Immanuel Sermon Audio
Titus and Philemon (56-57:66)
All right, tonight we are going to double up. We haven't done this since we started all the way back in Genesis, but we're going to double up tonight and we're going to look at two books. We're going to look at Titus and we're going to look at Philemon. So they're both in the New Testament, number 56 and 57 in the count of books marching through the Bible. So find Titus. We're going to look at it first and then we'll talk about Philemon. We read a story this week about Ernest Hemingway and the story about Hemingway goes. He was hanging out with some of his writer friends and they were having guy talk about different things. And at some point, they began talking about short stories and Hemingway, as the conversation progressed, finally spoke up and he said, "I think I could write a shorter story than any of you." And so you think so, so they start going around the table and finally remember the show name that tune where you sort of start off and you say, "I can name that tune in so many notes. I can name it." Well, Hemingway pipes up and he says, "I can write a story, an entire story in six words. A short story, six words. That's all I need. Anybody think they can top that?" And everybody kind of looks around and says, "You can't write a whole story in six words." He says, "I can do it." And he says, "Why don't you put your money up on the table?" And so everybody around the table, the story goes, "Put up 10 bucks out in the middle." And Hemingway said, "If I do it, then I get your money. And if I don't do it, then I'll match everybody's $10." So everybody put their $10 out there and Hemingway picked up a napkin and this is what he wrote on the napkin. For sale, baby shoes never worn. That was his story. Shortest story ever written. So I was looking that story up to check the details and I found some other ones that are a little more humorous, this is one that I found that I like. This is supposedly the shortest horror story ever written. Last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door. That sounds like something Lyndon would say, doesn't it? Man, you're welcome. Here's another one that I thought was just kind of funny. I took my son into bed and he said, "Daddy, check for monsters under my bed." I looked under the bed to put his mind at ease. Then I saw my son under his bed and he said, "Daddy, there's someone on my bed." You can find all sorts of worthless stuff on the Internet. As I look for this one story, the Hemingway story that I had in the back of my mind from hearing it before, those were a few others that I found. So we're looking at Titus and Fleeman and I tell you those stories to say they're both short books, but short doesn't mean unimportant. And short doesn't mean that there's not truth there. And short doesn't mean it can't impact your life. Are they the book of Romans? No. Are they the book of Genesis or the book of Psalms? No. But they are in the Bible and they are important. We probably don't need to talk about either of these books as long as we talk, say, about the book of Psalms. But we are going to talk about them. And just to be real clear, we could spend an entire night on Titus. We could dig a little bit deeper than we're going to tonight and we could do the exact same thing with Fleeman. However, when I begin to plan out this spring and our studies and all of this, I realized if we double up tonight and we double up one other time, then we can end at the end of May with the book of Revelation and we don't leave two books hanging all during the summer and leave you in suspense like that. So this way we can wrap up in May with the book of Revelation. So we're going to start with Titus. Titus is one of the pastoral epistles, written by Paul. And Paul wrote this letter to Titus after he was released from house arrest in Rome, which you can read about in Acts chapter 28. So there are three books that fall into this category of pastoral epistles. First Timothy, Second Timothy and Titus, and they're letters that Paul wrote to pastors. That's why they're called pastoral epistles. So he's writing not to the church as a whole, but he is writing to the pastors of these particular churches. And you remember we've just talked about First Timothy and Second Timothy. Timothy was the pastor in Ephesus, which is neat because we have a letter to the church in Ephesus and we have a letter to the pastor of the church in Ephesus. And so you can read those together and learn a few things. Titus was a pastor at, I should say, on the island of Crete, which we're going to talk about in just a minute. Put this little timeline up. I've shared this with you the last couple of weeks. I just want you to sort of see the dates and where this is falling. Acts 28, Paul is placed under house arrest. That's in about 59. That's when the book of Acts ends. And he's under house arrest for a couple of years, so we'll say about 62, he's released. And he writes, "First Timothy and Titus." And then he's arrested again, sent to Rome. We talked about the prison he was in at Rome, and we talked about that last week. Then he writes, "Second Timothy from that prison." Then he's martyred by Nero. That's tradition. It's not in the Bible, but that's according to tradition. And then Roman history tells us that Nero dies in 68. So you kind of got a window