What does the really spiritual life look like? It may surprise you to find that it consists in how husbands and wives, children and fathers, and bosses and employees relate to one another.

Resources:

Colossians 3:18-4:1

The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon, 2nd ed. (PNTC), Douglas Moo

Colossians and Philemon (BECNT)G.K. Beale

Commentary on Galatians-Philemon (Ancient Christian Texts)Ambrosiaster

Colossians (Geneva Commentaries)John Davenant

Sermon Transcript

What does a really spiritual life look like? Peter and Anita Li, members here who lamentably moving this summer (today is their last Sunday I believe), recently told me about a trip they took to Greece, during which they visited the caves of some ascetics. These were people who claimed to be following Christ, and to do so, they isolated themselves in caves without food or water. We could also think of monks who isolate themselves from society to spend their days in prayer and fasting. Or today maybe you’d think of the person who takes a pilgrimage to Tibet or Mecca, or who does things like yoga, meditation, and sensory deprivation baths.

 

The recipients of the letter we’re looking at today had people telling them what the really spiritual life looked like: Observing certain food laws and holy days, rigorous self-discipline, worship of angels and heavenly visions. Surely, whatever the spiritual life is, it doesn’t have much to do with comparatively mundane things like marriage, parenting, and your job. Those are all pretty earthly concerns, it would seem. And at the beginning of Colossians 3, the passage on which we focused last week, we read that we are to set our minds on things above, not on things on earth (3:2).

 

And yet, as the apostle Paul, the author of this letter, goes to explain what a life set on things above looks like, this week we come to instructions about marriage, parenting, and work. In fact, this section has close parallels to the “household codes” that appeared in the ethical treaties of unbelievers in the ancient world who came before Paul, those who definitely did not have their minds set on things above. The Greek philosopher Aristotle described the relations of a household as consisting in a husband and wife, children and parents, and master and slaves. Amazingly, what we’re seeing here is that the truly spiritual life, life in Christ, does not mean a rejection of our earthly relationships, but a redemption of them. The one whose mind is set on things above will not neglect their spouse, their children, or their boss in favor of more “spiritual” pursuits. Rather, their relationship to Christ will shape their earthly relationships. So Let your relationship to Christ shape your earthly relationships, and we’ll look at how it does for husbands and wives, then fathers and children, and then bosses and employees.

 

Husbands and wives

 

Our passage begins by addressing wives, and in doing this it already demonstrates its difference from the ancient household codes. The ancient codes that preceded it addressed only the man as the head of the household, but here we see that in the kingdom of God, the wife also has a part to play in bringing him glory. What is the part God has given wives to play? Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. To submit is to joyfully accept the authority God has given to someone over you. It is to encourage and follow the leadership of such a person. Part of the reason such submission is “fitting in the Lord” is because all Christians have entered into a relationship of submission to Jesus. So before I talk more about this command to wives in particular, I want to zoom out and talk briefly about Jesus’ lordship over all Christians, because it’s so essential to understanding this entire passage. Think about what the name “Lord” means—it’s a reference to God, but it’s a specific way of referring to God that highlights his authority over us. The word behind it appears 7 times in this passage, though it’s translated “master” twice in verse 1 of chapter 4. Think about the good news of our redemption; what is it? “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:13-14). God delivered us from the domain of darkness, from our slavery to sin, Satan, and the world’s value system, and then he didn’t just leave us as sheep with no shepherd; he transferred us into a kingdom with a king, a Lord—his beloved Son.

 

None of us are naturally wired for submission, whether male or female, wife or husband. Since our first parents rejected God’s authority, we’ve inherited from them a nature that wants to assert itself, to be a law unto itself, to never to submit to another. The lie Satan told our first parents that he’s still very successfully perpetuating is that if someone is exercising authority over you, they’re doing it to hold you down, to hurt you. So if you are to be truly happy, you must assert yourself, and never submit yourself to another. Who can you really trust, after all, to act for your good? Only you, Satan says. And so he keeps many in the domain of darkness, many who think they are freely asserting themselves, but who are actually obeying and following his voice. If you are here today and you are not a Christian, might you consider that? Even if all the Satan stuff is a bit much for you, can you see how much you are being led by advertisers, professors, bosses, the family of origin or culture into which you happened to be born? Why are any of them worthy of your submission?

