Paul – The Legacy of a Transformed Man
So this morning, we are finishing our series, Paul, the Legacy of a Transformed Man. Today, our last letter from Paul to Philemon is going to bring us into contact with three men who were transformed by the grace of God. The first is the Apostle Paul himself. He starts as an enemy of the faith. He was a detractor to Christianity. he persecuted Christians. He does not see anything positive in Christianity. Instead, he sees it as a dangerous movement that needs to be eradicated.
He thinks of it as a very dangerous movement, as something that’s going to harm Israel, until he encounters Jesus and finds himself transformed by the encounter.
In today’s scripture, Paul is writing to Philemon, a Christian man, but a Christian man who’s not living in perfect unity with God’s will. Philemon is a lot like all of us. We may love Jesus, but that does not mean that our lives have been shaped into conformity around the character of Jesus.
Some parts of our lives may be out of alignment with Jesus. There were for Philemon. So, for example, Philemon owns slaves, and that’s not in alignment with Jesus. But Philemon loves the Lord, so there’s potential for change. And that is incredibly good news. As long as change and growth are possible, there are signs of spiritual health.
And then there’s Onesimus, an enslaved human who will recover his physical freedom and become free both on the inside and outside. He’s transformed. But I want to start by observing that missions and evangelism are to the church what burning is fire. Reaching the world for the gospel and reaching others for Jesus is who we are and what we do.
Missions and evangelism are the central program of the church. They are the central focus of the Christian community. But I want to say that there have been a lot of folks in the last century or so who have taken the Christian method and have outworked us.
There are some pretty radical folks going back to the beginning of the 20th century who said, Listen, if we can’t change everything, we’ll make incremental changes. If we can’t change everyone, we’ll make deep changes where we can. We may not be able to achieve everything we want to achieve now, so we’ll plant the seeds of change and do incremental work. We’ll make a deep change with the idea that it may take a century or two to change a culture in all the ways that we hope.
You know that I’m referring to folks like Saul Alinsky, who wrote Rules for Radicals and The Invisible Committee, responsible for the work The Coming Insurrection, and others who have worked to undermine our culture and have had a very long and deep plan, which they knew could not be accomplished all at once. We, the church, got so used to being at the seats of power, assuming that everybody at least honored what was going on in the church, we got lazy, and we’ve lost a lot of ground. And so I want to remind us of our origins.
Some folks from our church we’re just in Greece with the Bromleys. And we’re in the ancient city of Ephesus. I have read much about Ephesus over the last 30 years, but reading isn’t the same as seeing. Ephesus was a vibrant port city in Paul’s day, with about 200 thousand people. And Paul travels there intending to change the world. So he goes into the port city of Ephesus and a few traveling companions. And what does he think he can do there? Paul was a strategic thinker.
He knew that if you could reach port cities, places like economic centers and capitals, places where people were traveling to and from, you could change the whole world from the strategic spots. He also had the long game mind. He knew that some of the changes he was envisioning would take place only long, long after he was gone.
This letter from Paul brings us into contact with the issue of slavery, and it raises questions about what the Bible teaches about slavery. One of the criticisms of Christianity by postmodern people is that the Bible itself is pro-slavery, or at least it does not say enough against it. Since the book of Philemon brings us into conversation about that topic, I thought we would do some deep digging on the subject together.
So using the outline of head, heart, and hands, we will start with our minds.
Head – Helpful Information for Understanding Today’s Passage.
*Slavery In Ancient Rome
And the first thing that you need to know is that slavery was everywhere in almost every civilization up until the 18th century. It was so widespread in the Roman world that between 25% to 30% of the people were enslaved to somebody.
So widespread was slavery that the Roman Senate had to pass a law that said if you have your enslaved person out in public, there can’t be anything that marks them as a slave. Nothing, no marks, no bands on their arms, no clothing that marks them as enslaved, because the Senate knew that enslaved people were such a large portion of the population that they’d look around and see how many there were of them, and they’d say, you know what? There’s enough of us to do something about this. And so, the Roman Senate forbade enslaved people from having anything that could identify them as such in public.
I also want to say that one of the hypocrisies of postmodern people criticizing the fact that Christianity couldn’t immediately abolish slavery and that they put up with it for so long is that we are not innocent in this regard either. Do some investigation about where your Smartphone came from, where your clothing was made, and where your electric car components came from, and you’ll likely find that many of those source materials, like rare earths, come from slave labor. And so, there is some hypocrisy in criticizing that the church couldn’t make the necessary changes as fast as some people imagined. Slavery was part of the economic fabric throughout the entire known world.
