Refresh My Heart in Christ

I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints. I pray that the faith you share with us may deepen your understanding of every blessing that belongs to you in Christ. I have had great joy and encouragement because of your love, for the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother.
Philemon 4–7 (NET)

Read Philemon 4–7 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

I Always Thank My God

The thanksgiving section is a fixture of Paul’s letters. He opens almost every epistle with one. Romans, First Corinthians, Philippians, Colossians, the two Thessalonian letters, Second Timothy, this letter to Philemon, all of them move, after the greeting, into some variation on the words I thank my God. Second Corinthians opens with a blessing of God instead, and Galatians, pointedly, has no thanksgiving at all. The form is so consistent that scholars have given it a name. They call it the Pauline thanksgiving. It is not a mere formality. It is how Paul writes, and when he leaves it out, as in Galatians, the silence speaks.

We should not let the form’s familiarity numb us to the substance. When Paul says I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, he is not engaging in epistolary politeness. He is reporting a habit. He prays. He prays for Philemon. He prays for Philemon often. And what comes to his mind when he prays for Philemon is gratitude, gratitude to God for what God has done in Philemon’s life.

Notice the address: my God. Paul does not say the God or our God, though either would have been theologically defensible. He says my God. The possessive is intimate. The God who is the God of all nations and the God of all creation is, in Paul’s prayer, the God in whom Paul has personal claim: the God who has redeemed him, called him, made him an apostle, and now sustains him in chains. My God: the gospel has made the universal God a personal God for this prisoner. We will hear in this phrase, if we listen for it, the same intimacy that gives us our Father in the Lord’s Prayer. The God who is no one’s possession has, in His grace, given Himself to be possessed by His children.

Paul will offer thanksgiving for what comes next (for Philemon’s love, for his faith, for the refreshment he has brought to the saints), but he frames the thanksgiving in this way first: I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers. The remembering is real. The prayers are real. The God to whom the prayers are made is real and is the apostle’s own. This is the foundation on which everything else in verses four through seven will rest.

There is a quiet but important Lutheran note to sound here. Prayer, in the Reformation tradition, is not a work that earns God’s favor. It is the response of faith to a God who has first spoken. Luther’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism makes this point in every petition: God’s name is holy in itself, His kingdom comes without our prayer, His good and gracious will is done without our prayer, and we pray that these things would be so among us also. Paul’s thanksgiving for Philemon works the same way. The grace God has shown to Philemon is grace God has shown. Paul does not pray because his prayers will cause the grace; he prays because the grace has already moved him to gratitude. Prayer is the response, not the cause. Prayer neither earns nor coerces God’s grace. Yet God commands prayer, promises to hear it, and often grants His gifts through the petitions of His people, as Paul himself will confess in verse twenty-two. Thanksgiving is the form prayer takes when the response has caught up with the gift.

Faith and Love

What Paul has heard about Philemon, and what now fills his thanksgiving, is named in a single compact sentence. The NET smooths it into natural English: I hear of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints. But the Greek runs differently. Rendered literally, Paul says he hears of your love and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus and for all the saints. The grammar is interesting enough to slow down for, because Paul has constructed the line with a precision that most translations, for the sake of clarity, smooth away.

The two nouns, love (ἀγάπη) and faith (πίστις), are introduced as a pair. The two objects, toward the Lord Jesus (πρὸς τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν) and for all the saints (εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους), are also introduced as a pair. But the two pairs are not arranged in the order that would seem most natural. We might have expected Paul to say “love for the saints and faith toward the Lord Jesus”, pairing love with its proper object (the saints) and faith with its proper object (the Lord). He does not. He says love and faith first, then names the two objects after both nouns have been spoken.

The arrangement is often read as a chiasm, the crossed pattern classical rhetoric knew well, though not every interpreter is persuaded that Paul intended one. The reader is left to assemble the connections. Faith does not properly run toward the saints; faith runs toward the Lord Jesus. Love does not properly rest in the Lord as its terminus; the Lord is the source of love, but love is poured out toward the saints. The chiasm asks the reader to do the work of sorting. When the work is done, the structure looks like this: faith toward the Lord Jesus, love for all the saints. The vertical and the horizontal. The first commandment and the second. The whole life of the Christian named in two prepositions and two objects.