 

Christians submit to Christ above all these things because God has shown us in Christ that his authority is good. What’s the proof that God isn’t just trying to hold us down? It’s that when he had every right, according to justice, to condemn us to hell for our sins, to condemn us to the lowest, most shameful possible position, from his exalted position of authority, he came down, and became not only a human, but a servant, and not only a servant, but a crucified servant, dying the most shameful death imaginable, so that when he was risen from the dead and exalted as Lord, we could be raised with him to the highest glory possible for a creature. A creature can never become the creator—we all had a beginning; he didn’t. He made us; we didn’t make him. He died for our sins; we didn’t die for his. This is not a problem for us to overcome or resent; it’s good news for us to joyfully accept, which we do when we call him what he truly is: Lord. And when we do, we are raised with Christ to the highest possible glory for a creature—to be called sons of God, to be remade in his image, and to appear with him in glory when he appears.

 

If you are still resisting his authority over your life, then of course it is not fitting for you to submit to the other authorities he has placed in your life. But if you are joyfully accepting his authority over your life, it is fitting that you would submit to the other authorities he’s placed in your life. Your relationship to him will shape your earthly relationships. Imagine you trusted the CEO of your company with a full and unshakeable trust, so that you would submit to whatever he said. If he personally hired a new manager to be your supervisor, wouldn’t you then also submit to that supervisor? And so part of the identity of every Christian is that we are submitters. We are those who joyfully accept the authority of Jesus over us, who rules us now by his Word and Spirit. We are those who submit to him. And under him, we find in his word that he commands all Christians to submit to some other humans in some spheres. Elsewhere in the Bible, all Christians are commanded to submit to their government (Rom 13:1) and to the elders of their particular church (1 Pet 5:4, Heb 13:17), for example. Governments are not told to submit to their citizens, and elders are not told to submit to the members of their churches.

 

And so here, wives are told to submit to their husbands, and in the next verse, when husbands are addressed, they are not told to submit to their wives. This is how God designed marriage to function, and Jesus has come not to set up a different kingdom in rebellion against God, but to restore God’s loving authority over us as it was meant to be in the beginning. In the beginning God made the man first, then the woman, and before he created the woman, God gave the man work to do in the garden and the command to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And when they sinned, though in time the narrative in Genesis 3 tells us clearly that the woman ate the forbidden fruit first, the promised curse of death was pronounced on the man, and later scripture makes clear to us that sin entered the world through the man (Rom 5:12-19). What’s that showing us? It’s showing us that God assigned the husband a position of authority over his wife, and the Lord Jesus has come to redeem that arrangement, not to overthrow it.

 

So what is a fitting way for a wife who is in the Lord, who joyfully accepts his authority over her, to treat her husband? Submit to him. Joyfully accept his authority over you. Encourage him in it, and when he tries to exercise his authority by leading you and your family, follow him. He’s not going to get it right every time, and you almost certainly won’t think he’s getting it right all the time, but submission means you follow him even in those times. Submission as long as I agree isn’t submission at all; that’s just agreement. The rubber meets the road when you aren’t sure, when you even think the direction he’s leading may not be the wisest, and you joyfully follow him anyway, because you aren’t ultimately submitting to him; you’re submitting to the Lord who you can always trust to get things right in the end.

