The Intercessor #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word. Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in the Truth Pulpit. Well, it's a delight this morning to begin a brief study of a new book that we've never looked at at Truth Community Church before. It's the short book of Philemon, found just before the book of Hebrews in your Bible. And I would invite you to turn there and find this one chapter book so that you can follow along as we study it here together.

And as we approach this letter, speaking this morning to those who are true Christians, those who have been born again, I think there is something that will help you understand and appreciate the spirit of what lies behind this letter. And friend, I would invite you to remember your state before you became a Christian, to remember what you were like in the eyes of God before you were saved. You had wronged God the Father. You had broken his holy law. And he had a right in his position as judge and governor of the universe to punish you. Not only to punish you, but to punish you severely because an eternal God who has an eternal law requires eternal punishment when his law is violated. And each and every one of you were in that condition.

You were in that state. And you were helpless before a holy God. There was nothing that you could do to earn your way into the graces of his favor. There was nothing that you could do by way of ritual to cleanse yourself.

You couldn't splash water on yourself from a fountain inside a church to cleanse yourself from sin. There wasn't an appeal to your own righteousness. You were hopelessly and miserably lost with no one to come to your aid. And it was in that position where you were helpless, where you had nothing to commend yourself. You could only appear before God with your own guilt, clinging to your account. Oh friends, it was when you were like that that our Lord Jesus Christ interceded for you. When the Lord Jesus Christ mediated for you, when he stepped in on your behalf and made a case for you before a holy God and allowed reconciliation to take place.

If you're in Philemon, go one book to your right in the book of Hebrews chapter 7. What happened for you as a Christian was that an intercessor came to your aid. In the midst of a broken relationship between you and God, someone interceded and took up your case and your cause before someone that you had offended. And that was the Lord Jesus Christ. Chapter 7 verse 25 of Hebrews says that he is able to save forever those who draw near to God through him since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens, who does not need daily like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people, because this he did once for all when he offered up himself. Here's what the Lord Jesus did for you if you are a Christian. There you were, clothed in the rags of your own unrighteousness and in your guilt, standing as it were before a holy God who could not receive you, who cannot simply wink at your sin and say, ah, come on in, it's all right.

Doesn't work that way. You see, justice, the justice of violated law must be satisfied before you are going to be reconciled to God, and you had no way to do that on your own. You were guilty, and guilty people cannot absolve themselves of their own sins. There had to be someone to intercede, and what did Jesus Christ do? He suffered for sins on the cross. He took the wrath of God that should have gone onto your head, onto your shoulders. He went to the cross, and he received the full brunt of God's anger against your sin there at Calvary. He drank the full, bitter cup down to the last drop in order to intercede for you, in order to save you from your own guilt.

And then what does he do? Having lived a life of his own perfect obedience to the law of God and being perfectly acceptable in his own right and merit before God, having paid the full price for sin at the cross, what did he do? In essence, having satisfied divine justice in his own body on the cross, he takes you, as it were, gently by the hand and brings you to God the Father. And on the basis of his completed work, he appeals to the divine love of God and says, receive this one as you would receive me. And that's what God did when you were saved. He received you not on the basis of your good works.

We're not saved by works, Ephesians 2 and many other places make plain. He did not set aside the law and say, I won't regard my own justice. No, he received you because Jesus Christ had fulfilled the law. He had satisfied divine justice on your behalf. He had interceded for you. And on that basis of his own work and his own merit, he says, Father, I appeal to your love for sinners and based on what I have done, I pray that you would receive this one into your kingdom.

And what happened? God did exactly that. God received you, God accepted you gladly because an intercessor of perfection had come on your behalf and reconciled you to God. That should do a couple of things in your heart. One, it should cause you to bow low all over again before the Lord Jesus and say, Lord, thank you for what you have done for a sinner like me. You took up my cause, you took up my case that I couldn't make on my own, and because you did that, now I am reconciled and received by a holy God when I couldn't have done it on my own. For those of you who aren't Christians, that's what you rely on to come to God, not your good works, not your promises to get better, not even your regret over your past sin. You come to God and say, I rely on Jesus Christ alone.

