Latest / The Daily Word / July 3 – Character That Inspires Confidence
Transcript
- Cory: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good wee hours of the night, whenever you're joining us. Welcome to the Daily Word podcast from Lakeshore Christian Fellowship. My name is Corey Barnes, and it's my privilege to lead our Katawba campus. And we are sitting down today on the Daily Word to do a devotion coming out of the book of Philemon. I would say Philemon chapter one, but there's only one chapter to the Books. So it's gonna be it's good. It's a quick read. ⁓ this is in fact Paul's shortest letter. It's different from Paul's other letters because it doesn't really do much teaching. ⁓ but what it does do that's really ⁓ beautiful is it gives us a picture of how Paul handled personal conflicts ⁓ between people that he pastored. Now Paul is writing this letter. Letter to Philemon. He's a man that lives in Colossae. He's part of the upper class of Roman culture. And he leads a church out of his house. And just like most of the people in the upper class in Roman society of those days, Philemon owned slaves. And he had one in particular slave named Onesimus. Who apparently wronged him in some way and then ran away. Now we don't know exactly how Onimus we don't know exactly how Onesimus ⁓ wronged Paul. ⁓ the letter doesn't get into that, but we do know that whatever he did, it was bad enough that Onesimus traveled to Paul to ask him for help. He traveled ⁓ From Colossae to either Ephesus or Rome. Paul wrote this from one of his prison stents. We don't know exactly when, but it's likely that he was either imprisoned in house arrest in Ephesus or he was in a Roman prison cell in Rome during the writing of this letter. And And Paul does choose to help Onesimus in a pretty profound way, actually. Now, we don't really have time here to unpack why it's so profound, why Paul writes what he writes here. Let's just say that in the Roman slavery system, Paul's approach in this letter to a master of a runaway slave would have actually been. Really revolutionary. You see, Paul appeals to Philemon to not only forgive Onesimus both for whatever wrongdoing he did and for running away, and not only to forgive him, but here's the super duper duper revolutionary part. ⁓ to also accept Philemon as a brother in Christ and to set him free. And that's just a picture there of how the kingdom of God turns the ways of the world on their head. This is a really, really big ask for Paul to do, for Paul to ask from Philemon. And that's what makes the verse that caught my eye for this devotion. all the more powerful, and that's verse twenty one. Confident of your obedience, I write to you, knowing the knowing that you will do even more than I ask. See, after asking Philemon to forgive Onesimus for wronging him, forgive him for running away, and to free him from his slavery, all of which are completely contrary to both human nature and the cultural norms of the day, Paul then says That he is confident that Philemon will not only obey Paul's request, but that he will go above and beyond in ways that Paul probably can't even imagine. And that left me asking the question for myself, ⁓ am I the kind of person that others would be that confident in to do the right thing? Now let's be clear here. Paul wasn't commanding Philemon to obey him as an apostle. In fact, he pretty clearly said at the beginning of the letter, I I could command you, but instead I'm going to appeal to you by love to do this thing. And it's in that appeal of love that even without commanding him, Paul already expected that something was there in Philemon's character. He must have known something about this man to give him the confidence that even without commanding him to do this, Philemon would go above and beyond what he could imagine in the way that he responded. Now, do I live a life? Where the people around me have confidence that if they come to me in love and they appeal to me to do the right thing when they can see that I am an error or that I have a choice to make, will I actually do it? Am I the kind of person, does my character stand out to those in the ⁓ around me in a way that they would be confident that I would do the right thing? Now, of course. The way we build that character, the way we demonstrate to that to people, is by exemplifying Christ's character in in the small things. When we're willing to to submit ourselves to the Lordship of Christ and do the right thing in the small things, when it comes time for these big things, people will expect it of us. And more even than people feeling the confidence to come to me and ask me to do the right thing and expecting it of me, what about the Lord? Does the Lord have confidence in me? That when he says, hey, Corey, I see this in your life and I need you to make a change in this, have I given him a track record that when he convicts or brings correction in my life that I respond to it? So I guess our application here is just to be mindful and to start making those adjustments when the time comes. When the Lord convicts us, when someone brings something to us instead of flying off the handle and demanding our rights and what we know, that we would instead lay down our own lives and submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Let's pray. Father God, I just thank you. I thank you, Lord, that you are a good God. And every time we come to your word, you bring something out of it for us. You show us something that we've perhaps never seen before, but that speaks to us and speaks to our heart and gives us something that we can apply to our own daily lives. We love you. Jesus, for how you do that. We love you for so much more than just how you do that, but we're very thankful that you do that. Lord, I pray that you would help to form all of us into your image and that we would be the kind of people that people would expect to do the right thing above and beyond what they would expect others to do. We love you, Jesus, and we thank you that you do truly turn the world on its head. You give us grace to live a life with you that defies human nature. And I thank you, Lord, for your kingdom dwelling in each of our hearts so that we would live based on who you are and who you have made us to be instead of who the world says that we are and expects us to be. We love you, Jesus. We really do. Amen.