Notes on Philemon

This is a letter of intercession.  As such, it is a picture of Christ interceding with the Father for us as slaves to sin.  There can be little doubt that Paul spent many hours in prayer, since all of his letters mention his faithfulness in praying for all of the churches and all of the individuals who are the recipients of these letters.  We often tell people we will pray for them, and promptly forget to do so.  One of the great aids to prayer is an ongoing prayer list, both as a reminder of the concerns we should pray for, and as a record of God's faithfulness in answering prayer.  Some prayer concerns may remain active for days or weeks; others may remain for years, for a lifetime.

When we pray for someone, we should not only pray for their needs, but, as Paul did for Philemon, thank God for the good things we hear or know about them as servants of Christ.  That is just as important as lifting up specific needs for our brethren.  We aren't reminding God, but ourselves.  We can also pray in an ongoing way that our brother or sister will grow in faith and love, and in their own spiritual maturity.  As they do, than, as Philemon, they can better communicate their faith as others, fulfilling the Great Commission.

The name "Onesimus" means "profitable", so Paul is using a play on words here, saying that Onesimus was an unprofitable servant in the past, but now would live up to his name.  Before we become Christians, we are all unprofitable to God, but the sad thing is that many of us remain that way after we're saved.  Just as Christ humbled himself to become a servant, so we are called also to serve both God and other people.  We serve God and others through obedience to the commandment of love, and we can only do this by learning what the commandment means.  To do that, we must be faithful in feeding on the Word, in the fellowship of prayer, and in the fellowship of worship.  Once we know what obedience means, we must be fit instruments for carrying out God's commandments, which we achieve through spiritual purity and the practice of righteousness.  We can achieve none of this through our own efforts, just as we can't be saved through our own efforts.  The Holy Spirit provides the power, but only if we choose to submit ourselves to Christ.

Not many of us have children in the faith, as Paul could claim many times over.  We often feel that only those with a special gifts in evangelism and witnessing can bring someone to Christ, but the Bible makes no such distinctions.  It is true that some do have evangelism as a calling, but Christ made no such distinction in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19-20), which is addressed to the church, not just a select few.  If it were only for the eleven disciples present on the mountain, the commandment would have ceased to be in force when they died.  In every letter, as with the words of Jesus in the Gospels, there is at least implicitly if not directly the admonition to share our faith with others, just as Philemon was told to do here.

The concepts of debt and repayment recur over and over again in Scripture, in a spiritual context.  Sin always involve a debt incurred to God, and we all carry with us, at birth, the debt of Adam's sin.  Just as Paul gave surety to Philemon for any debts incurred by his servant, so Christ's blood is surety for the sin debt we incur.  Had Onesimus never presented himself and his letter to Philemon, his debt would have remained forever paid, even though arrangement for its repayment had already been made.  If we never seek God's forgiveness, it will not matter that arrangement for payment for our sin debt has already been made.  The only difference in our case is that the one who holds the debt and the one who makes repayment for it are one and the same.  Put another way, we are slaves to sin only because we do not take advantage of the fact that the price of our redemption has already been paid and is on record.