If you would take your Bibles and turn to the little book of Philemon. You can find that on page 1000 in the pew Bibles located in the pew in front of you, or if you’re flipping in your own Bibles and haven’t flipped to Philemon very many times, if you can get to Hebrews and turn back one page you’ll be there. We’ll look at this little letter in our time together this morning.
You know the story and the ways that Peter has been given a hard time over the years for some of the things that he said to Jesus. One of those times was when he asked Jesus, “How many times should I forgive my brother, up to seven times?” You know that’s really not that bad. And in the day and age in which we live, that’s actually a lot. We live in this culture of snap judgment and held grudges and so much unforgiveness. Seven times may sound a little bit soft on someone who has done us wrong. But that’s not what Jesus says. What did Jesus say? Jesus said, “Not seven times but seventy times seven times,” or “seventy-seven times,” as some translations have it. In other words, “More times than you could count.” And of course Jesus is not talking about literally counting up technically that many times to forgive someone. He is saying to forgive someone an uncountable amount of times. But think about the kind of people, who are the people in your lives that you would have opportunity to forgive that many times. You’re probably sitting next to them! Maybe it’s a spouse, a parent, an inlaw, a sibling, a best friend, a roommate, your fellow church member. We have many times, many opportunities in our lives to practice forgiveness.
And Philemon is a little letter, it’s a little book in the New Testament – it’s the smallest, the shortest of Paul’s letters – and it really shows us what that’s all about. It shows us forgiveness on a very personal level. This is one of the most overlooked books in the New Testament, but it really shows us how the Gospel, how the grace of God in our hearts plays out in real relationships. Tim Keller, the last book that he wrote before his death was a book on forgiveness. And in it he writes about three dimensions of forgiveness. He says that there’s the vertical dimension – in other words, the forgiveness in relation to God. There is the internal dimension – or how that looks in our own hearts. And then there is the horizontal dimension of forgiveness – and how that grace is extended to one another in our lives. And so we’ll see basically those three dimensions of forgiveness from this little letter of Philemon. But our outline will be first, grace, then second, love, and then third, fellowship. Grace, love and fellowship. An old preacher once wrote, he said, “There is no better test of true religion, both as it is preached and practiced, than just to ask for and to grant forgiveness and to offer and accept restitution.” So with that in mind, let’s turn to God in prayer and ask Him for His blessing on our reading and preaching of God’s Word this morning.
Father, we give You thanks for Your grace that You have already poured out on us. Every one of us has received something of Your grace this morning. And we give You thanks that You have drawn us here to this place, to this time, to hear Your Word. And so we pray as we hear Your Word that we would receive Your grace in a new way, that we would see Jesus, and that You would give us Your Spirit to understand and to apply these truths and teachings of the Gospel into our own lives, into our own relationships, and that You would be glorified through it. And I pray all of this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Philemon, starting in verse 1:
“Paul, a prisoner for Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother,
To Philemon our beloved fellow worker and Apphia our sister and Archippus our fellow soldier, and the church in your house:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I thank my God always when I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you.
Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you—I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus—I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment. (Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.) I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me, in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel, but I preferred to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion but of your own accord. For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother—especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.
So if you consider me your partner, receive him as you would receive me. If he has wronged you at all, or owes you anything, charge that to my account. I, Paul, write this with my own hand: I will repay it—to say nothing of your owing me even your own self. Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.
Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing that you will do even more than I say. At the same time, prepare a guest room for me, for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you.
Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall but the Word of our God endures forever.
Well basically the first and last word of this letter is grace. “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ,” verse 3. Verse 25, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit.” That word, it is the bookends of this letter; it is the bookends of the Christian life really. It is the grace of God. That’s how we begin the Christian life; that’s how we end the Christian life. And everything in between comes down to this – it’s the grace of God in Christ Jesus. But what is that? What is grace? And like so many words that are familiar to us that we use a lot, we know how to use them, we know they are important in some way, but sometimes we lose what they really mean. Sometimes we lose the force and the impact of these beautiful words that we find in the Gospel. And we can do that with “grace” as well. But if we lose the meaning of grace then we lose what it means to be a Christian. And one of the best definitions of grace that I’ve heard recently, it connects that word “grace” with what that word would have meant at the time that Paul was using it, at the time that Paul was writing this letter. And that is connecting the word “grace” to a gift, to the word “gift.” Grace is the gift of God in Christ. That definition is that grace is the ultimate gift of God to the world and it is given without regard to worth; in fact, it is given in the absence of worth and it is an unconditioned gift that does not match the worth of its recipients but it creates it. Did you get that? That grace is a gift and it’s a gift to the unworthy that makes the unworthy, worthy. And grace is a gift that is something that creates and sustains a relationship, a relationship with God.
