Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the Morning Mind Set.

I hope you're ready to get your minds aligned with the Truth of God.

Now, if you've been with us for the past three or four days, we've begun a new study

in the smallest New Testament book that I know of besides the Book of Jude, and that is

the Book of Philemon.

This is a one chapter short little letter from Paul, the Apostle, to a man and his family

about a specific situation.

And the situation is Paul has come across one of their runaway slaves.

Now, because this book is addressing head-on in issue that has been one of great destruction

and great sinfulness in the history of mankind, I thought I should pause here for a moment

and make a few comments about the way Scripture deals with issues like this.

If we go back into the Old Testament, you see there were laws even within the Jewish

law about the possession of slaves and how that was to be done justly and rightly in

those sorts of things.

And modern day people, especially those of us in the Western world, would cry immediately,

well, there's nothing just about slavery at all to impinge on another person's freedom.

There's nothing just about that.

What do you mean laws to have it done justly?

Well, what I mean is this.

The culture that Scripture is written into, so in other words, the culture that receives

the writing of Scripture is what it is.

Scripture doesn't always intend or even attempt to immediately change the things in a

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