Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible, where we discuss one book of the Bible in 10 minutes. Well, give or take 10 minutes. In this session, we're going to discuss the book of Philemon. And as you've heard me say throughout this series, in order to understand any book, especially a book in the Bible, you need to understand three things. Number one, you need to understand the subject of the book. Number two, you need to understand the structure of that book. And number three, you need to understand what I call the situation. Now let me explain those three things. The subject is simply what is the author talking about? What is the main subject of the book? And of course there are other subjects that are subtopics within that overall subject. A book has unity, which means it has one overall subject. By structure, I mean how does the author develop that subject. In a secular book, there is a table of contents, and that gives you some idea of how the author is developing the subject. In the Bible, there is no such thing, so study Bibles. outline of that book and that substitutes for the table of contents and can give you some idea of what the author is doing. So the subject is what is he talking about. The structure is how is he developing the subject. The third part is the situation. And that consists of three elements. Why is that author talking to that original audience on that subject? Author, recipients, purpose. If you understood those three things, you would understand a lot about that book and how it came to be written. Now with those three things in mind, let's look at the book of Philemon. And the first question is, what is the subject of the book of Philemon? And in this case, it's really rather simple. The subject is love. I'll explain that more in a minute. So then the question is, what is the structure of the book? And as you've heard me say, as long as we've been in Paul's epistles, that the structure of these epistles is that of an ancient letter. In the case of Philemon, the letter follows that format, 2AT, no part is missing. So, the first part is a salutation, which was the first part of an ancient letter, identifies the author and recipients and gives a greeting. The second was a thanksgiving, and this epistle does that. Then that's followed by a prayer. And then the author delves into what is called the body of the book. In the case of Philemon, The body of the book is broken down into basically three parts. In the first part, he gives the basis of a request he's going to make of Philemon. Then, that's verses 8 to 11, then he gives the nature of the request in 12 to 17, and then he offers to make a payment for what he's requesting. That's verses 18 to 22. The book ends with some personal greetings and a benediction, which were the characteristics of an ancient letter. Now, let me repeat what I just said. An ancient letter consisted of several parts, salutation, thanksgiving, prayer, the body of the book, personal greetings, and a benediction. This letter follows the format of an ancient letter perfectly. It has all six of those parts. The body of the book is the bulk of the book, and that's where you outline it in terms of its topic. So I gave all of that just a second ago, but I wanted to clarify that the outline of the ancient letter with salutation, thanksgiving, prayer, body of the book, personal greetings, and benediction. And that's true of the epistles in the New Testament. They follow the pattern of a letter, except in some cases they may leave out one element, like Paul may not include the thanksgiving as in Galatians. But he follows the format in Galatians other than that. All right, back to Philemon. The subject is love, the structure is of an ancient letter. What is the situation? Well, the first verse tells us that the situation is Paul, and later he says, in verse 19, he wrote it personally. Now that's significant because Paul used a secretary, called an amanuensis, and he dictated the letters, and the secretary, or the amanuensis, wrote them. In this case, he wrote it personally. And he constantly talks about the fact that he's in prison. He refers to that repeatedly. In a sense, this book is linked to the book of Colossians because the people involved lived in Colossae. So if that's the case, we know Paul was in prison when he wrote Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon. He wrote four epistles while he was in prison. And this is the fourth and final one. The date would be 61 A.D. Now, who did he write it to? Well, it gives us a whole bunch of people, but it's primarily written to Philemon. The other people that are mentioned are said to be his wife and maybe his son or the pastor. At any rate, it's addressed to those individuals and the church. He mentions that as well. Now, that means it's not a private letter. It's written to one person, but it's addressed to other people as well, including the whole church. The basic idea is this. Philemon was a slave owner. He had a slave named Onesimus. Onesimus ran away, perhaps even robbed Philemon, and he ends up in Rome, somehow meets Paul. Paul leads him to Christ and sends him back to meet his master, Philemon. That's what's going on in this book, and he wrote the book for Philemon to receive at the hand when Onesimus got back. The purpose is to request that Philemon receive Onesimus, a runaway slave, as a beloved brother, and if there was any debt involved, perhaps because Onesimus robbed Philemon, that Paul says, just put that to my account. In other words, this is a great story that illustrates a whole bunch of things, love, forgiveness, and even respect for the law. So this book is small, one chapter, but chock full of some very fascinating information. If I were going to summarize the book, I would say the overall subject is forgiveness, and restoring Onesimus, his runaway slave, as an illustration of what Christian love is all about. Remember I said at the beginning, the real subject of this book is love. So it has to do with the slave owner and the slave and robbery and all that other stuff, but the spiritual point is love. So if I were going to say what is the takeaway for us, the practical spiritual truth, I would say that Christ loved us, paid for our sin so that we could be forgiven. This book illustrates that. And we should love and forgive others even if we have to pay the cost, as Christ paid the cost for us to be saved. So this is a story of great love that is an illustration of God's love who paid for our sin so that we could be forgiven.