Paul Sent a Runaway Back and Called Him Profitable

A man told me he has a sentence he says before every job interview, and he says it standing in a hallway to nobody.

He says: they already know.

He does it because the alternative is worse. The alternative is sitting down across a desk from somebody being polite, and not knowing whether they have looked, and spending the whole conversation reading a face instead of answering the questions.

His thing is over a decade old. He served what he was given, he has not been near anything like it since, and he has been turned down for work he was overqualified for by people who were kind about it in a way that made it worse.

I do not carry what he carries and I am not going to pretend I do. What I do carry is a version of a public record, and I know the specific feeling of walking into a room where a thing about you arrived first.

There is a whole letter in the New Testament about a man in that position, and it is one page long, and the thing Paul does with the record in it is worth reading closely.

Paul names the record and does not hide it

Onesimus is a slave who has run away from a man called Philemon, and Paul is sending him back with a letter. Here is the sentence.

Which in time past was to thee unprofitable, but now profitable to thee and to me. (Philemon 1:11, King James Version)

In time past was to thee unprofitable. He says it. He does not manage it, minimize it or leave it out. Paul, who is trying to get this man received, names the record in the letter itself.

That matters, because the alternative would have made everything after it worthless. A recommendation that pretends nothing happened is not a recommendation, it is a risk somebody else is taking blind.

And then: but now profitable. The word is a play on the man's own name, which means useful. Paul is doing something almost mischievous: he takes the name the man was given, admits it was not true of him, and then declares it true.

You are being described accurately and named differently in the same sentence. Philemon 1:11 names the record and the new standing side by side. It is the Holy Spirit, 1 Corinthians 6:11 saying but ye are washed, ye are sanctified, by the Spirit of our God, who is named as the one who did what the sentence describes.

What Paul asks for is not leniency

The request in the letter is more surprising than the description.

If thou count me therefore a partner, receive him as myself. (Philemon 1:17)

Receive him as myself. He is not asking Philemon to go easy. He is asking him to transfer the standing of an apostle onto a returned runaway, which is an enormous request and Paul knows it.

And then he goes further and offers to pay: if he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account.

Notice what is happening. The record is not erased in the letter. The debt is not denied. Somebody else's name is put beside it, and the receiving is asked for on the strength of that name rather than on the strength of the man's improvement.

Which is the whole gospel in a business letter, and it is also the practical answer for anybody who cannot get past their own history: the standing you are received on was never going to be your record cleared. It is somebody else's account.

You are received on the strength of a name that is not your own. Philemon 1:17 asks for him to be received as Paul himself, and it is the same Spirit, Romans 8:15 the Spirit of adoption, who makes another name become the ground a person stands on.

The church did not want Paul either

If a person thinks this is easy in practice, Acts records what happened when the man who wrote that letter tried to join a group of believers.

And when Saul was come to Jerusalem, he assayed to join himself to the disciples: but they were all afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple. (Acts 9:26)

They were all afraid of him. All of them. And they were right to be cautious, because he had been arresting people like them within living memory, and some of those people were dead.

It took one man, Barnabas, to take him and bring him to the apostles and tell them the story. One person willing to stand next to him in a room.

So Scripture does not pretend that a record disappears when a person changes. It records years of it not disappearing, and it records the mechanism that finally worked, which was a human being who vouched.

You are not imagining the caution, and Scripture records a whole church having it about an apostle. Acts 9:26 says they were all afraid of him and believed not. It is the Spirit of God, Acts 13:2 separating Barnabas and Saul for the work, who eventually sent out the very two men that scene divided.

And if the record has begun to feel like a sentence you are still serving inside your own head, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. A man rehearsing a hallway sentence before every interview is carrying more than an application, and it does not have to be carried alone.

The name that gets given rather than earned back

There is a line in Isaiah about naming that is aimed at a people whose reputation was ruined.

And the Gentiles shall see thy righteousness, and all kings thy glory: and thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name. (Isaiah 62:2)

Which the mouth of the LORD shall name. The new name is not one the people choose for themselves and it is not a rebranding exercise. It is issued.

And that is the difference between what a person can do about a record and what they cannot. A man cannot make other people stop typing his name into a search field. What he can have is a name that was issued from somewhere those results do not reach.

I want to be plain, because this site does not sell outcomes. That does not get you the job. Some doors stay shut and some stay shut permanently and it is not because anybody failed to believe hard enough. What it changes is what a man is standing on while he walks up to the desk.

You have a name that was issued rather than one you have to win back. Isaiah 62:2 says thou shalt be called by a new name, which the mouth of the LORD shall name. It is His Spirit, Ephesians 1:13 sealing us after we believed, who is named as the seal on the one that was issued.