here where you don't know exactly when he wrote this letter, but you know it's after he got out of house arrest and before Nero dies, somewhere in that window he wrote this letter to Titus. So who was Titus? He's mentioned, I searched his name on my Bible software this week, he's mentioned in four books of the Bible. So if you want to look this up, you can find it. He's mentioned in second Corinthians. He's mentioned in Galatians. He's mentioned in second Timothy. And of course he's mentioned in Titus. And when you look at those four books and you read every verse about Titus, there's not a lot of them, but there are more than just four, four books, but several verses. Here's some of the words used to describe him. I had these on your outline and then I took them off because I didn't have space. He's a brother, he's a comforter, he's a joyful man, he's a missionary, he is concerned about the churches, he's a partner in ministry, he's a fellow worker, he's a man of integrity, and we also know that he was Greek, he was not Jewish, but he was a Gentile. We know that he worked, he spent some time in Dalmatia. We actually saw that last week in second Timothy, remember where Paul was talking about everybody has left him and some people have left him abandoning him, some people have left him to go do other work and Titus was one of those guys. The very, very end of his life, he says Titus has gone to Dalmatia. But we also know that he worked on the island of Crete and so I've pulled up some pictures of ancient Crete, different sites that you can go visit and I don't know what all of these are other than their ancient buildings, ancient temples, different things like that. Go to the next picture. This is a famous one, this picture came up a lot when I searched for Crete, just an ancient temple where pagans worship their gods. Next picture, an old building, kind of a cool dome there in the middle. The island was conquered by the Romans at some point in the first century and they pretty much destroyed everything of value on the island. That was a pretty neat picture. Just some houses and roads built into the rocks of the island there on Crete and you can see a guy standing on that bridge there and I think there's one more picture. You see some of the ruins, looks like a theater up there on the top left of some kind that's houses down in the bottom middle and then houses or some sort of buildings over on the top right as well. All sorts of stuff, lots of people live there and it's a little bitty island but it's also kind of a big island. It's big enough that there were multiple cities on the island. It wasn't just like one little spot and all the people were out there, it's a pretty big place and I did forget to put a picture of it as far as being on a map. You can look that up. If you've got maps in the back of your Bible you may be able to find it or you can google it pretty easily. So Paul left Titus on the island of Crete and he gave him this specific job if you're just looking at the book of Titus chapter 1 verse 1, it says, "Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth which accords with godliness in hope of eternal life which God who never lies promised before the ages began and that the proper time manifested in his word through the preaching with which I've been entrusted by the command of God our Savior. To Titus my true child in a common faith grace and peace from God the Father in Jesus Christ our Savior then comes verse 5, "After all the introductions, this is why I left you in Crete so that you might put what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you. But what remained into order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you." So apparently Paul sort of has gone through and they've preached and they've started all these baby churches but they're not exactly formed into everything that Paul wanted them to be formed into but Paul's calling was to go where Jesus had never been heard where he'd never been preached where people didn't know about the gospel and so Paul goes on and he says, "Titus I've trained you up. You're my true child in the faith. I've mentored you just like I mentored Timothy and I'm leaving you here to put everything into order into appoint. The wording is important. We're about to talk about this. I want you to appoint elders in every town as I directed you." And so I want to just throw in for you tonight as you read that verse about what Paul wanted Titus to do. I want to throw in a very short discussion about church government, how churches are run, how decisions are made, where the power lies. The theological term for that is ecclesiology, doctrine of the church. So look at this first slide. This is an episcopal form of church government and I'm just giving you this as an example of how some churches do things. The very top you have the archbishop and then down below him you have several bishops and this is a chain of command. They report up the chain of command to the archbishop and then below each bishop there are multiple rectors. I know there's only two up on this graphic but there could be many. And then below the rectors there is multiple congregations. So it's sort of a pecking order, archbishop to bishop, director to congregation. And the power in this episcopal form of how they do church is at the very top. If you don't