 

And since you are ultimately submitting to the Lord, there is a kind of submission to your husband that would not be fitting. To submit to your husband when he leads you to violate a clear command of scripture would not be fitting in the Lord. To submit to your husband when he’s leading you beyond the authority the Lord has given him is not fitting in the Lord. Imagine a husband tells his wife she must walk on all fours whenever she’s in their home. It’s not sinful to walk on all fours—I do it when I’m playing with my kids sometimes. But a husband has no right to require that of his wife. It’s degrading and contrary to the image of God in which she was made, and it would not be fitting in the Lord for a wife to submit to that. And finally, it would not be fitting in the Lord for a wife to submit without contributing her wisdom to her husband. Submission does not equal silence. Your husband needs to know what you are seeing, feeling, and thinking to lead you and your family wisely. And yet it would not be fitting in the Lord for you to then accuse him of not listening to you or caring about you if he honestly weighs what you share and chooses to lead in a different direction than you would if God had put you in authority.

 

Wives, is submission to your husband on your radar as something for which you’re striving? It is worth noting that in this verse, wives are only commanded to do one thing in their marriage to let their relationship to Christ shape this earthly relationship: Submit to their husbands. This isn’t the only thing the whole New Testament says to wives about how to relate to their husbands, and there is much more to every married Christian’s life than their relationship with their spouse, but submission is the main thing the New Testament tells wives to do toward their husbands. I counted three other places in the New Testament wives are specifically addressed, and in every one of them they are told to submit to their husbands (Eph 5:22-24, Titus 2:5, 1 Peter 3:1). I get why to those who are not in the Lord, this seems weird and perhaps dangerous, but sometimes even we who are in the Lord can talk about a wife’s submission to her husband like it’s the part of the Bible for which we have to apologize. We say, “yes it says submit, but…” and then kill it with a thousand qualifications so that wives come away thinking the main thing God wants them to do in the marriage is keep their husband in check, when what God actually says in Colossians 3:18 and every other passage addressing wives is clearly not that. It’s, “Submit to your husband.” Yes there are qualifications and I’ve covered them, but no submission to your husband is not a bad thing to feel a bit sheepish about. This would be a great thing to ask a married woman if you are in a discipling relationship with her: “How are you doing submitting to your husband?” Sisters, encourage one another in this. It is fitting in the Lord.

 

What, then, is fitting in the Lord for husbands? Let’s notice first what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say, “Keep your wife in submission” or “assert your authority.” I’m not saying there’s never a time for a husband to gently confront his wife if he’s observing a lack of submission in her, but if you’re regularly having to tell your wife to submit to you, something is wrong in your marriage. Church leaders get a command like Titus 2:15 – “Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you”; husbands never do. Husbands are the head of their wives by God’s appointment in creation; in that sense, they are the head of their family, whether they assert themselves to be or not. So rather than command husbands to assert their authority, God tells them what to do with it in verse 19: Husbands, love your wives. Jonathan Edwards defined love as that affection whereby one is dear to another, and I think that’s right. So yes, husbands, this verse is commanding a certain heart affection toward your wife, that she would be dear to you, and can you see why that would be fitting in the Lord? Is it not the case that to Jesus, our Lord, we are dear to him? Why else would he have shed his blood for us, why else would he intercede for us now, why else would he come again to take us with him, that we may be with him forever?

 

An affection isn’t something you can just go do, but it is something you can cultivate by what you do. Husbands, how might you cultivate the affection of love for your wife? A few ideas: First, pray for her. And when you pray for her, start by giving thanks for the many ways in which you see God’s grace at work in her. The fact that any of us who deserve God’s wrath even have a wife is a miracle of God’s grace. On top of that, many of us have excellent wives; I certainly do. Thank God for them, and pray for them, less for God to fix the stuff in them you don’t like, and more for God to fill them with the fruit of his Spirit. Second, praise her. Proverbs 31:30 tells us that a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised—take those things you thanked God about for her in prayer and say them to her. Pray for her, praise her, and third: Spend time with her. 1 Peter 3:7 commands husbands to live with their wives in an understanding way, and I’ll say more about understanding next, but first just notice that it does command husbands to live with their wives. Be with them. Don’t waste your life on your career, your hobbies, or your buddies. Then when you’re with her, live with her in an understanding way—get to know her, and let her get to know you. Pastor Matt Smethurst commends the use of this question for husbands to ask their wives: “How’s your heart?” Draw out her inner life, and let her into yours. And finally, give your body to her. Show physical affection to her, rather than just requesting, or worse, demanding, physical affection from her.

