I had a weird low effort office nickname at my first grown-up job from just one person. It didn't catch on at all. And it was fine, but very much low effort. I was on a trip one time, right? And I got back late the night before, and I came into staff meeting the next day anyway. And everybody's like, oh, you know, welcome back. How was it? It was great. You know, we're just small talking. And I'm like, yeah, you know, I just just got in. I maybe I like pulled up my pant legs or something to show my socks. And I was like, look, yeah, I didn't even have time to do laundry. My socks don't even match. And everybody's like, uh, oh, well, you know, welcome back. But one person was like, socks don't even match. And that's just so you. And I was like, really? Is it? I don't feel like I've ever not matched my socks before, even once. I really like them to match, but okay. And then yeah, maybe a couple months later, I'm collecting lost and found from around the building, and I've got a bunch of clothes and stuff in my hands, and there's socks and stuff in there. Same person. I was like, more socks that don't match. Am I right? I'm like, what? These like these aren't even my these are like children's socks. I don't I'm like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there they are. Soc guy. Like, really? Soc guy? But I just rolled with it. I was a nice person. I I never understood the dynamic. Like I said, you know, it's a low effort, lazy office nickname. Sometimes we give them, sometimes we get them. Sometimes I wonder if they had those in the ancient world. And sometimes further I wonder if they did have those. If Paul's lazy, low effort office nickname was ever jail guy. What's up, jail guy? Been in prison lately or anything? Any good jails? Maybe Paul is like, I I I don't even know what to tell you, man. Yeah, I I yeah, you're right. I I guess I I get arrested and go to prison a lot more than normal people. Right. Jail guy. Truth of the matter is, it would have been an excellent, like the most obvious low effort office nickname for Paul because he really did go to jail a lot. All the stories are pretty cool. I mean, we don't have all of them. We know that he went to jail sometimes, but we don't hear about exactly what went down or how long he was there or anything. But the stories we get in the Bible of him going to jail are juicy. The one we looked at yesterday from Acts and Philippi, where you got a slave girl who's possessed by like the demonic spirit of a prophetic python or something. And then Paul casts out the demon or the spirit and goes to jail and then gets freed by an earthquake. But it's like, no, I think I'm gonna stay in jail. And then, I mean, somebody people become Christians. I mean, it's just crazy the way that whole thing worked out. And really, there's a formula there for how Paul kept ending up in jail, and that usually had to do with civil unrest and people getting really worked up and people, you know, throwing fake riot or something to demonstrate how upset they were. And so, usually, if Paul was in jail, I mean, there was violence to go along with it as well. And the Philippi thing was just the first of his mini trips to jail. By the time he's writing the letters of Philemon and Colossians, he's done a lot of stints. And he opens the letter of Philemon, reminding its recipient that he knows jail. It's me, it's Paul's jail guy, Paul, a prisoner of Christ to Jesus, and Timothy, our brother. I told you yesterday that Philippi would be the only one we'd really have time to deep dive into, and that is still true. But real quick, here's the roster that we know of of the rest of Paul's jail stays. He really was very good at getting arrested and going to jail. In Acts 21, and then for a while after that, Paul very courageously goes back to Jerusalem, even though he knows everybody's mad at him there. And even though a prophet has literally said, you know, like he bound him up with like a belt and was like, literally, this is what they're gonna do to you. When you go there, Paul, and people are kind of begging him not to go back to Jerusalem. But all throughout Acts, you can tell Paul wants to go back and have one more conversation, even though he knows it's gonna be heated with his old classmates, the people who don't believe in Jesus, the people who helped him execute Stephen back in the day before Paul became a Christian. And he does. He goes back, and it's a pretty crazy scene because Paul has this whole speech that he wants to spell out, and you can tell that the meltdown gets started, and that Paul kind of has to hurry through the end of it, and he's like, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then things just go nuclear there in Jerusalem. The Jesus thing has clearly become a very hot button issue, and the leadership there clearly does not want ownership of Jesus' execution and what has come out of that. And so Paul gets put in protective custody, and that is the next for sure jail stay that Paul has. But then he doesn't get let out of protective custody. In chapter 23, he gets hauled up the road, which I used to know this. It's like a day's walk, like 60, 70 miles, maybe up the road to Caesarea Maritima, which is where the Roman seat of governance was in Judea. There was a presence in Jerusalem, but the seat of governance was in Caesarea. So Paul goes there and he sits there for a long time, like two years he sits in Caesarea from chapters 23 to 26 of Acts. So that's getting to be a lot of jail at this point. And it's an okay time in prison there. I mean, Caesarea, I've been there, it's absolutely lovely. You can kind of figure out even where Paul was on the ground, so the different places and the different scenes and acts. But he talked to actually two different governors there, Felix and Festus, and Herod Agrippa, uh uh Herod Agrippa, this would be the second, was also there. And after Paul realizes that nobody knows what to do with him, and he's just sort of stuck in neutral, he does the, well, I've got to do something thing. And as a Roman citizen, he appeals to Caesar. And then the very last part of the book of Acts, it's like being in the prison bus, which sort of counts as still being in jail, but it's another voyage. It's really the fourth big voyage of the book of Acts. You get three missionary journeys, and then you get Paul's journey to Rome. And that trip is very eventful. It