Confessional Lutherans will recognize this immediately as the structure of the Christian life as the Apology of the Augsburg Confession explains it in its fourth article. Faith justifies. Faith receives the righteousness of Christ. Faith runs to the Lord Jesus and clings to Him for everything. And love is the fruit of faith. Love is what faith does when it has been justified. The fruit cannot precede the root. The love does not produce the faith. The faith, having received the righteousness that justifies, produces love as its natural overflow. Philemon’s love for the saints is not the basis on which God has accepted him. It is the evidence that God has already accepted him through faith in the Lord Jesus.

The order matters because the gospel is at stake in the order. Religion in every other shape says love first, and earn what is given. The gospel says faith first, and receive what cannot be earned, and then love, freely, because nothing depends on it. Paul has compressed all of this into one chiastic sentence in his thanksgiving. He has not had to argue for it. Philemon, who came to faith through Paul’s ministry, will have been taught this shape of the Christian life. Faith toward the Lord Jesus and love for all the saints. The gospel-shape of the Christian life named in one breath.

Verse six is the difficult verse. Translators have wrestled with it; commentators have argued over it; even the most careful English versions have to make decisions that the Greek does not force. The NET renders it: I pray that the faith you share with us may deepen your understanding of every blessing that belongs to you in Christ. That is one careful decision among several possible. More literally, the Greek reads: that the sharing of your faith may become effective for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. What does it mean?

The crux is the phrase the sharing of your faith: in Greek, ἡ κοινωνία τῆς πίστεώς σου. The noun κοινωνία is one of the most theologically loaded words in the New Testament. It can mean sharing in the sense of giving and receiving: financial sharing, the sharing of goods. It can mean fellowship in the sense of common life. It can mean participation in the sense of joint partaking. Acts 2:42 uses it for the apostolic fellowship of the first Christians. First Corinthians 10:16 uses it for the partaking of the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Philippians 1:5 uses it for the Philippians’ partnership with Paul in the gospel. The word has range.

Three readings of verse six contend with each other. The first treats the sharing of your faith as evangelism: Paul is praying that Philemon’s outward telling of the faith may become effective. The second treats it as the fellowship that faith creates between believers: Paul is praying that the common life that Philemon shares with his fellow Christians may become an effective vehicle of every good thing. The third treats it as the participation that faith makes possible in Christ Himself: Paul is praying that the union with Christ that faith effects may become known to Philemon in its fullness.

All three readings have honest claims. I am inclined toward the second, because the second sits most easily with what comes before and what comes after in the letter. Verse five has just named Philemon’s love for all the saints; verse seven will speak of the hearts of the saints refreshed by Philemon’s love. Verse six, the prayer between them, is most naturally heard as the prayer that the common life of faith between Philemon and the saints around him would become effective (ἐνεργής, energetic, active, productive) for the full knowledge of every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ.

But the verse is also, and not by accident, preparing the ground for the appeal. Paul has not yet named Onesimus. He has not yet said why he is writing. But he has prayed, in the hearing of his recipient, that the fellowship of Philemon’s faith would become active in a particular direction: toward every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. When Paul, two paragraphs later, asks Philemon to receive Onesimus as a brother, the request will not come out of nowhere. The prayer has been laid down. The fellowship of faith Paul has prayed for, when it does its work, looks like this: a runaway slave received back as a beloved brother in Christ. Verse six is the petition. Verse sixteen is the answer Paul hopes will come.

There is one more thing worth noticing in this verse. The phrase every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ (παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ τοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν εἰς Χριστόν) places the source of all good things in Christ. Philemon’s good works are good not because they originate in Philemon but because they originate in Christ at work in Philemon. The full knowledge (ἐπίγνωσις, the deeper or more complete knowledge) for which Paul prays is the knowledge of what Christ has done and is doing in those who are in Him. Lutherans hear in this what the Augsburg Confession teaches in its sixth and twentieth articles: faith is bound to bring forth good fruits, and because the Holy Spirit is received through faith, the heart is moved to do good works (AC VI; AC XX). The works that flow from faith are the Spirit’s fruit in the believer. Philemon’s love is Philemon’s, and yet Philemon’s love is the work of Christ in Philemon. The prayer is that he, and we, would come to see this more fully.

Joy and Comfort, Brother

Verse seven turns from prayer to feeling: I have had great joy and encouragement because of your love, for the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother. Paul, the prisoner, names what Philemon’s love has produced in him personally. Joy (χαρά) and encouragement, or comfort (παράκλησις). Two of Paul’s favorite words in his prison correspondence. Two of the things a man in chains most needs.