 

Those are all just ideas for cultivating the affection of love, but when verse 19 tells husbands to love their wives, it doesn’t just command the affection—it also commands the actions that flow from that affection. Loving actions are those that genuinely benefit the one loved, actions that serve the other’s ultimate good as God has defined good, often at the expense of one’s own private interests. Sometimes you do things that only directly benefit you—you brush your teeth, you exercise, you read a book you enjoy, but you want those things to be a lower priority for you than actions that directly benefit your wife. As you set your mind on things above, not on things that are on earth, those things become less important anyway. Be the kind of husband who talks to his wife instead of watching the show, who vacuums the floor and wipes the table instead of relaxing on the couch, and who goes to bed with his wife instead of staying up later to finish the game. Give your private interests the leftover time.

 

And consider her private interests! In Chad and Emily Van Dixhoorn’s excellent book on marriage, Chad mentions three things he tries to sacrifice his private interests to empower his wife to do: Study her Bible, exercise, and get enough sleep. Many of us husbands do these things for ourselves—are we intentional about promoting them in our wives’ lives? If you’re growing in some way, are you intentional about leading your wife in the same kind of growth? Husbands, love your wives.

 

And, do not be harsh with them. Where positively we are commanded to love our wives, the opposite of such love is harshness. One of the great temptations of sinners in positions of authority is to use that authority harshly. Husbands are harsh with their wives when they make unreasonable demands of their wives. I doubt any of you have actually demanded that your wife walk on all fours, but what about the husband who demands his wife sacrifice her sleep and health to care for their children while he indulges his hobbies? Husbands are harsh with their wives when they frequently and severely criticize their wives. Instead of covering smaller faults, overlooking offenses, and interpreting her actions charitably, husbands are harsh when they read their wife’s actions in the worst possible light, and exaggerate the wrongs done when a wrong has occurred. Worse yet, husbands are harsh with their wives when they insult their wives, threaten their wives, or try to isolate their wives from her friends or family. And perhaps most obviously and heinously, husbands are harsh with their wives when they physically harm their wives. Husbands, do not be harsh with your wives.

 

And wives, if you are facing some of that more severe harshness that we’d call abuse today, please know that you have the right to protect yourself. Myself or our other elder here would be happy to talk to you, and we would not blame you, shame you, or take your husband’s side if he is abusing you. Not all sin is abuse, or else every wife and husband in this room would be guilty of abuse. But a persistent, unrepentant pattern that aims especially to control or manipulate another is serious sin that can rightly lead to church discipline and even divorce. It is certainly not fitting in the Lord, for it is the exact opposite of how he exercises his Lordship over his people, who are dear to him.

 

Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Wives, it is not your job to make sure your husband is loving you and not being harsh with you. Husbands, it is not your job to make sure your wife is submitting to you. Wives, it is your job to submit to your husband, and husbands, it is your job to love your wife and not be harsh with her. These are not just abstract ideals—these are what fits for those who are living in joyful submission to the Lord Jesus. Let’s look next at what is fitting for fathers and children.

 

Fathers and children

 

Here children are addressed first, and children are told to obey their parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Obedience is a tick stronger than submission. Kids in the room, I imagine you have a pretty good idea of what it means. Different parents may summarize it in different ways, but I think a fair summary of the Bible’s teaching on obedience is that it means doing what you are told right away, all the way, and with a happy heart. Obedience means doing what you are told right away, because if you do not, what does that indicate? Between the time the command is given and the time you do it, you are still operating as though you are in authority over yourself. In that time, you are doing what you want, not what your parents commanded you to do, and therefore you are disobeying. I know it’s tempting to want to finish the thing you are doing, but obedience means stopping when you are told to stop, even when it doesn’t get done. If your parents tell you to go get dressed and you instead of doing it right away you say, “but I just need to finish this,” that’s disobedient.

