Jonathan Edwards says the chief business of the Christian is to press into the kingdom of God,

to press onward to that mark, to reach the fullness of maturity in Christ.

And the apostle does this while he is rejoicing in his prison. Many say that it's much easier to be a Christian, to be a faithful witness to the Christian faith

when things are going well, but when trials come, when we feel imprisoned by circumstances or literally we waver

You're listening to renewing your mind as we spend a week surveying the epistles of the New Testament.

For the Apostle Paul, when he was in prison, he didn't waver, he didn't flinch, and he wrote

some of the most beloved books in the New Testament.

If you'd like to study the entire New Testament and Old Testament,

and I encourage you to request R.C. Sproll's 57 message overview of the entire Bible, Dust to Glory.

You can learn more at renewing your mind.org.

Well here's R.C. Sproll on the four prison epistles of the Apostle Paul.

From Paul's autobiographical account in 2 Corinthians, chapter 11, we understand that he suffered extraordinary levels of peril

and that he was arrested many times and had a prison record that was certainly unenviable.

Some of those stays in jail were brief, such as his occasion in the Philippian altercation.

But he had some rather lengthy times of being incarcerated, one in Cesseria, and then a two-year house arrest

in Rome that took place during the time of the emporship of Nero, who ultimately was the one who executed

the apostle Paul, and then his final imprisonment in Rome under Nero when he was killed. But at some

point during these imprisonment he wrote four very significant letters that are called the prison

epistles of Paul. We don't know for sure which imprisonment was involved. But I think the weight of the evidence favors

the first Roman imprisonment which was a two-year stay in Rome from which the apostle wrote these important

letters and those prison epistles include the epistle to the Philippians, the letter to the Colossians, the letter to the Ephesians, and then the brief letter to Philemon. And so what we're going to do in this session is to have a little

introduction and brief overview to these four letters and the first of which is the letter to the Philippians.

...