like something at the bottom, the only way to change it is to go to the very top and get him to change it or to go to somebody one step up and get them to change it. The power is at the top, not at the bottom. And if you don't like something at the top, find a new church because you don't get a vote, they're not taking public opinion polls, they're not asking you what you think, they're just telling you, this is the way it is and it's going to filter down. So this is a Episcopal form of church government. This would be Episcopalians, this would be Anglicans, this would be the Church of England, this would be several other denominations follow this general pattern, okay? So that's one example of church government. There's a problem with doing church this way. The problem is biblically, when you look at the New Testament, you have all these letters written to churches, church in Rome, church in Corinth, church in Galatia, church in Ephesus, church in Colossae, church in Thessalonica, just church after church after church. And then you have three written to the pastors of those churches. And nowhere in those three written to the pastors do you see anything like this? And when you read the letters written to the churches you say, it sounds like Paul thought that those churches had some power. It sounded like Paul thought those churches had decisions to make and that they could change things and that they could stop doing it this way and start doing it this way. And in this set up of church government, the congregation really doesn't have that option because all the power is way up at the top and you're just sort of following the long from behind. So it's problematic when you compare this form of government to the New Testament. Now let me put up something that will ring a little bit closer to home for a lot of us. This is what I would call the typical southern Baptist church government, okay? Typical. It's not here, but just typical southern Baptist church. You've got a senior pastor and you may have other staff members, you may have any whatever, but they really don't matter that much in this form of how things work. You've got one guy at the top and then you've got a group of deacons below him and then you have the congregation below the deacons. But if you want to know where the deacons come from, you've got to go to the congregation because they're the ones who pick the deacons, nominate them, vote on them, kick them out, replace them, et cetera, et cetera. And if you want to know where the pastor comes from, you go back to the congregation because the congregation's the one that picks the pastor or say, "We need a pastor, we're going to take a group of us out and we're going to form a search committee and then they're going to bring it back to us and then everybody's going to vote." And so it's sort of a weird format where on the one hand it is top heavy, there is power at the top, but the real power lies at the bottom of this structure because the congregation is the one who's voting on everything, approving everything, blocking things that they don't like, picking who's above them, not the case in that Episcopal form. Nobody down in that congregational level getting to vote on anything. So this is a lot more familiar to most of us. And to be honest, there's a lot of people in the Bible Belt who look at this and say, "Well, how else would you do it? Why would you do it any other way?" That's the way you do church. That's how you do it. That's biblical, they'll say to you, say, "Okay, yes, there are some biblical things about it, but how do you take Titus 1.5 and apply it to this where it says Paul, a missionary, he didn't talk to the churches in Crete and asked their permission. He just said, "Titus, you're the guy. I'm leaving you in charge of this island." Titus, your job is to go around to all these churches and not to show them how to vote on a pastor, you just go appoint the pastor. That's your job. You go to the church and you look around and you talk to folks and you figure out who's the most gifted and you say, "It's you." Clearly you ought to be the pastor of this church. You're the elder, you're the shepherd, you're the pastor. You appoint them. Here's my point. I could throw up 18 different flow charts. I could give you Presbyterian, I could give you a manual Baptist, I could give you non-denominational. I could just throw them up Catholic, I could throw them up there all night long. Every single one of them, we could come back to the Bible and we could say, "Yeah, but how does that fit with this?" Here's what I'm telling you when it comes to church and how we do things. There are clearly some ways that people do church that are unbiblical. Some things you can look at and you can say, "That's not the way that it ought to be done." There's a big category over here, and I'm a black and white kind of guy, so I hate to say this. I see things very clearly, but there's a big category over here where you say, "There's a little bit of wiggle room." There's a little bit of leeway. When you look at the New Testament and how Paul did things with Titus and things that he told Timothy and things that he told the church in Rome and things that he told the church in Philippi, there's not a lot, not a lot, but there's a little bit of wiggle room to say, "This is how we do it," and you don't have to