We should not pass over the smallness of this scene too quickly. Paul is in custody. He cannot move freely. He is, in the natural course of things, cut off from the people he loves. He receives news. He receives visits. He receives letters. And when the news that comes is good news (when he hears that Philemon, far away in Colossae, has been loving the saints and refreshing their hearts), the news reaches Paul in his chains and produces joy. The gospel does this. The communion of saints, the communio sanctorum of which the confessions speak, is a real fellowship across distance. Paul rejoices in Rome because Philemon loves in Colossae.

This is not sentiment. This is the structure of the church. The body of Christ is one body even when its members are far apart. The joys and sorrows of one member are the joys and sorrows of all the members. Paul, who in an earlier letter wrote that If one member suffers, everyone suffers with it. If a member is honored, all rejoice with it, lives that doctrine here in verse seven. Philemon’s love is not Philemon’s love alone. It is the love of a member of Christ’s body that flows out into every other member and reaches even into Paul’s Roman custody.

And there is the direct address: brother. Ἀδελφέ, vocative. Paul has named Timothy his brother in verse one; he has addressed Apphia as our sister in verse two; now, in verse seven, he addresses Philemon himself directly as brother. The word that opened the letter has now been spoken to the man who matters most for what the letter will ask.

The address is not casual. Paul knows what he is doing. He is preparing Philemon to hear the appeal that is coming. The man who will be asked to receive Onesimus as a brother has just been addressed, by Paul himself, as a brother. The category that will define Onesimus’s new status in the household of Philemon is the same category Paul is using, freely and warmly, to name Philemon. Brother. The vocabulary is consistent across the letter because the reality is consistent. We are brothers in Christ. The slave is brother. The master is brother. The apostle is brother. The man in chains is brother to the man who hosts a church in his house. Brother: the word does the work.

The Hearts of the Saints Refreshed

The verse closes, and the thanksgiving closes, with a phrase that will become the rhetorical pivot of the whole letter. Because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. Two words in Greek deserve our attention: σπλάγχνα and ἀναπαύω.

Σπλάγχνα is the noun translated hearts. The literal meaning is more visceral than our English word can carry. The σπλάγχνα are the inward parts: in the medical writing of the ancient world, the entrails; in the everyday speech of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean, the seat of deep feeling. Where modern English locates emotion in the heart, Greek located it lower: in the bowels, the gut, the inward parts. When Paul says the hearts of the saints have been refreshed, the word he uses is the visceral one. The saints, in their inward being, in the place where they feel most deeply, have been given rest.

Ἀναπαύω is the verb translated refreshed. It is the verb Jesus uses in Matthew 11:28: Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. The same verbal root. Anapausis, rest. To refresh, to give rest, to bring relief from labor. Philemon, by his love, has been functioning toward the saints around him the way Jesus functions toward all who come to Him. He has been a source of rest in their inward parts. He has refreshed them where they most needed refreshing.

These two words will return. They will return because Paul has chosen them as the rhetorical thread of his appeal. In verse twelve, when Paul sends Onesimus back, he will call him my very heart: τὰ ἐμὰ σπλάγχνα, my own inward parts. The same noun. Onesimus is, to Paul, the bowels of his own affection. And in verse twenty, when Paul caps the appeal, he will say to Philemon: Yes, brother, let me have some benefit from you in the Lord. Refresh my heart in Christ. Ἀνάπαυσόν μου τὰ σπλάγχνα ἐν Χριστῷ. Same verb. Same noun. The vocabulary of verse seven is being deposited here as a seed that will sprout twice more.

Paul is, in other words, writing the letter as a piece of considered prose. The thanksgiving is not a courtesy that precedes the real business. The thanksgiving deposits the keywords that the appeal will pick up. Philemon refreshes the hearts of the saints (v.7); Onesimus is Paul’s heart (v.12); Philemon should refresh Paul’s heart in Christ (v.20). The line runs straight through the letter. The hearts that Philemon has refreshed are the saints’ hearts in verse seven; the heart Paul will ask him to refresh is Paul’s own; the welcome of Onesimus, who is Paul’s heart, is how the refreshing is to be accomplished.

There is something tender about this construction. Paul is not arguing with Philemon. He is not threatening or commanding. He is saying, in effect: you have already done this, again and again, for the saints around you. You have refreshed their hearts by your love. Now I am sending you the deepest piece of my own heart, and I am asking you to do for me what you have done for them. Receive Onesimus, and you will refresh my heart in Christ. The appeal will rest on the thanksgiving. The thanksgiving is already preparing for the appeal.

Gathering the Threads

Verses four through seven are the thanksgiving section of the letter to Philemon. They are short. They do not appear, on first reading, to be doing much beyond expressing the gratitude that a Christian writer might be expected to express. But careful attention has shown us several things worth carrying forward.