I recently learned about a museum that is located in Zagreb, Croatia and it’s called The Museum of Broken Relationships. And in that museum there are all sorts of objects that commemorate relationships that had once been but were no more. So there’s this little sketch and it’s called “A Drawing of Us Made by a Stranger in the Train.” And it was given to a couple. And a man, a stranger sitting on the train. As he watched them, he was somewhat struck by their relationship and so at the end of the train ride he tore out the first page of the book that he was reading and he handed it to this couple and it was a rough drawing or a sketch of them together. And yet that was the only thing, at the end of the relationship, that remained to commemorate that now broken relationship. There was another, an item of a plush Snoopy doll. And this Snoopy doll was a gift to this woman on her seventeenth birthday and it was commemorating the relationship that had lasted for thirty years – through family, kids, a home. And then he left. And what was left was this Snoopy doll. Or there was a little pair of toy frog figurines and the caption with it just said, “Mom left when I was three. This was one of the few Christmas gifts that she gave to me.” And it goes on and on and on in this heartbreaking fashion, commemorating all of these broken relationships.
But do you know what’s worse than all of that? What’s more heartbreaking, what’s sadder than all of those things is a broken relationship with God. A broken relationship with God. And that’s what we are all born with. We are all born in an estranged relationship with God and there is nothing we can do about it and all that we have are all of these items in a museum of a broken relationship with God. Things like guilt and shame and sin and rebellion and fear and despair and idolatry and addiction. And all of those things are, they’re pieces of a bigger picture, of a bigger problem, and that is a broken relationship with God. And yet that does not have to be the end of our story. It doesn’t have to be the end of the story for us because there’s grace. There is the grace of God that brings us into a relationship with Him and it’s a gift. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift, the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Jesus is that gift. He is that gift of God who takes all of those things – all of those things like shame and guilt and sin and rebellion – He takes it on Himself and He forgives our sin, He bears our shame on the cross and He brings us into this relationship with God, this relationship which is the greatest blessing that it is possible for us to know and it will not ever end. It cannot be broken. And all that we have to do is to do what we do with gifts – and what is that? It’s to receive it. We sang about it earlier. “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to the cross I cling.” We come with open hands to receive this gift, not because we are worthy, not because we are going to try harder or do better, not because of anything we could ever offer in return for this gift, but just by receiving it, receiving it by faith because it is a gift.
You see, that’s grace. That’s grace. And that’s where this letter starts. I want to say that grace is the most important word in this little letter to Philemon, but that’s not quite true. And yes, everything that Paul says is dependent upon grace. It’s this grace that is the foundation of all true forgiveness and reconciliation, yes, but grace isn’t that most important word in this letter. What is the most important word? Well, it’s Jesus or Christ. It’s Christ Jesus. And Paul says in verse 1 that he is a prisoner for Christ Jesus. He says in verse 5 that he gives thanks for Philemon’s love and faith toward the Lord Jesus. He prays for the full knowledge of everything that is in us for the sake of Christ. He is bold in Christ and that grace that is the heart of this letter, it is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ to us. So that’s where we have to start, that’s where we have to start if we are going to understand this letter and understand what this letter is teaching to us. We have to understand what Jesus has done for us with this gift that is ours. His life, His death, His resurrection, the forgiveness of sins, the forgiveness of an unpayable debt, His bringing us into the household of God not as slaves but as sons. You see, great grace has been shown to us, has been given to us in Christ.
And you remember Jesus’ parable, how He told the parable of the man who had an unpayable debt that was forgiven. The king showed him mercy, yet at the very same time, right afterwards, he would not forgive a much smaller debt that someone held against him. Why would he not forgive that debt? Because he didn’t recognize the magnitude of the grace and mercy that had been shown to him by the king. So forgiveness, you see, it begins by recognizing, it begins by accepting, by delighting in God’s grace and forgiveness that is for us in Christ Jesus. Have you done that? Have you received that gift of God? It’s there for you. It’s on offer in the Gospel today to receive it by faith. And that’s what really matters. You see, nothing else will make sense in this letter, nothing else will make sense about forgiveness until we get that first – the forgiveness and the grace of God to us in Christ Jesus as a gift received by faith.