make this big stamp on it and say, "This is the only biblical way to do it," because there's different things that are done in the New Testament, and so you've got to be careful with that as you think about church and you think how are things done and what's the right way? Just understand there's some passages that sort of you're going to look at it from different perspectives and say, "Oh, man, I don't know how those fit together," and what we have to do is use wisdom, and we have to look at the way that we do church and say, "Okay, is there anything we're doing that's clearly wrong, clearly in violation of Scripture, clearly unbiblical," and then these other things, maybe there's a little bit of wiggle room to do things a little bit differently. So there you go. Let me move on and give you a few reasons why the book of Titus is important, because it is an important book. First reason is that the focus in this letter is on keeping the faith and refuting heresy. Really that's true for all the pastoral epistles, first and second Timothy and Titus, and because this is the overarching theme of all these letters, they're timeless because as long as we're here and Jesus hasn't come back, then we need to do those two things. Keep the faith and fight false teaching. You're going to have to do it in this generation, and the things that people my age are going to have to refute are different than the things that some of you guys had to refute. And the things that those kiddos down in the nursery are going to have to refute when they're in charge and we're all out in sunset are different than the things we're refuting now. And so they're timeless letters and they continue to be applicable in that sense. Second reason that Titus is important is that it details the qualifications of an elder/paster/overseer. And if you want to be really technical, you would say that Titus details the qualifications of an elder, because that's the word that he uses in verse 5, a point elders in every town, and then he gives the qualifications for who can be appointed to that work. But the reason I put all three of those on there and ask you to fill them in is because when you compare Titus to first Timothy, you realize that there's different names for the exact same position, because Timothy, when Paul gives this exact same list to Timothy, he doesn't call them elders, he calls them overseers. And then when Paul writes to the church in Ephesus, he talks about pastures or shepherds, depending on the translation. And they're all talking about the exact same position, so different words, different titles for the same position, but Titus details some of those qualifications. You can read those. We're not going to look at those tonight. Another reason that Titus is important is that it emphasizes the importance of good works, or you could even say the necessity of good works. And these verses really struck me this week. I've read Titus, I've studied it. I have it all marked up in my journaling Bible here, and I have some notes written in it. And I had never noticed this particular theme in Titus until I was studying this week, and I read these verses and they're just, they're shocking. So look at them with me. Titus 1 verse 16 says, "They profess to know God, but they deny Him by their works. They live in a culture that says, 'That's not possible.' If you say you believe in Him, then you believe in Him, it doesn't matter what you do." And Paul says to Titus, nonsense. If you say you believe in Him, then your works ought to back that up. And you don't have to commit verbal apostasy. You don't have to curse Jesus out loud with your mouth. You're denying that you really believe the truth about God, possibly by the way that you live, by your works. Look what he says in chapter 2, verse 7. He says, "Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works. Be a model of good works." Look down at verse 14 in chapter 2. He's talking about Jesus who gave Himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works. Jesus saved us to make us pure so that we would belong to Him, and then that we would be zealous about good works. Look what he says in chapter 3, verse 1. Remind them to be submissive to rulers and authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good work. Be ready for it. In chapter 3, verse 14, "Let our people learn to devote themselves to good works so as to help cases of urgent need and not be unfruitful over and over and over again." Very short letter, but he brings it up multiple times. Good works, good works, good works, they're important. Fourth, the importance of Titus. It contains two classic summaries of the Christian faith. These would be great passages. If you like to memorize Scripture, these would be great ones to memorize. Neither of them are too terribly long, and they contain a full summary of the gospel really, and because of how Paul wrote them and the beauty of them, they sort of flow off your tongue, and they're beautiful words. So look at chapter 2, verse 11. Just reading this as a summary of our faith. The grace of God has appeared, is talking about Jesus, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions and to live self-controlled upright and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own position, who are zealous for good works. Another good summary down in chapter 