Should We Drive Like Cowboys or Lead Like Shepherds?

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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This program is dedicated to helping you better understand the word of God and the doctrines of grace.

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The Bible tells us, do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.

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Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to study along.

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Here's your host with today's lesson, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist.

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Today we're going to be in the book of Philemon.

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So if you wanna open up your Bible, we're going to be looking at this short one chapter letter from the pen of the Apostle Paul.

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Now, if you're going along with our daily Bible reading, which is at our website, sgfcjacks.org, you'll notice that I'm off on the dates because I accidentally went over Philemon and into the book of Colossians and in the order that we have it, I actually had Philemon first.

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So we're a little bit behind on our reading, but if we do today in the book of Philemon, then tomorrow we'll be in Acts chapter one.

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And remember the way we're doing this is we're doing it in the order that we believe the books were written.

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So today should be Colossians chapter four, but it's actually Philemon.

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And then tomorrow we'll begin with Acts chapter one.

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So if you have your Bibles open, I wanna focus on, first of all, just talking about what Philemon is.

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Philemon is a personal letter to Philemon from Paul, and Philemon is a person who owned bondservants or what we might identify as slaves.

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And one of those slaves was a man by the name of Onesimus.

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And Onesimus had somehow gotten away from Philemon.

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He had left his master and had, and at some point gotten saved and become associated with the apostle Paul.

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And Paul is now writing back to Philemon and essentially calling for Philemon to accept Onesimus, not as a bondservant or slave, but to accept him as a brother in Christ.

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Now there's a lot that we could talk about on the subject of slavery.

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And certainly slavery is a huge topic that would require more than the 10 or 15 minutes that we spend on our daily coffee with the Calvinists.

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But I do wanna say this.

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Recently, I read a book by Thomas Sowell, which was very helpful in understanding the history of slavery, not only in the United States, but slavery all around the world.

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And one of the things that he pointed out is that slavery is certainly something that has been a part of every culture throughout the history of man.

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And while slavery was handled different and meted out differently within different cultures, and certainly slaves were treated better and worse in certain conditions, slavery is something that's not unique to America.

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It's not unique to the Southern American states.

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Slavery is something that has been a condition of man.

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And it's actually, and this was Sowell's point in his book, it was really the rise of Western culture that caused the elimination of slavery.

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And we see that, the Western culture, the United States actually was the country that fought to free slaves.

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And that idea of the freedom of slaves spread around the world, and we're thankful for that.

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Doesn't forgive the sins of the past, but it does give us an important perspective on the history of slavery.

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So that's something I wanna point out here.

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When we look at this and we look at this situation, we have to understand there is a historical context in which the Apostle Paul is speaking.

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And one of the things that we note in the book is when the Apostle Paul speaks to Philemon, the owner or the master, he speaks to him in such a way that he wants the master to receive Onesimus as a brother.

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And does that mean that he's calling for his emancipation, that he's calling for his freedom? Well, I think that that could certainly be implied, but it's not stated specifically.

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But what is stated specifically is what I wanted to focus on today, and this is verse four.

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In verse four, we see this.

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Excuse me, I'm sorry, I said verse four and I was looking at the wrong, the verse eight is the verse I wanna look at.

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So if you'll please focus on verse eight.

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Paul is speaking and he says, "'Accordingly, though I am bold enough in Christ to command you to do what is required, yet for love's sake, I prefer to appeal to you.

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I, Paul, an old man and now a prisoner also for Christ Jesus, I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.

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Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.'" So a couple of things we see there.

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One, Paul has the authority to demand that Philemon do what he says.

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Well, where does Paul get that authority? He's an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

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Philemon is obviously a brother in Christ, and there is a certain apostolic authority and weight that the apostle Paul has.

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He has the power, he has the authority to make the statement, you must do this.

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But he doesn't do that.

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He doesn't exercise his authority with a heavy hand, but rather he appeals to Philemon as a brother.

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Rather than demanding him, he appeals to him.

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I think this is a wonderful lesson for anyone who is in leadership, especially in leadership in the church as elders, as ministers and throughout the church and wherever you have maybe authority, maybe you're a deacon or something in the church, or maybe you have, maybe you teach Sunday school, doesn't matter.

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If you have authority over others, it's an example given by the apostle here is the example of appealing to them based upon the commands of Christ, rather than saying you must do something, appealing to them to do what is right.

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Years ago, I heard somebody say there's two ways to pastor a church.

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You can pastor like a cowboy, or you can pastor like a shepherd.

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The cowboy gets behind the cattle and drives the cattle.

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The cowboy gets behind and yells, yah, and pushes the cattle forward and demands that they stay in line and stay together and move forward.

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And that's the way a cowboy gets his herd in line, is he pushes them and he demands them.

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But a shepherd gets out in front of the sheep and he holds up his staff and he walks and the sheep follow him.

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And which one of those is the example that Christ gives? Christ calls himself the good shepherd.

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He gives the title of his elders, his ministers in the church, that of pastor, which is a type, it's a idea behind pastors, shepherd.

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And so I would encourage you, especially if you're a pastor and you're watching this, to remember your responsibility to lovingly shepherd your people, not to drive them like cattle, but to lead them like sheep, ultimately as the under shepherd to Christ, who is the great shepherd of us all.

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So this is a good example of Paul for that.

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But there's something else I want to note here.

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And that is what we see in verse 10.

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He says, I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whose father I became in my imprisonment.

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Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.

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You say, well, what is he saying? What he's saying here is the ability of the gospel to change a life.

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Onesimus has gone from being a slave to being a brother.

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And Paul says in his former condition, he was useless.

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Well, that doesn't mean he was completely useless.

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He was certainly probably somebody who did work in the house of Philemon.

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But in regard to spiritual things, he was not a believer, but now he is and his life has been changed.

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And therefore he is a different man.

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The Bible says, any man who is in Christ, the old has passed away and all things have become new.

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And so we have in this letter, an example of the ability of the gospel to change lives.

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The gospel can take a person who is useless in regard to spiritual things and can make him a brother in Christ.

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The gospel is powerful.

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It is the gospel that changes lives.

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It's the gospel that changes men and women.

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And we should be thankful for a gospel that can change us.

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Certainly a lot to learn in this little one chapter book.

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I hope you spend some time meditating on this letter and spending some time with it today.

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And I hope these insights have been useful to you.

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Again, thank you for watching.

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My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

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On behalf of Pastor Foskey, thank you for watching and may God richly bless your day.