love. And we see Paul elaborate a little bit on this in verses six and seven, explaining a little bit more about this faith and this love. He said in verse six, I pray that your participation in the faith may become effective through knowing every good thing that is in us for the glory of Christ. This idea of him having faith, but Paul praying for his faith to become more effective, I look at as him saying, you have this faith, now let’s pray that you get the opportunity to put it to use.
Let’s pray that you get the opportunity to do something with it. And we’ve talked about this before here at church. Do you have faith in God?
What are you doing about it? Do you belong to Him? Act like it.
Those sorts of things. And Paul is praying here that he would have the opportunity to put his faith into action, that his participation in the faith would become effective. Now, Philemon doesn’t know this yet, but he’s about to have the opportunity to live out his faith, isn’t he?
He’s about to have the opportunity to do something with what he professes to believe when Onesimus comes back. You know, it’s one thing to say, I believe that God is gracious and God desires us to show grace to others as well. It’s something entirely different on many occasions when you get in those situations where you need to show grace to somebody.
We don’t always want to, do we? But when we’re reminded of what grace God has shown us, it becomes much harder for us to withhold grace from other people. And he said, I pray that your participation in the faith may become effective through knowing every good thing that is in us for the glory of Christ. Now, I don’t believe that that’s Paul saying, for you to look at all the good that is in us, meaning look at how good we are, look at all these positive attributes that we have.
Now, I believe he’s talking about the work of God taking place in his life. We pray that as you see our example, as people who have received grace and who have shown grace, of people who have been called to live in a certain way for the glory of Christ. As you see us as people who’ve been changed by the power of God in our lives, we pray that as you witness those things, that your faith will become effective in the same way through knowing, through experientially knowing the same thing that God is doing in us. He’s praying that God would be at work in him as God has been at work in them.
So he prayed that Philemon’s faith would be put into greater action as he recognized God at work in him for the glory of Christ. And then in verse 7, we see that he rejoiced in the love that Fuliman showed because it had encouraged and strengthened his brothers in Christ. He says, for I have great joy and encouragement from your love because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother. He said, your love for others, your love that you actively show to others causes encouragement and joy to me as well. See, Philemon didn’t just feel love toward other people.
He didn’t just say he loved the brothers and sisters in his church. He actively showed it. And just by being around Philemon, just by hearing from Philemon, just by hearing about the reputation that Philemon had, word getting back to Paul about the things that Philemon was doing, it encouraged Paul.
It brought him joy. probably most of us have known somebody like that some believer like that I can think of in particular first face that comes to mind is a friend that charla and I have here in town and I always think I’m a generally loving person until I’m around her and I think what a what a cynical pessimistic person I really am in comparison to this lady uh because she just you know in a non-braggy way, she talks about this person that she met and prayed with at Walmart and this person that she found out needed diapers for their kid and she was taking it over there and, you know, swings by and asks how she can pray for us and our church. And I just, and it just encourages me after I get over that initial setback of, I am just a hateful person in comparison.
Once I get over that initial setback, I think, man, I just, I want to love people the way she does. And probably many of us have known somebody like that. I think that was Philemon for Paul.
He heard the stories about what Philemon was doing for other people. He saw the evidence in the lives of the other Christians about how Philemon encouraged them by his love, and Paul found it hard not to get excited about the love that Philemon showed. Now, somebody like that, you would think, I’m going to send Onesimus back.
It’ll be all right. But, you know, sometimes people get hurt, and it can be hard to show love in a particular situation. I was talking with Kay this morning during Sunday school.
Not her story, my story, about the need to forgive over and over and over. And I feel like with most circumstances, I’m a very forgiving person. try to be very gracious and not a lot of stuff bothers me but there are certain circumstances where I somebody could say good morning and I would say what’s so morning about it because that person just you know I’ve been hurt there right y’all know what I’m talking about y’all been there too and no matter how loving a person you are there’s there have been instances where somebody’s done us wrong and it’s hard to forgive.
Philemon, very loving man, generally speaking. But it’s possible he was hurt by the departure of Onesimus. I know, again, that’s foreign to us with our American conception of slavery.
But for all we know, Onesimus might have been somebody deeply trusted in the household. Somebody that lived there. I can’t imagine Philemon being hurt by somebody that just worked for him out in the field running off to where Paul’s having to write back to him and say, please be forgiving, please be forgiving.