Now, another thing to say is that slavery in the ancient Roman world was different from the slavery of antebellum America in that it was not based on ethnicity. In the ancient world, anybody whatsoever – in fact, some of the ways that people ended up enslaved was that sometimes their financial world collapsed, and they volunteered for slavery. And you may think, well, who would sign up for slavery? Well, if your only choice is that of starving to death, we know what is likely to happen. Desperate people do desperate things, so some people signed up for it.
In ancient warfare, there weren’t lots of prisons and prisoner-of-war camps. When troops surrendered, an easy way to disperse them was to sell them into slavery. There were a lot of ways that people ended up in slavery. That was just the norm in the ancient world.
No major thinker would propose the end of slavery in the ancient world. That idea would have to wait until the 18th century. Towards the end of the 18th century, a British man named Will Wilberforce, a devoted Christian who was a member of Parliament, would spend his fame, fortune, health, and family reputation working to abolish slavery in the British Empire.
And the remarkable thing is not how long it took for that to happen, but that it ever happened. And the seeds of this radical idea were planted much, much, much further back, which brings us to Onesimus and Philemon.
So, Onesimus is an enslaved person. And Philemon, another Christian, is his owner. Paul seeks to change that, but he has to work with the situation as it is, not as he wants it to be. Paul and other Christian missionaries start where people are and slowly move them gradually to where God wants them to be. In some cases, that takes a lot of time, especially if you are seeking to change a nation or a culture. Sometimes, the changes take many, many generations.
So Onesimus gets a chance to run away, but when he gets out in the world, he doesn’t have anywhere to go. The only person he knows is the missionary Paul. Miraculously, he finds Paul in jail and offers Paul assistance. But Onesimus soon realizes that he must return home. But that is a real problem because his master has the right topunish him. According to Roman Law, a slave had no right of refusal. And a master faced no legal repercussions for mistreating a slave.
So Onesimus says to Paul, I’ve got to go back home. What do I do? So Paul writes to Philemon and says, ” youdon’t have to listen to me. I know you have the legal right to ignore me.
I know that I can’t force you to do anything. But, as your spiritual father and the one who led you to Jesus, I am asking you to receive Onesimus back, not as a slave, but as a brother. And I will ask you to send Onesimus back to assist me in the work of the gospel.
Now, this brings us to the heart of the message.
Heart – the Personal Connection
Paul is asking Philemon and Onesimus to imagine the world differently, to see the world through the lens of Christ, not to see it through politics, economics, or culture. (That invitation is always an invitation to have your paradigm, your way of looking at things, and your worldview reschuffled. It is an invitation to allow Jesus to reorder our way we live.
It allows Jesus to give us a new definition of what it means to be human. So when we begin to understand the gospel more deeply, we realize that life can and should and eventually will be lived very differently than it’s lived today. Now, here’s the thing about it.
There are a lot of folks who look at what the gospel demands and say, well, that’s completely unrealistic. That’s completely undoable.
Only dreamers, you know, and people who listen to John Lennon or some Christian equivalent could think that that kind of thing could work. But here’s the thing – there have been examples in every single age of people who have followed the gospel, done what it said, and shown the rest of us that all of our excuses are just excuses. Let’s start with Le Chambon.
Le Chambon was a little bitty village in France. It is still a medium-sized village, but around 5,000 people lived there during World War II. These were most very devoted, simple Christians. Most of them had a very simple education. Most of them were farmers, winemakers, and carpenters. The village did not have many PhDs or university scholars. Most of them were just ordinary people living out the gospel.
During the refugee crisis of World War II, they harbored about 5,000 refugees, including 3,500 Jews. It was a one-to-one ratio. They harbored anybody who came to their village looking for safety.
In the 1960s, a reporter came to investigate the story. They asked many villagers why they did what they did. The answer they got was many were very similar. Jesus said that we were to do unto others as we would have them to do unto us. And we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
Let’s look at Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. On September 30, 2013, a man stormed into a one-room schoolhouse in an Amish community. The gunman was Charles Robert, a father of three and the husband of Marie. He shot up a bunch of kids. Terrible, right? But as the Amish community was grieving and tending to their losses, they realized that Marie and her three children were also suffering.
