SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/17/2017
10:58 PM
My Worship Time
Focus: The
Necessity of Obedience
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Philemon 21
Message of the
verses: “21 Having confidence in
your obedience, I write to you, since I know that you will do even more than
what I say.”
As we have been looking at this letter I think that it is
fair to say that Paul was confident that Philemon would forgive Onesimus for
what he owed him and also for the fact that he, being a slave ran away from him
when that was against the law. In this
verse Paul is writing about Philemon’s obedience to the Lord to forgive
Onesimus. Paul also knew that Philemon
had good character and would do the right thing.
As we have looked at the letter we have not seen the word
forgiveness in it but have seen the principles of what forgiveness is, and it
is certain after studying this letter that Philemon knew the principles of forgiveness
as found in the Word of God. This was
the early part of the church age that we are talking about and people who were
believers knew a lot of what the Lord Jesus taught while on earth as that had
not been that long ago when Jesus was preaching and teaching, teaching things
about forgiveness as seen in Matt. 18:21-22; and Luke 17:3-4.
We have also talked about slavery as we studied this
letter and found out that slavery was a part of the culture during this time
period, and there were millions of slaves in the Roman Empire. Some were even doctors and teachers, nurses,
and even lawyers. So when we read that
Paul states that he believes that Philemon will do even more that Paul asked of
him, Paul is not talking about having Philemon free Onesimus. Perhaps Philemon would allow Onesimus to
minister along side of him, something according to Paul he could do. Why would Philemon do this? Well it would not be because of law, but
because of Philemon’s grace, and love for Onesimus.
7/17/2017 11:14 PM
No comments:
Post a Comment