First, Paul prays for Philemon, and his prayers for Philemon turn into thanksgiving. The God of his thanksgiving is my God: the universal God made personal by the gospel. Prayer in the Lutheran tradition is the response of faith to a God who has first spoken; Paul’s thanksgiving is exactly such a response.

Second, Paul has heard about Philemon’s faith and love. The two virtues are paired in chiastic order: faith toward the Lord Jesus and love for all the saints. The vertical and the horizontal of the Christian life. Faith justifies; love is the fruit of faith; the order matters because the gospel is at stake in the order. This is the structure of the Christian life as the Apology of the Augsburg Confession expounds it in Article IV.

Third, Paul prays that the fellowship of Philemon’s faith would become effective for every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. The verse is difficult, but its drift is clear: the koinonia of faith is meant to do work, to take energetic form in love. The prayer is laying down the ground for the appeal that will follow.

Fourth, Paul has received joy and comfort, even in his chains, from the report of Philemon’s love. The communion of saints is a real fellowship across distance. Paul rejoices in Rome because Philemon loves in Colossae.

Fifth, Paul addresses Philemon directly as brother. The keyword of the letter is now spoken to the man who must hear it. The category that will define Onesimus’s new status is the category Paul uses for Philemon himself.

Sixth, Philemon has refreshed the hearts of the saints. The Greek words σπλάγχνα and ἀναπαύω are deposited here as seeds. They will return when Paul calls Onesimus my very heart (v.12) and asks Philemon to refresh my heart in Christ (v.20). The thanksgiving is the seedbed of the appeal.

The thanksgiving turns, in verse eight, to the appeal proper. Paul has prepared the ground. He has named Philemon as a brother. He has named the saints as those whose hearts Philemon has refreshed. He has prayed for the fellowship of Philemon’s faith to be effective. Now he will ask Philemon to do, for the apostle and for one particular saint named Onesimus, what Philemon has done so often before. The thanksgiving was never an empty courtesy. It was the foundation.

For Discussion

Six questions for individual reflection or for use in a group study. Take your time. The questions are not pretexts for an answer the author has in mind; they are doors into the text.

Paul opens his thanksgiving with I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers. What does it tell us about Paul’s pastoral life that he prays often for Christians far away? What does it tell us about the God he addresses as my God?
Verse five names faith toward the Lord Jesus and love for all the saints. Why does Paul put faith and love in that order, and why does he aim them at those two objects? What goes wrong in the Christian life when the order is reversed?
Verse six speaks of the sharing of your faith (koinonia). Which of the three readings (evangelism, fellowship between believers, participation in Christ) seems to you most likely, and why? How does this verse prepare for the appeal that is coming?
Paul says he has had great joy and encouragement because of Philemon’s love, even in his chains. How does this verse illustrate the doctrine of the communion of saints? How is the joy of one Christian the joy of others?
Paul addresses Philemon directly as brother in verse seven. What weight does that address carry, knowing what will be asked of Philemon a few verses later? Why does Paul deposit the word brother in his thanksgiving before he ever uses it in his appeal?
Σπλάγχνα and ἀναπαύω, the visceral word for hearts and the verb meaning to give rest, will return at verses 12 and 20. How does Paul’s careful repetition of these words shape the letter as a whole? What does it suggest about how he wrote it?

Looking Ahead

In the next session we will turn to verses eight through fourteen, the appeal proper, in which Paul lays before Philemon the request he has been preparing the ground to make. The session contains the moment when Paul names Onesimus for the first time, the moment when Paul refuses to command and chooses to appeal instead, and the moment when Paul tells Philemon that he would have liked to keep Onesimus by his side but is sending him back so that any good Philemon does will be done voluntarily and not by compulsion.

Read Philemon 8–14 before our next session. Watch for the moment when Paul names Onesimus. Watch for how he names him. The names, in Paul, are rarely accidental.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus Christ, who has bound us to Yourself in faith and to one another in love: we give You thanks for the example of Philemon, whose love refreshed the hearts of the saints, and for the example of Paul, who in chains gave thanks for the brother whose love had reached him from far away. Make us such Christians as these. Strengthen our faith toward You, and make our love effective for all the saints. Let the fellowship of our faith become active for every good thing that is in us for Your sake. And when the day comes that another saint needs the refreshment we have received, let us give what You have given us, that the hearts of the saints may be refreshed and Your name be glorified. Amen.