 

Obedience means doing what you are told right away, and it means doing it all the way—so if your parents tell you to put your clothes in the laundry, and you kind of pick up a pair of shorts by your pinky, walk backwards, and toss them toward the hamper but don’t actually put them in, what does that reveal? It reveals that your heart is still disobeying, and you’re just doing the bare minimum to preserve the appearance of doing what you are told, and that is not genuine obedience. Genuine obedience entails picking up the clothes with both hands, walking with an intentional pace toward the hamper, and placing them directly into it.

 

And finally, genuine obedience means doing what you are told with a happy heart. If you stomp, growl, or say something like, “Why are you always making me stop what I’m doing to put my clothes in the laundry?!” that is not obedience, even if you technically do what you are told, because again, what does it reveal? It reveals a heart that is still rebelling. Obedience looks more like, “ok mommy” or “ok daddy,” and then doing what you were told right away and all the way.

 

Now kids, I realize obedience does not come naturally to you. You were born with the same heart that your parents and I were, that wires us against submission. And that is why you too need the Lord Jesus to renew your heart. That is why you need to be delivered from the domain of darkness and transferred into his kingdom. It’s only when that happens that you will know the joy of submission to God’s loving authority, and though you will still have to fight the sin that remains in you, you will want to submit to your parents’ loving authority. If that desire to obey your parents out of obedience to the Lord, and the desire to kill the sin that remains in you isn’t there, then you should not assume that you have been transferred from the domain of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son. You were not born into the Lord, and your parents can’t put you into the Lord by bringing you to church and teaching you the Bible, as much as they must do that. You must personally receive Christ Jesus the Lord by faith, and you are never too young to do that.

 

To you kids who have, do you see how obedience to your parents is fitting in the Lord? Verse 20 goes further: It says it is pleasing to the Lord when you obey your parents in everything, not just in the things you happen to agree with. We know this pleases the Lord because when God gave the ten commandments to summarize what it was like to live with him as your God, he included one specifically on honoring your father and mother. And once again we see that Jesus did not come to overturn that arrangement, but to redeem it. Do you believe the Lord Jesus shed his blood for you? Do you believe he’s reigning over you for your good now? Obey your parents in everything, for this pleases him. Above pleasing other kids, your teachers, or your siblings, make it your aim to please the Lord, and so obey your parents.

 

Next to be addressed are fathers. Though children are commanded to obey both their parents in verse 20, in verse 21 only fathers are addressed. This is once again because God has appointed the husband or father to be the head of the home. Of course, there’s plenty for mothers to also learn and apply from verse 21, but fathers are addressed because they bear primary responsibility before God for the parenting of their children. Think about it: If a mother is provoking her children, her husband can lead her not to do so, and she ought to submit to him as his wife. But if a father is provoking his children, a wife cannot call him to submit to her. So God addressed fathers directly with the expectation that they will lead their wives in the same direction, and that their wives will submit to them, as they were just commanded to do.

 

The command to fathers in this case is a purely negative one: Do not provoke your children. Other passages give more positive commands to fathers, but here we just get the prohibition. As husbands are prone to abuse their authority in harshness to their wives, fathers are prone to abuse their authority by provoking their children. Ironically, fathers often provoke their children because they’re too lazy to do the hard work of wise parenting. The biblically wise approach of a patient and consistent use of the rod and reproof (Prov 29:15) requires diligence (Prov 13:24), so instead of it, sin inclines fathers to a see-saw between passivity and anger. Fathers provoke their children to anger when they yell a command at them from the other room, and when the child doesn’t obey right away, all the way, and with a happy heart, the father gets angry with them and disciplines them. Should the child have obeyed? Yes, but you also put them in a situation which was likely to provoke disobedience by making it much harder for them to obey. And why? Because going to them, getting their attention, looking them in the eye, and issuing the command would have meant effort on your part.