3, starting in verse 4, 4 to 7, says, "When the goodness and loving kindness of God, our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace, we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life." So beautiful words, two summaries of the Christian faith. And then the last significant thing about Titus that we're going to talk about is this. He gives details or detailed instructions about countering opposition. So you remember, he said back in chapter 1, verse 5, that some things are not in order, and Titus' job is to put them in order. So just understand, churches in Crete were made up of people just like you and me, just regular people, regular old run-of-the-mill sinners who were trying to love Jesus, but they were still struggling with sin in their life. So here comes Titus walking in, "Hey, I'm here to put things in order." Well, we're so glad you showed up. Just tell us exactly what to do, and we'll just do it whatever you tell us with a smile on our face. I'm sure that's how it went in every town that he went to, right? So Paul tells him, "Look, you're going to face opposition." And at some points in these verses, you can look them up. At some points, he says, "Look, don't be argumentative." He knows when Titus goes around to these churches that there's going to be people that just want to argue with him and fight, and he says, "Don't do that. Don't waste your time on that." And then other times he says, "Have some backbone. Don't back down. Stand up for what's right." So he gives him some advice on how to face opposition. So there's Titus. Let's move on to Philemon. Philemon is only one chapter. When you see a reference in a scholarly work to Philemon, they don't put a chapter, they only put the verse, so they don't typically put Philemon one verse whatever, they just put Philemon in the verse. And for some reason, that drives me crazy. I always feel like you need to have a one there just to clarify, Philemon one, but it's just one chapter. Philemon is one of the prison epistles, and there's four of them. Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. Paul wrote Philemon while he was under house arrest in Rome, which is detailed in Acts 28. So I just told you, Titus was written after he got out of house arrest. Now we're backing up a little bit and we're saying he wrote this letter to Philemon while he was under house arrest in Rome, along with Ephesians and Philippians and Colossians. And when you look at those four letters, they have a lot of things in common, a lot of different lines you can draw between them to connect them. And here's a few of the things that those prison epistles share in common. Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon, those three were sent out from Rome, Paul's under house arrest, he writes those three letters, he sent all three of them together. The same person carried all those letters because they were going basically to the exact same area, Colossae and Ephesus were neighbor cities like Midland Odessa, so they're going in that direction, and Philemon as we'll see in just a minute lived in Colossae. So all three of those go out together, Colossians and Philemon, I just told you Philemon lived in Colossae. So it's not surprising when you look at those two letters, they have almost the exact same names in them, where Paul says, say hello to this person, say hello to that person, say hello to this person, almost identical lists, and two examples are Epaphras and Anisimus, both of whom were from Colossae, they lived there and Anisimus and Epaphras are carrying these letters back, and so a lot of names similar in those two letters. And then interesting when you read Ephesians and Colossians, letters written to two churches like side by side, so like the church in Midland, the church in Odessa, he writes these letters. Very, very similar Christology as he talks about who Jesus is and the doctrine of Christ and what he's accomplished, very similar things written in those two letters, so that when you read them, if you're just reading through the Bible, you read those two letters and you think, oh, it's almost like he copied those exact same thing down, very, very similar in the things that he writes about Jesus in those letters. So to focus on Philemon, there's really only two characters you need to know to understand this letter, okay? Pretty simple. The first guy that you need to know is, surprise, surprise, Philemon. Probably Philemon was converted through Paul's ministry, and I'll show you where I see that. Look at Philemon, chapter 1, verse 19, says, "I, Paul, write this with my own hand. I will repay it to say nothing of your owing me, even your own self." Okay, we're going to talk about what that means in a minute, but Paul says, what does he mean by, I'm going to pay it? We'll discuss that. So he says, don't forget, buddy, you owe me your life, basically. You're, you're in debt to me. So most scholars look at that little verse and say, okay, so he was probably converted through Paul's ministry. Philemon was a member of the church in Colossae, he was a believer, and he actually hosted the church in his home. So look at Philemon, chapter 1, verse 2, down at the very end of verse 2, it says, he's greeting people, and he talks about the church in your house. So this is very early in church history. This is right after Paul came