Now what difference does that make in relationships? What differences does that make in the relationships that we see here on display in this letter to Philemon? What difference does that make in our own relationships? Well it’s about grace but it’s also about love. I was thinking, you know, it’s part of that strange time that we’re living in in college football and the transfer portal. And players are always switching teams from one year to the next. So you may have a player who one year was a wide receiver for Ole Miss, and the next year he plays for State. Or vice versa. I saw recently in basketball where the point guard for Auburn is transferring to be the point guard for Bama next year. And you read these stories and you think, “Can you do that? Is that possible? Aren’t they supposed to be enemies and arch rivals?” And the funny thing is, fans that care so much don’t really care, and if it will benefit the team, then bring whoever can come in! It reminds me of what a comedian said one time. He said, “Really we’re just cheering for the clothes. We’re cheering for the jersey. And we’re yelling for our clothes to be the clothes from the other school or from the other city.” And a lot of it doesn’t make sense, we know it doesn’t make sense, but still, there’s something that we just can’t quite get used to when a rival becomes an ally.
Sometime like that is happening in this letter to Philemon. And in the first place, we have it between Paul and Philemon. You see, Paul was a Jew; Philemon was a Gentile. Remember who Paul was. Paul was a Pharisee. He was circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin. He was a Hebrew of Hebrews and his whole confidence, his whole security was in his flesh and in his distinctiveness, his being different from a Gentile. And now here we have him in this letter, he is writing to Philemon who is this uncircumcised Colossian. And what does he say to Philemon? He calls him a brother. Verse 7, “For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother.” And all throughout this letter there is a warmth, there is an affection, there is a love that Paul has for Philemon. He prays for him. He calls him a beloved fellow worker and a partner in the Gospel. He appeals to him for love’s sake. Verse 22 says, “Prepare a guest room for me for I am hoping that through your prayers I will be graciously given to you.” He longs to be with Philemon. He longs to be with the church that is meeting in his house. You see, walls have come down between Paul and Philemon. Walls have come down between Jew and Gentile. Why? It’s because of the grace of God and it’s because of this love that now becomes a reality because of what Christ has done to break down those walls, to tear down those barriers.
Now there’s another one as well in this letter. There’s another wall that needs to come down, and that is the wall between Philemon and Onesimus. It’s a barrier between master and slave, between rich and poor. Now of course Paul is not in any way endorsing or even accepting the reality of a Christian owning a slave. In fact it’s quite the opposite because what we have here in this letter is that Onesimus, he had run away from his master, Philemon, and that in and of itself was a crime worthy of the death penalty in some cases. And we’re given the hint that at some point when Onesimus ran away from Philemon that he may have taken something that belonged to Philemon. Verse 18 says, “If he has wronged you at all or owes you anything.” He may have taken off with something that belonged to Philemon in order to support himself now that he was a runaway slave. But, but what happened when he ran away was that eventually he made his way and crossed paths with Paul and that changed his life. And while Onesimus was with Paul, he heard about what Paul was always talking about. He heard about the grace of God. He heard about the Gospel. He heard about what Jesus had done in His death and resurrection and he believed. He believed in Jesus. He became a Christian, a brother, a child in the faith for Paul. Paul says in verse 10, he says, “I appeal to you for my child, Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.” Paul is a spiritual father to Onesimus and now, now after Onesimus had helped him and cared for him, Paul is sending Onesimus back to Colossae, back to Philemon. That could be bad. That could be really dangerous and a vulnerable place for Onesimus to be.
But what Paul says, what he writes to Philemon is really unheard of. He says in verse 12, “I am sending him back to you,” verse 16, “no longer as a bond servant but more than a bondservant – as a beloved brother. As a beloved brother.” That is unthinkable. It’s subversive. It’s revolutionary. It’s radical. Because the Gospel overturns all the accepted social structures and class differences and it actually makes brothers out of those who are at one time slave and master, even those who might have been a slave and a scorned and aggrieved master because slavery cannot exist among brothers. And what Paul is asking Philemon to do is to forgive. He is asking Philemon to forgive Onesimus and to receive him back in love as family. And then it somewhat ends there and we don’t really know, technically we don’t know how all of this worked out. We can be pretty confident that Philemon received Onesimus back as a brother because we have this letter in our Bibles and this letter has survived for us.