has, again, kind of a miraculous liberation for Paul. And like his imprisonment in Philippi, he doesn't run there either. In fact, he helps people in their moments of peril. He helps his captors in their moments of peril. And then finally, in Acts, he makes it to Rome and he is, as we've discussed, sitting around waiting under house arrest in a rented apartment funded by Christians from these churches that Paul has founded, and he is freely preaching and communicating the gospel. And the final verses of Acts say this. Therefore, I want you to know that God's salvation has been sent to the Gentiles and they will listen. For two whole years, Paul stayed in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance, he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ. And as we've discussed, that kind of feels like the conclusion of the Ark of Acts, where Jesus says, You're going to be my witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Maybe Rome is kind of the ends of the earth. Whether that's how it's meant to be understood or not, it is very symmetrical. And it feels like Luke is saying, you know, leaving off at that scene at the end of Acts, even though Paul's in jail, this thing can't be stopped. And I think that's an intentional juxtaposition on the part of Luke and in other parts of the New Testament as well, that jail feels like the thing that most symbolizes losing your agency and you can't go anywhere and you can't do anything. But there's this biblical motif of God's power being demonstrated in exile, in prison, in slavery. The values of the kingdom and the power of the kingdom of God just pushes right through all of that stuff. Well, we know that Paul got out of that imprisonment. He was not executed at the end of Acts 28, but we also know that he got rearrested in his travels somewhere and taken back to Rome, maybe even two more times, but at least one more time. Paul hints at a couple other imprisonments in a pair of letters that he wrote to the Corinthian church. And 1 Corinthians, I'm sorry, I had to write it down. I don't remember the reference. 1 Corinthians 15, 32. Paul writes, If I fought wild beasts in Ephesus for merely human reasons, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. So there's some kind of reference here to him being maybe thrown into an arena or something, or maybe the wild beasts are just jerks like this silversmith who gave him problems toward the end of Acts in Ephesus. Maybe even though an imprisonment in Ephesus isn't recorded in Acts, I mean things got crazy enough there that maybe he was in jail for a little bit there as well. And then in the second letter to the Corinthians, toward the end, chapter 11. No, I did not remember this off the top of my head. Yes, I did have to look it up and write it down. Here we go. Paul writes, Are they servants of Christ? I'm out of my mind to talk like this. I am more. I've worked much harder, been in prison more frequently, been flogged more severely, and been exposed to death again and again. Out of context, that sounds like he's being a little braggy about his suffering. In context, it makes perfect sense. We'll save that one for another season. But the point is, he's saying that he's been in prison frequently. And Paul is writing 2 Corinthians before the Jerusalem imprisonment and before any of the Roman imprisonments or the Roman prison bus journey. All we know for sure at the time 2 Corinthians is written is Philippi. But Paul's saying he's been in prison frequently. I mean, what does that mean? If you used that word frequently, would that be three times? To me, that's gotta be at least four at minimum, maybe five plus. And given all of the chaos that we see when Paul goes to these places, like what happened when he first went to the Galatian cities that we looked at last season, I mean, you would have to think there would be some jail stays in there given how crazy stuff got. So, all of that to say, that here at the beginning of Philemon, Paul uses the phrase, Paul a prisoner of Christ Jesus, and Timothy our brother. I think that anybody who knew Paul would have felt like, yeah, you've earned that, man. You've earned the title, a prisoner of Christ Jesus. You've earned it many times. No one can question that you are in shackles now and that you know more about being in shackles than just about anybody we've ever known, anybody who's involved with the church. And it would be hard to fault any of these people in the early church for coming up with a low-effort office nickname for Paul, like prison guy or jail guy. He really was, I mean, almost comically gallows humorly so, the guy who just every time you check in, like, how you been doing lately? Oh, jail again, was always in jail. Okay, yeah, you you do go to jail a lot, Paul. That's kind of your thing. You are jail guy. Andy was proud of it. Andy thought it was a valid point of leverage, and I think he probably had to have felt like it was the least he could do to pay back something that he could never repay, to unmake damage that he could never unmake. I mean, remember, this guy is secure and confident in the grace of Christ, but the images of what happened to Stephen when the first martyr, the guy who got killed with rocks by Paul and his buddies, maybe Paul didn't throw any of the rocks, maybe he did. The images of whatever happened to the other Christians that Paul tracked down, we don't know exactly what he did to them, but it sounds like killed is on the list. He doesn't get to just wish that away. That's a part of him, that's in his brain. I have to think that at some level, psychologically, even deeply rooted in the grace of Christ, Paul was okay with prison, and it was kind of cathartic for him, and it sort of felt a little bit merited, even if what he was in there for wasn't fair. He knew dang well that it was only by the grace of God that he wasn't in a far worse situation than he was. And here, in the opening lines of Philemon, and four more times over the course of the letter, he's going to use that very strange, remarkable history, that unusual story that only he has as a point of, I think, appropriate leverage for something good and something redemptive between Philemon and Onesimus and the larger church there. Alrighty, pressing forward into more of Philemon next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon, I'm not going to be able to do that.