I trust in him. I ask you to accept me based on the work of your own son. And that's a prayer that God always answers because he receives those who come to him in repentance through the righteousness and shed blood of his son, Jesus Christ. No other way to God, Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me. Acts 4-12, there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name given under heaven by which we must be saved.

And so God accepts us based on the intercession of Christ on our behalf. Now friends, what I want you to do is to keep that picture in mind as we now turn our attention to the book of Philemon, the little letter of Philemon, because that picture helps you understand the dynamic that is at work between the three central players in the letter. And as you remember that, what you're going to see is that what plays out before us in the book of Philemon is a picture, it is an illustration of that which saved you eternally.

This is not simply about reconciliation between aggrieved parties on a human level. This shows us the gospel as we look at this wonderful book together. In general, what we can say about Philemon, just to help you get oriented to know what's going on in this book, the apostle Paul writes to a fellow Christian with whom he has had a long and fruitful relationship, and that man's name is Philemon. And he says, Philemon, I want you to receive this former slave of yours that I have gotten to know, I want you to receive him favorably even though he has wronged you. And so Paul is writing on behalf of this slave named Onesimus, who has wronged his former master, and now comes back to his master and takes with him this letter from Paul, and it is handed to Philemon, and Philemon reads it, and it is Paul's appeal to Philemon to receive this slave who has wronged him.

That's the general picture of it. There are three principal men in this letter. A party who had done wrong brings a letter from the apostle Paul and appeals to this Christian to receive him and to forgive him. That's basically a short picture of the theme of this letter. What I want to do this morning, we're just going to introduce the letter.

We're not going to really get into the bread and butter of it until a week or two from now. What I want to do is just get you acquainted with it, with the hope and the expectation that in the coming week, you'd read through Philemon two or three or four times and get it more into your mind and have this ability, have a framework to process it and to get to the heart of it quickly based on what we say here today. But we're looking at the intercessor.

In the ultimate sense, the great intercessor is our Lord Jesus. Here in Philemon, you see Paul acting as the intercessor on behalf of Onesimus to his former master Philemon. And so what I want to do at the start here, I want to introduce the three men involved in this letter. First of all, we're going to introduce Paul to you. Introduce Paul as he appears in the context of this letter. I realize that you know who Paul is, that Paul was the apostle that met the Lord on the road to Damascus, was wondrously saved and was appointed to ministry on behalf of Christ. He saw the resurrected Christ, he went out and he proclaimed Christ, he suffered greatly on behalf of Christ and was in prison for him, as we see in the book of Acts, and wrote a substantial portion of the New Testament which gives us guidance to how we are to be as a church even here to this day. He was a man, an ambassador of the Lord Jesus Christ.

What I want you to see just very briefly from this letter, as it pertains to this time that brings us together, is that he was writing this letter from prison. He was under Roman custody at the time. He had been charged with crimes simply because he had preached Christ to those who needed to know him. And so he is suffering for the gospel.

His life liberty has been taken away from him simply because he proclaimed the same gospel that you and I have believed unto salvation. Paul is in prison, as he writes. Look at verse 1, where he says, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus. In verse 9, he writes as he appeals to Philemon, he says, I am such a person as Paul, the aged, and now also a prisoner of Christ Jesus. Verse 10, he says, I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my imprisonment. Verse 13, I wish to keep him with me so that on your behalf he might minister to me in my imprisonment for the gospel. Friends, this letter is only 25 verses long in our English version. Four times in those 25 verses, Paul alludes to the fact that he is in prison as he writes this letter. We'll say more about that later, but here's what it should do to you and what it no doubt did to Philemon as he first read this.

Picture it this way. Suppose you knew a truly godly man who had been imprisoned for the sake of Christ, and you knew he was innocent, but there he is suffering for the gospel that you hold dear to your own heart. What's your response going to be? What's your attitude toward this man going to be as you think about him in that condition? You're going to think about him with respect, right? He's suffering for the gospel. You're going to think about him with a sense of sympathy that he's suffering for that which I love. I am on the outside free and he is inside in chains, and you're going to have a sense of concern and sympathy for him as you read and think about him.

