Today on Summit Life, a picture of the gospel at work from J.D. Greer.

Philemon is a self-centered businessman transformed into a beautiful picture of generosity

and onesimus is a pilfering thief transformed into the leader of one of the most important

churches in the ancient world. Can you see why I think there is no better picture of the vision

of our church than this book?

Welcome to Summit Life with Pastor and author J.D. Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vitavitch.

If you've been listening for a while, you've probably heard J.D. say that the gospel isn't just

a philosophy that we believe or a program that we practice. It's actually the power for the

Christian life. And today we'll see a picture of that in the lives of two first century believers.

In fact, it's a fascinating account that you probably flip right past as you read the Bible.

You're joining us in a teaching series called Everyday Theology.

To hear previous messages in this study or learn more about our scripture memory cards,

go to J.D. Greer.com. But for now, let's get started. Pastor J.D. titled this message

from ruthless to generous and enslaved to empowered.

Today, we are going to briefly look at a New Testament book that I think captures the heart

of our vision. It is the book of Philemon in your Bible. So if you have a Bible,

I want you to take it out and begin to open it to Philemon. The book comes right after the book

of Titus. So if you have been here the last few weeks and we've gotten good at finding Titus,

it's the very next page. We just finished our study through Titus. And really Philemon is an

extension of the thought in Titus. So you could consider this like a bonus track. Philemon is one of

the shortest books in the Bible, only one page, 355 words in Greek. It's actually a post script that

was attached to the book of Colossians. A really interesting story behind this book, Philemon was a

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