through town and started the church there. They haven't had time to start a building fund, okay? They haven't built anything, and so they're meeting in homes, and this is one of the guy that's hosting people in his home, Philemon. And formerly, until he ran away, he was the master/owner of a slaved name, Onisimus, which brings us to the second character that you need to know if you're going to understand the letter, and his name is Onisimus, formerly a slave, owned by a guy named Philemon. Philemon in Colossae. He escaped from his home in Colossae and fled to Rome, where we don't know the details of how it happened, but he met Paul and he became a Christian, okay? We don't know how that happened, but in the sovereignty of God it happened. Goes to Rome, meets Paul, Paul's under house arrest, Onisimus becomes a Christian, and then, this is a little bit awkward, he's part of the team that Paul asked to carry the book of Philemon and the book of Colossians back to his hometown. So Paul says, "Okay, you come here to Rome, you met me, you got saved, I'm sending you back home, and I'm sending you with two letters, one to the church, and one to the guy that used to own you before you ran away. Here's the letter, go back and give this to your former slave owner." And in that note, I just need to give you a little bit of a disclaimer, because you say, "Wait a minute, the whole book is about a runaway slave and the guy that used to own him, and you're telling me that the great apostle Paul meets this runaway slave and tells him, "Go back to the man that used to own you." There are a lot of scholars who look at the book of Philemon and they just laugh Christianity out the back door and they say, "It's all a joke. You're telling me you got this Jesus guy who says, "Love everybody, love your neighbor as yourself, yada, yada, yada." Here you got Paul, the main guy that went around the world preaching about Jesus, did he not know about the golden rule? Did he not know that you're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself? Why didn't Paul write a letter to Philemon and say, "Hey, you fool, quit owning other people? It's not right to own slaves. You should love him as yourself. You can't own him." So you got all these scholars that look at the book of Philemon and they say, "Look, you guys don't even practice what you preach. You say love your neighbor as yourself." And then you turn around and you say slavery is such a good thing and to our own shame, okay, you want to be real honest, to our own shame and our own Southern Baptist heritage, there were men who owned slaves who justified it by pointing to the book of Philemon. Paul didn't say anything bad about it, so why can't we do it? That's in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention, do you understand that? In fact, the reason our denomination was founded is because a group of slave owners could not be appointed by the convention as missionaries because they owned slaves, so they said, "Well, start our own convention, Southern Baptist Convention." What a rotten reason to start a church or denomination or anything, but they did it for that reason and they looked at the book of Philemon and they said, "Look, if there was a problem with it, Paul would have said something right back here." It doesn't say a thing about it. So here's a few things for you to think about if you ever come across that or you ever wrestle with that. First of all, slavery in Paul's day, it was real and I'm not telling you that it was a good thing, but let me just give you a few disclaimers, okay? Disclaimer number one, slavery in Paul's day was not race-based. They were equal opportunity in slavers, okay? We think about slavery and we think, "Oh yeah, that's when the white guy's on the black guy's bad deal." It wasn't that way in Paul's day. It wasn't like one race was owning another. It was just sort of all over the place, okay? So it wasn't a race issue at all. Slaves were not limited to certain work in Paul's day. So today we hear slavery and we think, "Oh yeah, those are guys that picked cotton for us," right? They worked on the plantations. They did that, that, that, that, that, that. We have those things in our minds. That's not how it was in Paul's day. In fact, in Paul's day, it was not uncommon for slaves to be more educated than their owners. They didn't have more money, didn't have more power, but they had more education sometimes. Sometimes slaves did professional work managing households, doctors. I mentioned earlier in our study of the Gospel of Luke that many doctors in the ancient world were slaves and some people have speculated, maybe Luke at some point in his life actually was a slave of somebody. So that's a possibility, something to think about. Another thing to realize about slavery in Paul's day is it wasn't always for life. We think about slavery and we think, "Oh yeah, it's for life. They bought you off the boat. You worked on the plantation and you were there till you died." I mean, they owned you. It wasn't always that way. In fact, it wasn't usually that way in Paul's day. What Paul is thinking about when he talks about slavery is a lot closer to what we would think of as an indentured servant. Somebody who for whatever reason, okay, maybe it's injustice or maybe it's their own fault, but they're in a financial pinch and they're