I take great joy and encouragement in your love, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the saints.For we have much joy and comfort in your love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you, brother.For we have great joy and consolation in thy love, because the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee, brother.For I had much joy and comfort in thy love, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through thee, brother.
3 sermons cite this verse
… for the sake of Christ. For I have derived much joy and comfort from your love, my brother, because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you. 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. 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. Formerly, he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me. I am sending him back to you, sending my very heart. I would have been glad to keep him with me in order that he might serve me on your behalf during my imprisonment for the gospel. But I prefer to do nothing without your consent in order that your goodness might not be by compulsion, but of your own accord. For this, perhaps, is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever. …
… which is in you in Christ Jesus. For we have great joy and consolation in your love because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed by you, brother. And sometimes my wife will be talking on the phone. She'll be having a phone conversation. And I obviously, I can't hear the entire conversation, but I've been with my wife for 15 years. So I can kind of, I can understand her vocal tone pretty well, especially when it's like, oh, this is a juicy phone call. Like there's some details that are being shared that I want to hear about when this call is over. But again, the issue is at the moment, I'm only hearing half of the conversation. I don't know what the other person is actually saying. When we read these epistles in the New Testament, Philemon, Ephesians, Colossians, we are reading half of a conversation. There was a conversation that was happening, but only half of it was preserved as inspired scripture. So what we have to do when we are reading this, when we're studying the epistles in the New Testament, we have to do our best to reconstruct the probable circumstances that led to this letter being written. …
… and comfort from your love my brother because the hearts of the saints have been refreshed through you I want some benefit from you in the Lord refresh my heart in Christ and this language of refreshment is significant when one of the only places this language is used is in Matthew 11 28 famous passage if you know Matthew 11 28 where Jesus says come to me all who are burdened all who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest same word refreshment come to me Jesus says I will give you refreshment. And what I take this to mean is that one of the ways in which Jesus gives the rest, that Jesus gives the refreshment to our souls, one of those key ways is through other people. This can be surprising. Sometimes we take other Christians so for granted. Or we focus just on the hard parts of it. the quirks the idiosyncrasies the challenges of church life because we can be really different in the church we just got this thing in common Jesus it's such a good thing when really different people who wouldn't get together may not get along otherwise get together because of Jesus Jesus looks really good when that happens But we're different. …