This sympathy and this concern and this respect and this reverence for the man who is suffering is going to dominate your thought. Well, Philemon was no different. A man who had earned your respect, now suffering for the gospel, is someone that you're going to be favorably disposed to. That was the position from which Paul was writing. Now, you wouldn't know this from just looking at the book of Philemon, but Paul wrote this letter to Philemon at the same time that he wrote the letters to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. We know that by looking at a certain section of Colossians, and I invite you to turn back there so that you can see it, Colossians chapter 4. Colossians chapter 4, Paul wrote a number of letters that are contained in our New Testament called the prison epistles. He wrote different letters that are preserved for us today.

The Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon are among those letters. And notice in Colossians chapter 4 verse 7, this is the part that you hurry through because you think it doesn't matter in the 21st century, but sometimes these little personal notes give us a lot of background information about the circumstances under which our New Testament was written. Colossians chapter 4 verse 7, Paul says to the Colossians, he says, as to all of my affairs, Tychicus, our beloved brother and faithful servant and fellow bondservant in the Lord will bring you information. He had said the exact same thing at the end of the letter to the Ephesians, saying that Tychicus will deliver this letter and give you a personal update on my behalf. And look at what happens in verse 8.

He says, I've sent him to you for this very purpose, that you may know about our circumstances and that he may encourage your hearts. And then in verse 9 he says, and with him, Onesimus, our faithful and beloved brother who is one of your number. Apparently Onesimus was somehow familiar with, had relationships with, the people in Colossae, maybe from that very city, maybe that's where Philemon was from also. But Tychicus is taking a number of letters with him as he leaves the presence of the apostle Paul and going with him is Onesimus.

And as we read Philemon, we see that Tychicus and Philemon are going to be interacting over Onesimus in a very short amount of time. All I want you to see from this is the connection here, that when Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians, he also wrote this personal note to Philemon, and he sends out those letters with this former slave going out as well. And so we just see this background that there's a lot of things going on in Paul's mind in his ministry as he takes care of these things. When Paul wrote the letter to the Ephesians, he had been speaking about the greatness of salvation.

You remember that, how God chose us before the foundation of the world and Christ redeemed us at the cross and we were sealed in the Spirit and he wrote an exalted letter about the purpose of the church and the plans of God. And the themes of redemption in Christ and the glory and the exaltation of Christ are predominant in Ephesians and in Colossians. And that's the mental framework, that's the background, that's what's in his mind as he's writing this letter to Philemon.

It's the greatness of reconciliation in Christ. And that informs the things that he says and it informs the way that he approaches Philemon. That's the apostle Paul. Let me introduce Philemon to you based on this letter. We really don't know much about him apart from what is contained in this letter that we can glean from this letter. And I realize, and I say this many times, that I realize that if you're just reading through Philemon on a, like on a Bible reading plan or something like that, you read it in five minutes and move on and you don't really think about what you're reading. But when you read it closely, you can find out a lot about Philemon. You can find out about this man that helps you understand the nature of the transaction that is going on as Paul writes to him here in this short letter. What can we say about Philemon?

How could I introduce him to you? Well, first of all, Philemon was a man of some means. He had some measure of wealth of some kind because his house was large enough for the church in that area to meet in his place. Look at verse two of Philemon. Paul opens up the letter in verse one. He says, to Philemon, our beloved brother and fellow worker.

He mentions a couple of other people that we'll talk about later today. And he says, and to the church in your house. At the time, there were not separate church buildings for Christians like what we're meeting in here today. The church was the people. And the location where they met was often simply someone's home, a place for them to gather.

And it was often a person of means that had a large enough home for people to gather together like that. Philemon was the meeting place of these Christians. His house was the meeting place of these Christians, which tells us that in some measure he had some means that were at his disposal.

He was a man of some kind of stature, in other words. And what had Philemon done with his means, with his wealth? Well, as you read about this, you can see why the apostle Paul's heart is tender toward him. Philemon was a man who had dealt generously with other believers and had extended care to them. He had shown love for the people of God, the kind of love that we read about in our Scripture reading earlier from 1 John chapter 2. Look at verse 5 with me. Actually, in verse 4, Paul says to Philemon, he says, I thank my God always, making mention of you in my prayers, because I hear of your love and of the faith which you have toward the Lord Jesus and toward all the saints. He says, Philemon, I thank God for you when I think of you in my prayers.