just sort of out of options. They have debts that they can't pay. Maybe they have mouths that they can't feed and they find somebody who will employ them as a master and they say to them, "I will be your slave if you will take care of me. Feed my kids, pay my debts, and I'm yours. I'll do whatever you need me to do." That was very, very common in Paul's day. Were there instances of armies going and conquering people and bringing back slaves and owning them? Yes, there were, but it wasn't always that way. It certainly wasn't like slavery we think of here in the United States of America. Here's my point, we knock Paul, some people knock Paul, for not condemning slavery in this letter. It's entirely possible that the situation that he's dealing with was absolutely nothing like our idea of slavery. It's entirely possible that Onesimus ran up a debt because he didn't manage money well and maybe he ran up that debt with Philemon. Maybe he owed him and maybe instead of working for him and paying off that debt like he was supposed to, he said, "I'm sick of this, forget it. I've got this debt, I'm going to be working this off forever. I'm out of here and he high-tailed it." If that was the situation, it'd be much more like you saying today, "Well, this was my employee and they ran off with my money, they left me holding the bill." That situation, you wouldn't say to the owner of the company, "Get over it." You would say to the employee, "You owe him," and that could be exactly what's happening here with Onesimus and Philemon, we just don't know. Here's one point I want to make to you, okay, you've got all these scholars throwing rocks at Paul. Why didn't you just condemn slavery? Why didn't you just say it was wrong? That would have been the easy thing. I think we ought to give Paul the benefit of the doubt. I think it's crazy for us to think today in 2016, 2,000 years later, on the other side of the planet, in a completely different culture, I think it's crazy for us to assume we know exactly the situation between these two guys and why Paul handled it that way. When I read a lot of the things that Paul says, I don't get the feeling like Paul thought it was a great idea to own other human beings and be mean to them and beat them and hurt them and be cruel to them and separate them from their families on and on and on and on. What I'm suggesting is we say, "Let's give Paul the benefit of the doubt." I think that's a pretty good rule in church as a whole, don't you think? With people in your Sunday school class, with people that maybe have a tendency to rub you the wrong way, with somebody who looks at you funny when you walk down the hallway, or maybe they don't speak to you when you spoke to them or whatever, I think it would be a pretty good idea if most of us just gave people the benefit of the doubt. What we like to do is to say, "Can you believe what they did? I know why they did that. I know exactly what was going on there. She's been doing that to me for nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah." He said, "Wow, you know a lot of things. It's impressive." Why not just say, "I don't really like what they did or what they said, but I'm going to just give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they had maybe a good reason?" I think that's one of the things Paul's talking about in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, that we always apply to marriage that really originally had nothing to do with marriage. It had to do with church, and one of the things he says about love is it hopes all things and believes all things. It's not looking for the worst in people. It's looking for the best in people, and I think churches would be a lot better off. All of them. Ours, the ones down the street, the ones across the street, the ones in Crete, all of them. If we just said, "You know what, instead of being so hyper critical and assuming we know everyone's motives and the reason they did this or why they did that, maybe we should just give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we should hope all things and believe all things and look for the best in people." So I'm suggesting we do that with Paul and Philemon. Here's the importance of the book, really simple. Philemon highlights the importance of relationships. In this one chapter, there are 25 verses in the whole book, and he mentions 12 people, and only 25 verses. And when I read that and I say, "Wow, almost you mentioned a person, every other verse, on average," Paul cared about people. He wasn't so task-oriented and focused on getting things accomplished that he ignored people. And when you read the, like the letter to the church in Rome, there's a great book that we call Romans. And everybody could argue, "What's the best chapter in Romans? Is it chapter three or is it maybe chapter five is pretty important or chapter ten is really important?" Nobody's probably going to pipe up and say, "Well, it's the last chapter that's full of all those names, people we don't know." But to Paul, that was the most important chapter, because those were real live people that he knew and he cared about and he had relationships with and he was concerned about them, and so he mentions all these people by name and he does the same thing in Philemon, 12 people in 25 verses. Second reason the book's important is it talks