It’s possible Onesimus was trusted in a position of authority in the household. Some people have speculated that he might have even stolen from Philemon as he left. He might have been the guy in charge of Philemon’s accounts.
He might have been like the Joseph in the house of Potiphar, only in this case he might have actually betrayed the trust. Now, some of that’s speculative. I want you to understand that. We don’t know that for sure.
But just the things that the way he has to address Philemon in the text makes you think there’s something more here than just somebody ran off. This was a loving man who had to be reminded, you know, this is who you are. This is the kind of love that God has put in your heart for your brothers.
And he’s setting the stage to remind him that make sure that love applies to all of your brothers. And we’ll get more into that in the coming weeks. But the message here for believers in difficult situations, or what I’d call tricky situations, is that we’re supposed to represent Christ. Because he talks about Philemon’s faith in Christ and his love for Christ and doing all these things for the glory of Christ. And this was very likely a tricky situation for Philemon.
You know what I mean by tricky, right? Those situations where you think, I just don’t know what to do here because I know what I’m supposed to do as a Christian. But I also know that that feels wrong to let them, it feels wrong to treat them with so much grace and basically let them get by with what they did.
You know those situations where you say, I don’t know what the right answer is here. I think a lot of times we do know what the right answer is. But those areas where we’re weighing the options, what’s right and what’s wrong, grace, extending grace especially to somebody who’s hurt you and what do you do here?
We all end up in those tricky situations where sometimes we’re required to show some grace and even some diplomacy that we’re just not sure we can muster at that moment. Those situations where you go into it and you say, God, I hope you have hold of my mouth for the next 30 minutes. God, I hope you work in my heart in the next 30 minutes to where more love comes out than what I’m currently feeling.
What are we supposed to do in those situations? I know. I know what you feel in those situations because I get there too.
And I think in my mind through these scenarios about all the things that I would like to say and all the things that I would like to do to make it clear that I was right and you were wrong and you know that I was right. That’s the most important thing, that you know that I was right. And yet in the back of my mind, I hear that voice whispering grace.
And I know it’s my flesh telling me over here, you know you could easily put that person in their place. You know you could. But ultimately, what good is it going to do?
what do we do and what’s the answer go back to what Paul was telling Philemon and in these situations we’re supposed to represent Christ I know that because he’s about to address the band-aid rips off in verse 8 which we’ll see next time and he begins to talk about the situation with Onesimus but he’s already set the stage by reminding Philemon about his love and his faith and how all these things are supposed to work together for the glory of Christ. And that tells me that we as believers are supposed to react to these tricky situations with noticeable love. Okay, not just telling people, well, I love you. I love you, but.
. . You ever been on the receiving end of one of those conversations?
You know, I love you, but. . .
I’ve heard that a few times. Pastor, I love you, but. .
. What comes before the but never has quite the impact is the words that come after the but. Not just saying we love people, but then I’m going to unload on you anyway.
Actually showing love to them. That’s what Philemon did for all of his brothers. That’s what Paul was about to call him to do with Onesimus.
With noticeable love, we represent Christ with noticeable love and with an attitude that seeks to glorify Christ in our circumstances. I don’t know what circumstances you’re in tonight. They may not be pleasant.
They probably aren’t fair. You ever find yourself saying that to yourself? This is not fair.
And then you think, I’m an adult. I know life’s not fair. It’s okay to think your circumstances aren’t fair.
Your circumstances may not be fair. Sometimes we get in difficult circumstances because of our own mistakes, and sometimes we get there through no fault of our own. It really does happen sometimes.
And we can hunker down and get bitter and wait to show everybody that we’re totally in the right, and we can flail against the circumstances, because I was doing nothing but serving You, Lord, and now here I am, and this is going on, and it’s just not right, and we can get bitter, and we can get into the mindset of, how do I get out of this? And our focus in that tricky situation can be completely on our own comfort and getting out of the tricky situation, or winning the conflict, or whatever it may be. Or we can come into it with the attitude of, I’m going to glorify Christ in these circumstances.
I’m not here by accident. This didn’t catch him off guard. Jesus isn’t surprised that I am where I am today.
My job here is not to win. My job here is not to put Onesimus in his place. My job here is to represent Christ. My job here is to bring glory to him by the way I hold to my faith in him when it gets tough.
And the way I continue to love people the way He’s loved me.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download