To Encourage You

Philemon 8-9 “Though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love’s sake I prefer to appeal to you—I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus”

In the verses above we see the apostle Paul making an appeal to Philemon to do something that is to be expected of any Christian.  It is an appeal to forgive another person, in this case, Philemon’s runaway slave, Onesimus.  One of the things in this loving appeal that Paul mentions about himself is that he is “an old man and now a prisoner for Christ Jesus.”  I think one of the things that is instructive in these words is how these aspects of Paul’s life undergird the attitude and words that he is using in his appeal.  You see, age, life experience, and the trials that come with it, all have the effect of knocking the rough edges off of us. Whereas in our younger years we may have been more brash and impatient in dealing with others, our perspective tends to change as our life experience broadens.  Throughout Scripture we are told that, typically, more wisdom comes with more years, for with those years often there has been suffering in the school of hard knocks.  Elsewhere, Paul said this: “And I am sure of this, that He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6). And why was Paul sure of this?  Because he had experienced it.  He had endured much for the sake of Christ. He had learned to “rejoice in (his) sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5).  It’s a wonderful truth of God’s work in our lives – that as we walk with Him, as we suffer in this life, as we experience the ups and downs of life, God is at work to produce in us His very nature. He is working to pour His love into our lives as He patiently molds us after His own image, knocking off the rough edges, so that we are no longer “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2), but “conformed to the image of His Son” (Romans 8:29).  May God help us to this very end as we walk with Him day by day and year by year, and as we suffer the things He allows to touch us under His wise and sovereign control.  For you see, “for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28), i.e., “good” as He sees it, the good that is rooted only in knowing Him, and in being conformed by Him after His will.