When I was growing up, my family had a giant green Buick, and it was a wonderful peacetime vehicle. It was the kind of Buick, it was huge, a huge trunk. It had two giant bench seats front and back. But the upholstery on that, by the way, it looked like a luxury couch from the early 70s. It was vividly green when it was built, I'm sure, but UV had made it all kind of faded teal. And it had the white, I don't even know which material that is, like faux leather wrap on the roof of the vehicle. And then inside, you had one of those giant speedometers. It's like a foot and a half long and it runs horizontally across your dash. And as you accelerate, the red needle would move across your vision from left to right. It had an eight-track player, but the only eight-track cassette that my family owned was one by Slim Whitman. I know the irony is not lost on me. I see it. So I figured out that we could listen to other better music if I bought a cassette adapter that would go into an eight-track adapter, and then the cassette adapter could convert to a headphone jack, and then that could go into my disc man. So it was like an adapter of an adapter of an adapter, and then into the disc man. And then we could listen to important good music like Ace of Bass or PM Dawn from my CD collection while we bounced along in this car that had horrible suspension. And I said earlier it was a really, it was a great peacetime car because if you didn't subject it to any pressure, it was cool. People would make fun of it, but I liked that Buick. However, if even the slightest breeze of pressure was applied to that vehicle because of weather, or you need to accelerate fast or slow down quickly or navigate a bumpy road, it went to crap. It was awful. When you try, when you needed it most, like you needed to get into traffic, you'd hit the gas, and for whatever reason, the air intake was just always locked up and it didn't win it with uh uh uh uh it would hesitate. When you needed to slow down, it was so big and fat that it just took forever. You always felt like you were gonna rear-end people. And it's seriously, it would take an entire block to quit bouncing along after you hit any kind of bump. Great peacetime vehicle, bad wartime vehicle, didn't do great under pressure. Likewise, in our lives, we have a couple of categories of people who we know. We know people who are great during peacetime. That is, if no pressure is applied to the individual or the relationship, it's cool. You're gonna get great results, awesome. But then we also know some people who aren't so great during wartime and some people who are great during wartime. We have wartime friendships with people who we know they can handle pressure. They don't freak out, they don't panic, they don't make everything about themselves, they don't tap back into old narratives about things that happened in the past that have nothing to do with the current moment. Basically, the division between the two is the peacetime people in our brains are of middling maturity, but the wartime people, the people who can handle it, they're mature. They've been tested, they do well under pressure, unlike my family's Buick. Well, the last few days we've been talking about reunions and reconciliation. And we've been talking about some of the factors that seem to often be in place when it's a situation that's ripe for a good reunion or good reconciliation. We're talking about that because Philemon is a reunion and reconciliation book. That's the situation involved. A runaway slave named Onesimus and his master Philemon are coming together over a letter, a letter that's trying to make this thing work and write a new version of their relationship moving forward. But I mean, they're under pressure here. And so what do you look for? Well, over the last few days, we considered that the factors that seem to add up to whether a reunion or reconciliation is going to work out or not, involve, well, how bad was the initial offense? How much pressure is still in place here, if circumstances maybe changed or lightened up a little bit? But then probably most of all, yeah, how soft is the heart? What is the character of the people involved? Well, we know Onesimus, in the situation here in Philemon, is a brand new Christian, and we can deduce that his heart must be somewhat soft because he's showing up with the letter, right? I mean, if he goes off and meets Paul in a prison somewhere and becomes a Christian, and Paul's like, I think you need to go back and talk to Philemon, and Onesimus doesn't have a soft heart. Well, we've just never heard of him. The letter of Philemon doesn't exist. The Onesimus just leaves in the night again, and we never hear from him, and he vanishes to history, and that's that. But the fact that this letter does exist and that Onesimus did carry it back to Colossae and hand it to Philemon. I mean, I assume it was his hand putting in the hand of Philemon, it means that I think I can confidently say about Onesimus that this dude might be a decent wartime relationship. That is, he can handle pressure. Now, maybe he broke once under pressure, but for crying out loud, he was a slave. Everybody understands the call of freedom. In a lot of cultures, it's not even illegal to try to escape from prison because every culture knows that freedom is sort of the natural state of people and that you're gonna want to try to get out of prison. It's really hard to fault Onesimus for trying to flee as a slave. At least it's hard for me to fault him in that regard. Okay, so Onesimus, I'm cool with calling him generally a pretty solid wartime guy just by the fact that he's showing up. But what about Philemon? I mean, Onesimus is showing up with a letter. He's ready to reconcile. Really, what he's doing here is he's demonstrating a ton of trust toward Philemon, and trust that Philemon's faith that Paul has vouched for to Onesimus, he's trusting that that faith is real and that Philemon's faith in Christ and loyalty to Christ is going to be the bigger factor in Philemon's decision making than Philemon's loyalty to Rome or to the history of any one of those various cultures that came and went through his hometown of Colossae over the centuries. Onesimus must think, and maybe it's a bit of a gamble here, that Philemon is a guy who can handle pressure, that Philemon is a good wartime relationship, and that Philemon's loyalty to Christ is going to outweigh Philemon's loyalty to Roman law or Colossian tradition. And I would submit to you that Paul sees Philemon the same way, because the first seven verses of this letter are really just a greeting, and Paul praising Philemon for his character. Here we go. Big chunk of Philemon starting in verse one, going all the way through verse seven. Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy, our brother, to Philemon, our dear friend and fellow worker, to Affia our sister, to Archipus, our fellow soldier, and to the church that meets in your home. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers because I hear about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints. I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith so that you'll have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ. Your love has given me great joy and encouragement because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the saints. Well, dang. I wish the apostle Paul would write something like that about me. Paul's a pretty good dude. Also, Paul is a dude who knows what it is to be tested. Paul is a pretty good wartime friend. He does well under pressure. In fact, I think the third word of this entire letter is prisoner. Paul, a prisoner. Yeah, dude's writing this from a jail cell. He knows how to handle adversity. He knows who he is, whether circumstances are favorable to him or not favorable to him. In fact, in the entire Bible, I would say Paul is one of the foremost experts who we hear from in terms of what it is to keep your head in metaphorical wartime. So if Paul thinks Philemon is a pretty decent dude and expects Philemon to be a pretty decent dude under pressure, that goes a long way for me. Now, tomorrow we're going to break down this passage a little bit and see what clues we can gather here about Philemon's relationship with Paul and what specifically Paul likes about him. But big picture for the purposes of today, we're evaluating the question: are Philemon and Onesimus the kind of people you can only count on in peacetime, or are they the kind of people who you picture in your life who you can count on in wartime? You can count on them under pressure. They will deliver when it's tough. This is a high pressure situation, and if they respond to it the way my Buick responded to it, they're going to rear-end somebody or fly off the road. It's just not going to work out. I guess in that ongoing metaphor, at least they would get to listen to I saw the sign while they fly off the bridge into oblivion. But if they behave like my Buick under pressure, they're going to fail. If this reunion or reconciliation is going to work out, these are going to have to be people who don't keep a long record of wrongs and who don't have elaborate narratives in their brain that are triggered by any kind of pressure that distract them from responding to the moment. What kind of people are we talking about here? Well, at first glance today, the very act of Onesimus taking this letter back to Philemon gives me the impression that he is a high-pressure, tolerant, wartime kind of guy. And Paul's vouch for Philemon and the fact that Philemon is in the Bible tells me that Philemon might also be a high-pressure, wartime, ride or die kind of person who can respond rightly to a really difficult situation like this. We'll break down the passage and get a bit more into speculating about the character of Philemon next time around. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.