But you know what, in some ways we don’t have to know how it all worked out in order to know what we need to find out about forgiveness from this letter, at least in part. And it’s this – it’s that the Gospel calls for a change of heart towards others before any sort of reconciliation can occur. The Gospel calls for a change of heart internally towards the other person before that reconciliation can take place. Tim Keller says it this way, that “Forgiveness is granted before it is felt.” Forgiveness if granted before it is felt. And Paul expects Philemon, in light of Christian love, to change his stance towards Onesimus and adopt a posture of forgiveness towards him. That’s the internal dimension of forgiveness and that takes place in several ways in this letter. J.I. Packer, he writes that, “Forgiveness is compassionate, it’s costly, and it’s creative.”
And we see those three elements in this letter with what Paul is writing to Philemon. Forgiveness is compassionate because it calls for the person to identify sympathetically with the person who has wronged him. It’s costly because it calls for the person who was wronged to absorb the cost in some way, the cost of the offense. And it’s creative because it restores relationship and it seeks the good of the other person and not their ill, not their harm. Those elements are on display in this letter. Paul encourages compassion for Onesimus, doesn’t he. He talks about Onesimus as a beloved brother, as his son. He talks about the love that he has for Onesimus and he talks about the usefulness that Onesimus has shown to him and he has helped him and cared for him. He is creating a picture of compassion for Philemon to adopt towards Onesimus.
And it’s costly. Paul’s saying that he will absorb the cost. He will absorb the debt that Onesimus owes to Philemon. And yet at the same time he does something else in there, doesn’t he? He reminds Philemon of how much he owes to Paul. He says, “to say nothing of your owing me, even your own self.” Surely whatever Philemon, whatever cost he would absorb would pale in comparison to the debt that Philemon owes Paul.
And then it’s creative. He says in verse 20, “Yes, brother, I want some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ.” What Paul is looking for, he’s looking for now only his own encouragement but he’s also looking for the encouragement and the benefit and the blessing of Philemon and Onesimus and that whole church that gathered together in Colossae. All of that starts with a posture of forgiveness. It takes place internally and with a heart of love towards the person who has wronged him.
Now maybe for the hardest part in the last thing we see, and that is creating or restoring fellowship. Fellowship. And to find that, to find that kind of forgiveness we have to look to the very last part of this letter, to the last verses and to the names that are found there. When our oldest was little, we would be watching a TV show or a movie and you’d get to the part where the closing credits would start to run. We would pick up the remote to turn it off because it was over and he would say, “No, no, no! It’s not over; it’s almost over.” And he would want to watch the closing credits. He would want to watch it all the way to the end. Maybe it was because of the song that was playing. Maybe it was because there would be a little clip that was hidden in the credits. Maybe he just didn’t want to go and take his nap. Whatever it was, he didn’t want the show to be over yet. “It’s not over; it’s almost over!”
Sometimes we come to these little verses at the end of the letters in the New Testament and we think it’s over and we kind of skip right past it and we go on to the next thing. But it’s not over; it’s almost over. And some of the names that we find here at the end of Philemon are tremendously significant. And we could talk about Luke that’s in there and how he wrote more of the New Testament than anybody else. But the name I want us to focus on is really just one name, one name in particular. If you are with us on Sunday nights as we go through the book of Acts you may already know where I am going with this one. Verse 23 says, “Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, sends greetings to you, and so do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, and Luke, my fellow workers.” “And so does Mark.” Mark. Mark is there with Paul when he’s writing this little letter to Philemon.
