3. Good will and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ are yours!
4. ⌊Philemon,⌋ I always thank my God when I mention you in my prayers because
5. I hear about your faithfulness to the Lord Jesus and your love for all of God’s people.
6. As you share the faith you have in common with others, I pray that you may come to have a complete knowledge of every blessing we have in Christ.
7. Your love ⌊for God’s people⌋ gives me a lot of joy and encouragement. You, brother, have comforted God’s people.
8. Christ makes me bold enough to order you to do the right thing.
9. However, I would prefer to make an appeal on the basis of love. I, Paul, as an old man and now a prisoner for Christ Jesus,
10. appeal to you for my child Onesimus [Useful]. I became his spiritual father here in prison.
11. Once he was useless to you, but now he is very useful to both of us.
12. I am sending him back to you. This is like sending you a part of myself.
13. I wanted to keep him here with me. Then he could have served me in your place while I am in prison for spreading the Good News.
14. Yet, I didn’t want to do anything without your consent. I want you to do this favor for me out of your own free will without feeling forced to do it.
15. Maybe Onesimus was gone for a while so that you could have him back forever—
16. no longer as a slave but better than a slave—as a dear brother. He is especially dear to me, but even more so to you, both as a person and as a Christian.