about the role of Christian encouragement. So there's a verse in the book of Hebrews that says, "Continue meeting together as long as there's time and encourage one another as the day draws near." One of the reasons we're commanded to go to church is to encourage each other. And Paul talks about that in verse four to seven. He just talks about Philemon and the church there and the faith that they have and how much that's encouraged Paul and helped him as he's been in prison to make it through one day at a time, so encouragement's an important thing. I've mentioned this before, I think, on a Wednesday night. Most of us are not naturally good encouragers, and some people say, "Well, that's not my spiritual gift." Encouragement is not my spiritual gift, and I say, "Okay, that's fine," but you still have to be an encourager, right? Just because it's not your gift doesn't mean you're totally off the hook for it. Giving is a spiritual gift, but just because that's not your spiritual gift doesn't mean you don't have to put money in the box every now and then, right? I mean, giving is expected, encouragement is expected, faith is listed as a spiritual gift, you don't get to say, "Well, that's not really my spiritual gift." No, you have to have faith, that's part of the deal, and it's the same thing with encouragement, and all I can say is for those of us, and I'm putting myself in this category who aren't very good at it, you would probably need to practice at it, and probably need to be intentional about it. You probably need to plan to do it, because if you don't plan to do it, it probably won't happen if it doesn't come naturally for you, so it's important, encouraging each other. Lastly, this is the main, main idea from Philemon. Shows how the forgiveness that we have through Christ translates into forgiving other people, and that's really Paul's angle in this letter, starting in about verse 8, going down to 20. He talks to Philemon in that top section, 4 to 7, about all the things that he's encouraged by, and he's encouraged by Philemon's faith, and that he knows Jesus Christ, and his sins have been forgiven, and on and on and on, and then the rest of the letter, just to kind of put it bluntly, is Paul strong arming Philemon saying you know you have to forgive this guy. It's really not an option for you. For one, you owe me your life, and I'm telling you to do it. For another thing, God has forgiven you much, Philemon, don't forget how much you have been forgiven, and the faith that you have in Jesus Christ, and the hope you have a forgiveness. Don't forget that, and understand that it is now your obligation to turn around and forgive this guy who's wronged you. And look, when Paul talks about forgiveness, he's not saying just forget all harm that's done because Paul himself pipes up, and he says in verse 19, if he owes you something, I will pay it back for him. I'm not asking you to go without Philemon, I'll pay it back, but what I'm telling you is you have to forgive this guy, and he left, when he left, Paul says he was worthless to you, but he's not worthless anymore. He's met Jesus Christ and is now your obligation to forgive him. I mentioned that I thought churches would be better off if we gave people the benefit of the doubt. We'd probably be better off if we were better at forgiveness too, at not holding grudges, at not being bitter, at not putting ourselves at the center of everything and getting our feelings heard about every little thing, but being quick to forgive and slow to anger. And so we're going to pray for our church that we would learn the lessons of Titus and the lessons of Philemon, so I'll pray and we'll wrap up. Father, what a privilege to be part of your church, and help us never to forget that it is a privilege. It is not something that we earn, it's not something that we deserve. It is a blessing that you pour into our life. And Father, we want to keep the faith and we want to fight against false teaching. We want to be faithful in that, just like you called Timothy and Titus to keep the faith and to fight against false teaching, we want to do that at our church. We don't want to be arrogant about it. We don't want to be ugly about it. We don't want to be hateful about it, but we want to be serious about it. We want to guard the deposit that you've entrusted to us. We want to defend the faith that once and for all has been entrusted to the saints. And whatever challenge may come, we want to be found faithful in that task. Father, we also pray that you would help us to give each other the benefit of the doubt, not to look for the worst in each other, but to hope for the best in each other, help us to be quick to forgive, help us to be slow to get angry. Father, we know that a lot of the problems that we deal with in our churches just come down to us. It's just our hearts and our selfishness and our sin and our judgmentalism. So help us to look those issues square in the face and deal with them. So we're grateful for your word, for the big books that we think of as important and even for the little books like Titus and Philemon that sometimes we overlook. We thank you that they are true, that they're lasting, that they're just as true today and just as applicable today as they were 2,000 years ago. We love you and we pray all of this in the powerful name of Jesus, Amen.