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Three Angels Fellowship SDA Church

A Slave's Redemption

Garhett Morgan

A Slave’s Redemption Part 1

Father, we are here and we are in Your house, and when we come to this place, Lord, we expect a blessing.

But, Father, we are blessings to each other as well.

I don't know what's been going on in the lives of everybody in this room today.

Maybe there have been triumphs, maybe there have been heartbreaks, maybe there has been some difficult times.

And Lord, just now we ask that You would heal us.

We ask that You would give us an understanding as we jump into Your Word.

May something here speak to each and every 1 of us.

Speak in spite of the human instrument here in front of everybody.

Lord speak in the way that only You can, and may Your perfect and precious words not be marred by my own.

We pray this in the precious name of Jesus.

So, hopefully you found the book of Philemon, because that's what we're going to be.

When Paul was imprisoned, Paul was in prison multiple times, but we know that when Paul was in prison in Rome specifically he wrote 3 books or 3 epistles from prison in Rome.

Now, Paul wrote some other books from prison as well.

We're not gonna talk about those today, but we believe that Paul, around the same time when he was in Roman prison, before his execution, wrote 3 specific books.

And these were the books that Paul wrote when he was in prison there in Rome.

The letter to the Ephesians, or the people in Ephesus, as well as the book of Colossians, which was to the church in Colossae, and then in the middle, which we're going to be studying today, the book of Philemon.

Philemon or Philemon, depending on who pronounced it, is a very small book.

And Paul writes here not as an apostle, but Paul writes here as a friend, which is very significant, because Paul has a lot of authority in the church, right?

I mean, he is The apostolic father that's still around.

And instead of giving advice in the book of Philemon as an apostle, he says, I'm going to set aside that title and I'm going to write to the people that are listening to this book as a fellow laborer with Jesus, which is a beautiful thing.

Now there's a few different characters in this story of Philemon.

You have Paul, of course, who's writing the book, that's important, and then you have who the book is addressed to, Philemon himself.

If you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn there, Philemon, and we'll read verse 1 to start here.

It begins, Paul, a prisoner of Jesus Christ.

Paul is, yes, a prisoner of Jesus in the fact that he's a servant of God, But he's in physical prison as well, and he starts his book by saying that.

And then he says, and Timothy, our beloved brother, unto Philomon, our dearly beloved and fellow laborer.

Timothy hasn't been arrested like Paul, but Timothy's there with him, just kind of making sure that he has what he needs, and he addresses this letter to Philomen.

Verse 2, and to our beloved Epipha, or Epipha, which is probably the wife of Philomen, and to Archippus, probably the son of Philomen, our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house.

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now notice what this letter is addressed to.

It's addressed to his wife and likely his son, but then it also is addressed there, and you can see it in verse 2, to the church which is where?

So back in early Christianity, they didn't have churches like we do today because they were still a very small movement, and so they often met in people's homes.

Now the People that had the space to invite people into their homes to worship usually were wealthier people.

And we understand by this book that Philemon is not just a good guy, but he's a wealthy guy.

He has a lot of authority in the local area, And so this letter is not just addressed to him personally, which is the primary addressee, but it's also addressed to the church, which is meeting in his home.

And the 1 that's delivering this letter is kind of the whole reason this letter exists, we find another guy and his name is Onesimus.

Now we know a little bit about Onesimus, but not a lot.

Paul talks about the main character, Onesimus, and he says this, I appeal to you for my son on Simeon, who became my son while I was in chains.

We'll pause there, Paul's in prison, and this guy named Simeon comes along, and Paul forms a very special relationship with him.

Paul is old at this time, so it's not uncommon for him to call a younger man his son, right?

So he's saying, I love this guy that came and approached me in prison.

And Paul introduced Insimeus to the gospel message.

It continues, formerly, now he says something interesting, formerly he was useless to you.

Now that's a very interesting thing to say about somebody.

Imagine that you go up to somebody that you know and says, hey, I think I, you know how Adventists are especially, do you know this person?

Well, I know this person that knows this person and knows, you know, it's like a small world, right?

So imagine you're playing that do you know game And then they say, oh yeah, I know that person.

And you said, yeah, that person was useless to me.

That's what Paul is in essence saying about this poor guy, Insimius.

Formerly, he was useless to you, but now he's become useful both to you and to me.

Now this doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense at all until you understand who Insimius is.

1 thing that we know certainly about Winsimius is simply this, he's a slave.

And as we continue to read this book, Winsimius is not just a slave, but he's a slave that ran away.

And you'll never guess who his owner was.

So as Paul is writing this letter, Philomen is written by Paul to a slave owner.

And Philomenes happened to be the owner of this guy, named Winsimius.

So now that you understand that about this book, the book begins to take on a little bit of a new light, doesn't it?

Paul is writing to a slave owner that is now a Christian who has a runaway slave, and Paul is talking to him about this runaway slave, which is now like his best friend, it's like his brother.

Now understand a little bit how slaves were treated back then in Roman times.

When we think of slaves in American culture, we have a very set understanding of what we believe slaves are, right?

We're very influenced by the 1860s, right?

Really, from 1700s all the way to the Civil War, and I would argue even after that.

But the way that slaves were treated during the time of Jesus and during the time of Paul, I would argue is probably even worse, if that's even imaginable.

I was reading Josephus this last week, because I was reading about the treatment of slaves during the time of Paul, and he talks about a story of a slave owner that was sick, and he had 1 of his slaves being like a nursemaid to him.

And this was a very wealthy man and he had about 300 or 400 slaves.

And he was trying to get better and the slave was bringing him water and food and trying to help him get better, but unfortunately, the man died.

Well, because the owner died, everybody blamed, guess who, for his death?

Well, they blamed the slave for the death.

The Roman law at the time in certain precincts, but this 1 specifically, the Roman law was if there was a slave that revolted against a master, then not only would that slave be killed, but the rest of the slaves of the house could be killed as well.

Because of that, there was a lawsuit that said, well, these slaves shouldn't die, but the end of the story is simply that all 400 of those slaves died because of this misunderstanding.

That's the way that slaves were treated then.

They weren't anything in the minds of civilized, quote-unquote, Romans.

And when Simeon finds himself being a slave during this time frame.

Of course you're going to run away from something like that.

But being a runaway slave meant that you were on the very lowest of low in society.

And this is where Winsimius finds himself.

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A Slave's Redemption

A Slave’s Redemption Part 1

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