We all love to receive an encouraging note from a friend.

And on one page of the New Testament, we find a very personal letter from Paul to Philemon.

This brief note to a friend is full of doctrinal truth and practical help for us all.

Open your Bible and your heart today as we come to the book of Philemon.

Let's join Scott Pauli now as we study God's Word together. There are several different ways to approach a portion of scripture.

For example, you can do a book study where you view every verse in a book from start to finish in its order.

You can do a character study where you identify the main characters in the passage

and try to put yourself in their shoes, so to speak, and see what God is teaching them

or how God is working through them.

You could look at a portion of scripture and identify the great themes within that

scripture.

We're beginning a brand new study today, and we're going to do all of the above.

We are going to study an entire book, which is only one chapter long.

We are going to identify all the main characters and learn something from their lives.

And we're going to see, I think, one of the greatest themes in all of Scripture, and that is the

theme of the great grace of our God. I hope you'll find your place in your copy of the Scriptures in

the little book of Philemon in the New Testament. This is an amazing book. It is sandwiched in our

Bible between the pastoral epistles and the book of Hebrews.

And I think far too often it is terribly neglected. We study First and Second Timothy and

Titus and we learn things about the church and then we jump straight to the book of Hebrews

and we learn things about the greatness of Christ and the life

that is better. And we just kind of breeze over the little book of Philemon. But I want to remind

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