Now remember what happened in the book of Acts – how Paul and Barnabas and Mark, they set out on that first missionary journey, the went to take the Gospel to new places, to the Gentiles, but it wasn’t very long in that journey when Mark turned around and he went home; he left Paul and Barnabas. He deserted them at Pamphylia and Paul and Barnabas went on without him. And later, some years later when Paul and Barnabas wanted to set out and go back to those churches to strengthen those churches and continue to take the Gospel to new places, Barnabas wanted to take Mark with them. Barnabas wanted to take Mark with Paul and him and Paul said no. He wouldn’t have it. Acts chapter 15 says that “Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work.” And then it says this, “And there arose a sharp disagreement so that they separated from each other.” See, Paul didn’t trust Mark and he still held it against Mark in some way for what he had done those years earlier. But now, here it is at the end of Paul’s life, he’s an old man, verse 9 says, he’s in prison, he’s in need, and who is it that is with him? It’s Mark. Mark’s with him. And there are other places that we find – we can read in Paul’s letters – where we find the significance that Mark had in Paul’s heart and in his life. He says in 2 Timothy 4, “Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me in ministry.” There was reconciliation there.
And we don’t know how that happened, we don’t know how that restoration happened. Was it Mark that went to Paul and asked for forgiveness for deserting them in Pamphylia? Or was it Paul who went to Mark and asked him for forgiveness for being ungracious to him when they wanted to set out on another journey? We don’t know. We don’t know what it is. And really it could have been either or both of those things. If you think about what Jesus says about forgiveness, He says in Matthew chapter 5 that if your brother has something against you, go to him and seek to be restored to him. But then Jesu says in Matthew 18 if you have something against your brother, go to him and seek to be restored to him. So whether you have something against your brother or your brother has something against you, the requirement, the obligation because of God’s grace is to go to the other person and to seek restoration, to seek reconciliation. Whatever way that would have happened with Paul and Mark, what we can say is that they were restored. And Paul calls him in verse 24, “a fellow worker.” Fellowship. Fellowship is a major theme of this letter to Philemon. And Mark was there when Paul needed him most. He was there when he was an old man. He was suffering for the sake of the Gospel and Paul was grateful. Paul was thankful for Mark’s friendship.
And reconciliation may not have happened right away. Reconciliation may not happen right away. There may need to be trust that is restored. There may need to be change that happens first. Patience is always going to be required in order for reconciliation to happen. But when these things are in place, when there is first the grace of God to the biggest of sinners like us, when we have that first and when we have a posture of forgiveness towards those who have wronged us – and I love what one writer says, that “Forgiveness is what allows us to express hurt as hurt instead of hurt as anger.” And so when those two things are in place – the grace of God and the posture towards forgiveness – then we can be ready in God’s timing and in God’s ways as He allows to extend that forgiveness to other people and to enjoy the restored relationships that we see on display at the end of this letter to Philemon. Don’t we need that? We need those kind of relationships in the church to display and to demonstrate what the Gospel, what the grace of God has done to us and the impact that it makes in our lives and in our relationships.
I’ll close with this. Some of you have seen recently one of the cutting edge performance venues that has been built in recent years. It’s called The Sphere. And The Sphere, it cost $2.3 billion dollars to build this facility. And information about it says that it has 3D beam-forming technology and wave field synthesis to create crystal clear, concert great sound to every seat in the venue with very little audio decay. They’re trying to present the best possible representation of the true sound to everyone in the building. They’re aiming for that. Isn’t that what we are aiming for in our relationships? That they would be a representation of the true grace of God that we have received in Christ?
And you can hear echoes – it’s almost like the acoustics of this little letter – you can hear echoes of the Gospel all throughout it because here is this relationship between rich and poor and we’re reminded of what Jesus did for us. That “He who was rich beyond all measure, yet for our sakes became poor so that through His poverty we might become rich.” There’s a runaway slave, basically condemned, and we remember that Jesus took the form of a slave and He became obedient to the point of death in order to give us freedom, to give us life. And that debt, the debt that we owed to God, Jesus had it credited to His account and He paid the debt in full so that we might be forgiven, that we might be free and enjoy the blessings of God forever. There are echoes of grace, of the Gospel, all throughout this letter. It’s almost like a little case study. Do you want to know what it looks like when the grace of God comes to you? This is how we can put it in action. This is what it looks like in real life with real people. This is what it looks like so that we can have in our own lives what verse 6 says. Verse 6 says, “that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.”
Let’s pray.
Father, we give You thanks for Your grace, for Your mercy, for Your kindness to us in Christ. We thank You for the freedom of the Gospel and we ask that You would apply those things to our lives that we would be able to extend that same grace to others. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.