They had also had a loss. And so they decided to enfold them into their care and to take care of them as they were taken care of their own. They decided to help them through their grieving process as they worked through their own. They did so because they know the gospel can make a difference in a human life.
And let’s talk about Will Wilberforce. It is true that Christian Europe enslaved millions of Western Africans. But it’s also true that it was Western Christian civilization where the first serious thinkers gave thought to ending slavery.
Will Wilberforce was the first serious thinker ever to do so as far as we know. Will Wilberforce, who was partly mentored by John Wesley, put his fame, fortune, career, and physical health on the line to abolish slavery in Britain. And it’s the first place in a civilized world; in fact, it’s the first place in any part of the world where human rights were codified, and freedom is enshrined into law.
Christianity has the power to reshape lives.
Bob Pierce, a young American, was in Asia in the 1950s. Just a young guy traveling after having served in the Army
He found a young Korean child who was orphaned because of the war, and he started using some of his own smallmoney to take care of this child. A female Korean Christian who knew Bob said, well, what will you do when you return to the States? Bob said I guess I will have to find a way to keep supporting him. But then Bob noticed that there were dozens and dozens and dozens of children just like the one he was caring for. He asked God that his own heart would be broken by the things that break God’s heart.
He went back to America, taking film reels that he had filmed, and he started asking churches if he could borrow their basement to make presentations about what he saw and what could be done about it. And he began to invite people into the work.
(18:06) And he invited others to be broken in that same way that his own heart was broken. From that humble start, he founded one of the largest relief organizations in the world that has permanently changed the lives of men, women, and children all over the world.
All of these examples leave us without excuse.
Let me throw two more out there. Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. (18:27) You know that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu lived under apartheid. Under that brutal regime, things were harsh for the black community. And there were a lot of people in the black community who were set on getting their revenge. If they ever got control of their own country, they would punish the white community for what it has done to them.
Tutu and Mandela said that if we do that, South Africa will never have peace. They set their country on a new path. Now, I know some of you keep up with the world news. Unfortunately, South Africa is starting to have a lot of problems again.
But not under the watch of these two guys. If the young generation has chosen to go back to the old stupid paths of sin and revenge, violence and vengeance, that’s on them. However, Mandela and Tutu could envision a different path for South Africa.
For quite a long time, South Africa was a bright, shining star, and perhaps still will be. Maybe it will get through its current struggles in one piece.
Locally, I could speak of Eikon Ministries in our bulletin today.
Eikon Ministries is working in gang-infested neighborhoods in Memphis because they know that the gospel doesn’t give us the right to give up on the broken parts of our community. And they’re doing good work. Now, you may be sitting there thinking that this is foolish; it’s unrealistic.
But all of these examples, and there are hundreds or thousands more I could give you, each tells us that that’s just an excuse we make. The reality is that the gospel is the power of salvation for all who believe. G. K. Chesterton once said, “It’s not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It’s largely been found difficult and left untried.
Hands – The Practical Application
So Paul says to Philemon, I know it’s unrealistic, I know I have no way to enforce this, and I have no mechanism to make you do this, (but I’m inviting you to imagine the world differently. I’m inviting you to imagine your own life being different because of the gospel.
So, I want to go back to that criticism about why we couldn’t Christianity just abolish slavery from the very beginning. ) first of all, it starts as a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny minority. You know, the example I gave you about Ephesus. For quite a long time in a city of 200,000 people, there may have been a dozen or so Christians.
A dozen or so Christians is not a revolution, not yet anyway. There wasn’t modern democracy. Ancient Rome was a military political dictatorship, and there weren’t political mechanisms whereby average citizens could change their government.
Slavery was still woven into the fabric of all the thinking of the people of that culture. So what did Christian missionaries like Paul do? ) Well, they had to be subversive. They had to be the counterculture.
They had to work to undermine a system that was built on oppression evil and wickedness. And they had to do so with the long-term goal in mind. Now, I’ll tell you one more thing.
This brings us to the conclusion of the message. Church tradition tells us that Philemon said, yes.
And what I’m going to tell you, we can’t say for sure is about the same people but I’m inclined to believe this story. One of the church fathers, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, writes 60 years after Paul dies, and he talks about a bishop in Ephesus named Onesimus, who used to be a slave. Again, we can’t 100 percent be sure it’s the same person, but if it is, it shows us the gospel taking root in at least one corner of the Empire.