Why? Because you have shown love to the saints. You have been an instrument in the hands of Christ to provide for, to care for, to protect and watch out for the people of Christ. And I thank God for that, that you're a man like that, Philemon. And then you go down in verse 7 and you see Paul repeating this theme about the inner joy that the life of Philemon has brought to him, verse 7. I have come to have much joy and comfort in your love because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother. He says, I know what happens in the sphere of your influence with the people of God. You help them, you care for them, the people of God leave your presence and leave the sphere of your ministry built up and encouraged. And Philemon, I am so joyful over that, to see the reality of Christ being lived out in your life.

It brings me such joy as I sit here in prison to think of what you have done for the people of God. And you see the warmth with which he speaks to Philemon. Look back at verse 1. Philemon, our beloved brother.

Really, to Philemon the beloved, it could be read. He says there, as we looked at in verse 7, he calls him brother. He appeals to him in verse 9 for love's sake. And so there's this warmth toward this noble Christian man of some means that Paul addresses him. We get to know him and we say, boy, Philemon would be a pillar in any church based on the description that we see of him here.

There's one more aspect that kind of helps you kind of round out a little bit the nature of the relationship. Philemon had apparently become a Christian under the influence of the apostle Paul. Paul's ministry had led to Philemon's own conversion. Look at verse 19 with me. Taking these verses a little bit out of context and just pointing things out and then we'll come and pick up the context in future messages. Paul, in verse 19, says, I am writing this with my own hand.

I will repay it. Talking about whatever Onesimus might owe to Philemon. And then he makes this parenthetical comment.

Not to mention to you that you owe to me even your own self as well. What's he saying there? He says, Philemon, you're a Christian because you came to Christ under the influence of my ministry. Your very self, the very core of what defines you as a noble Christian man. Philemon, I would just remind you that that came as a result of you responding to Christ under the influence of my ministry. He says, you owe me your own self. Which is simply a delicate, polite way of saying, Philemon, I know and I remember that you came to Christ under my ministry. With that in mind, thinking about Paul and Philemon now, in light of what we're saying, let's go back, let's circle back and think through the dynamic that's at play here. Philemon, a man of noble character, a man of means, gets this letter that opens up and he realizes this is from Paul and Paul is in prison. Immediately, his affections are going out toward Paul as he writes, as Philemon reads. And he sees this affirmation, this kindness, this appreciation pouring out from a giant, from a man directly appointed by Christ saying, I see you, I know you, I love you, I appreciate you. God bless you for all that you've done. Wow, Philemon's feeling 10 feet tall at this because that's what encouragement does, that's what edification is.

It builds someone up. And Paul is having this edifying influence and then toward the end of the letter, he reminds him, Paul remembers and reminds Philemon, you know, you came to Christ under my ministry, didn't you? Oh yeah, Paul, I did. That was such a sweet time.

I left behind my sin, the idolatry, the wickedness of this world, and I found freedom and forgiveness and eternal life in the Lord Jesus Christ. Why? Because of your ministry, Paul. And there's just a four-lane highway of affection flowing back and forth between these two men. That's the way that it should be. That's the way that it was between these two men. So we see Philemon, a noble Christian man, faithful in his aspect, his contribution to ministry, who is loved by the Apostle Paul and who was even brought to Christ by the Apostle Paul.

That's who Philemon is. Well, my friend, just before we close today's broadcast, I just wanted to give a special word of greeting and thanks to the many people that listen to our podcast internationally. It's remarkable to me, the last report that I saw listed 83 different countries that in one way or another are listening to us, and I just want to send a special word of greeting to those of you that are in lands that are distant from my own home here in the United States. You know, we've seen people from every continent except maybe Antarctica and people from countries like Ireland and Australia and Singapore, Canada, the UK, India.

I have friends in all of those countries. And whether you've met me face to face or whether you only know me as a voice through your favorite device, I just want to say God bless you. Thank you for your interest in the word of God. And may the Spirit of God work deeply in your heart as you continue to study God's word. Thank you for being with us. Thank you for your prayers. God bless you. My prayers and love are with you as well. And we'll see you next time on The Truth Pulpit. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's word.