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. My favorite Bible story, I mean all-time favorite, is the story found in Luke

15 of what is commonly referred to as the prodigal son. For years, I have just loved reading it, meditating on it, sharing it with other people.

In fact, it is a story for me that when my heart gets cold and calloused, I like to go back

and think on again. It just warms my heart. It brings me back to the love of God. It brings me back

to who Christ is and why he came. The old Puritan said that the

story is really not the story of the prodigal son. It is the story of the wonderful father. I like

that. Every one of these Bible stories should make us think not more of men, but more of God.

It should take us all the way back upstream to the fountainhead,

to the source of love and forgiveness and mercy. And one of the parallels, I mean, the real life

parallels of that story of the prodigal son is the story we are now studying in the book of Philemon.

It is the story of another runaway. His name was

Onesimus. What was he running from? Somebody said, well, he was running from Philemon. He was running from his

job. He was running from his obligations. I think all that's true. I will tell you what he really was

running from. He was running from himself. He was trying to find a way to start over, to have a new

life, a new beginning. My experience has been that when people just try to change their

surroundings, they're always disappointed because they take them with them. And the real problem

is not what's around us. It is what is in us. And so here is

Onesimus who's on the run. He's a runaway slave. And yet he has a head-on encounter, not just with

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