It shows us the seed beginning to germinate. But, friends, we have to work in the same way. This brings us to the application.
We have to work with the long-term goal in mind. By long-term, I mean planting seeds that grow into trees we may not sit under. It means making incremental, deep changes in places where people are receptive to the gospel. I know that right now, there are large parts of our culture that are not receptive to the gospel. But, in any culture, including ours, there are places and pockets of receptive people. We have to look for and find those places, right? You can’t set fire to green grass.
You have to find the places where the grass is ready to burn and soil where the seed can grow. Jesus said that the gospel of the kingdom is like a mustard seed. It’s tiny, and its growth doesn’t happen quickly, but eventually, the change takes place over time. Over time, it makes huge changes, but the method seems so slow and weak.
Interestingly, things don’t have to be strong outwardly to make significant change. It’s fascinating that grass can break up a concrete sidewalk, right? I mean, it just does so by slowly, persistently growing in the wrong place.Well, good things can grow too and break up cement and hard ground.
And water can wear away a mountain. We have to be strategic. We have to be visionary.
We have to be counter-cultural. We have to be subversive for the kingdom’s sake, and we’ve got to look for places with pockets of receptive people. I’ll give you a few examples, a few of them good and one of them bad.
A friend of mine is pastoring a new church, and her new church is on the Gulf Coast. But it’s not on the side where all the young people go. It’s on the side where all the retired people go, and most people in her community are older. But, you know, every church wants youth and children’s groups, right? So she was asking a group of us that we were meeting a question.
She asked how I could start a children’s group. How do I get a youth group? I thought about it for 30 minutes. I wondered who were the new people coming into her community. She said they are 50-something-year-olds who have invested enough to retire early. I said, you’ve got a stream of those coming in? She said, as far out as the eye can see.
I said that’s a children’s group. The 60-year-olds are your youth group. Your 70 and 80-year-olds are the elders of the church. I said, if you stick with that strategy and plant where the soil is ready and strike where the iron is hot, your church will be healthy and vibrant for a long time.
Twenty years ago, Stacy and I had the opportunity to help start a church in western Kentucky. But it was a church where the community had changed a lot.
And what the conference invited two aging dying churches to do, was close, retrain, and plant a new church in our community. The problem was that the community had changed a lot, a lot, a lot. The two old dying churches mainly were upper-middle class, very traditional people who loved wearing suits and dresses to church and listening to old music.
Our community consisted primarily of lower middle class people of mixed race with less than traditional tastes. Our task was to reach those people with the unchanging gospel in a way that would make sense to them. To my surprise, we end up being able to do it. And I knew success had happened the first Sunday that we had a motorcycle club member who showed up and felt welcomed.
Let me tell you about another church. This church was in a community that was growing, growing, growing. However, it was growing because a large atomic plant was being built in West Paducah, requiring tens of thousands of skilled laborers. However, when the project was over, all of those workers were no longer needed.
The community that had grown, and grown, and grown, then began to shrink, and shrink, and shrink. And it was right on the cusp between those two changing movements (27:38) that one of the churches I pastored had started building a family life center. They didn’t know it, but they were building for families who would soon be leaving the community. When they realized this fact, the building was half complete, and they simply stopped building.
That had been 25 years since I arrived. Walking around the building for the first time, I asked how you get to the second floor? Where are the stairs? The answer was that they had never put them in. I pointed across the street to a new set of apartments filled with children and families and said, why don’t we focus on those children? The answer was, “We didn’t build this building for those children.”
Friends, sometimes our dreams and God’s plans line up in ways we didn’t see coming. Will we receive his version of our dreams fulfilled?
It may look like a children’s group of 50-year-olds. But if we follow Jesus where he’s taking us, that dream will have a marvelous conclusion, even if it is different from the one we hoped for. Let’s exchange our sadness for new visions.
We may be looking to reach one group of people, only to find God leads us to another. Jesus said to his workers, look, the field is ripe for harvest, but where are the workers?
Will we work where God has shown us to work? – Shifting and pivoting if we have to – Investing our time, money, and effort in the things that God is blessing.
Let us not waste a lot of time asking him to bless our efforts, but in seeking to add effort to the things he is already blessing.
I want to say one more thing; you know, 19 months ago, this new church felt like an adventure, right? But 19 months later, the newness has worn off some. Will we see this through to completion?