Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one is about Philemon.

The book of Philemon is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a Christian leader in the

Church of Colosse named Philemon.

And if you recall back to when we did our conversation about the book of Colossians,

the Paul didn't really know anybody in that church or almost nobody in that church.

He didn't found the church, he hadn't been there yet, and he wrote that letter to the

Colossians from one of his many prison stays and was hoping to get to go and visit them

sometime later when he got out.

He was aware of some of the problems and the challenges in that church, and he was

particularly interested in having them reimagine how they do their households there,

in light of the truth of the new family of faith, and the equalizing effect that the

work of Christ has in making this new family of faith, where everybody, regardless of

your gender, your race, or your ethnicity, or even your social status, even slave or

free, according to Paul, in Colossians 3, verse 11, reimagine all of that because you're

all equal in Christ as members of this new family, as sons, daughters, children,

heirs, agents of the king, because of the glorious work of Christ.

It's pretty awesome, and it's wildly forward thinking.

It's also the kind of thing that just begs for a test case to figure out if anybody actually

means it, because if you take that to its logical conclusions, it would require Christians

to act in some ways that are very weird and very counter-cultural, and that is exactly

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