 

Or consider my earlier example of a child wanting to finish what they’re doing before obeying. They shouldn’t do that, but dads, consider this: How do you like it when someone interrupts you and stops what you were working on to demand something else of you? When possible, you’ll often better promote obedience if you say something like, “hey I see you’re working on your coloring book. Feel free to finish the page you’re on, but then I want you to head upstairs to get dressed.” That won’t always be possible and the times when it isn’t will enable your kids to learn obedience in a deeper way, but in general you want to encourage them toward obedience, not provoke them to disobedience by making obedience unnecessarily harder. Another way fatherly laziness can provoke a child is when you haven’t been consistent to discipline them, but one day, when you’ve finally “had it,” you decide to enforce consequences. You’d trained the child to expect that disobedience didn’t involve any consequences, and now you give them to him? What’s that going to do? Provoke him.

 

Fathers can also provoke their children when discipline becomes less about loving the child and more about getting revenge. This happens when consequences are arbitrary or excessive: “You didn’t clean your room? Fine, I’m not taking you to the game you were looking forward to going to this Sunday.” And much like harshness to your wife, it can happen through verbal threats, insults, or harsh correction: “You always do this,” “Your brother never disobeys like this,” “You’re such a wimp.” Fathers, never speak to your children like that. Your Lord doesn’t speak to you like that. Set your mind on him, and let your relationship to him shape your parenting. If you don’t, your children will not become more obedient; they will become discouraged, verse 21 says. Eventually they will just give up trying to please you and retreat into themselves or act out in overt rebellion.

 

Do you see how this way of children treating parents and parents treating children makes sense if we have been raised with Christ, if we have been transferred into his kingdom? In his kingdom, children happily obey parents out of submission to Christ, and fathers do not provoke their children. Let’s look last, then, at how our relationship to Christ should shape the earthly relationship between bosses and employees.

 

Bosses and employees

 

You no doubt notice that the text in front of us doesn’t use the words “boss” and “employee”—it uses the words “bondservants” and “masters.” Slavery was the common practice of the ancient world and really even of the modern world until it was abolished in England in the 1800s under the leadership of evangelical Christians. Greco-Roman slavery was also different from American slavery—it was not race-based, families were not ordinarily separated, slaves could be educated, the slaves obviously worshiped in the same churches as their masters, as the address here implies, but that’s not to say it was a good thing. While we can find marriage and even male headship within it in God’s creation that he called very good, we don’t find slavery there. Nor do we find any defense of the institution in the Bible like we find in defense of marriage in a passage like Ephesians 5. To the contrary, scripture forbids manstealing (1 Tim 1:10) and Paul tells slaves that if they can get their freedom, they should (1 Cor 7:21).

 

Nonetheless, not all slaves could get their freedom and uprooting a system that was baked into the society isn’t something that could happen quickly. So Paul says there is a way for slaves to let their relationship to Christ shape their earthly relationship to their master even without gaining their freedom, and once again we see that it is by obedience. Now, we thankfully don’t still live under the institution of slavery in America, but since slavery was an arrangement centered on labor, the best place to still apply it is to bosses and employees. Employees, you should do what your boss tells you to do.

 

In fact, in many ways you have more reasons to obey your boss. Whereas a slave might be taken into slavery against their will, you chose your job! And when you did, you agreed to abide by the reporting structure of that company. You willingly put yourself under the authority of that employer, and your day-to-day work should reflect that. But ultimately, even a slave was bound to obey their master as long as they remained in that state, because neither a slave nor an employee, if they are in Christ, ultimately works for their master or employer. The end of verse 24 tells us that in the seemingly mundane work we do for our employers, we are actually serving the Lord Christ. Isn’t that amazing? Where the false teachers in Colossae had been calling the Colossians to a higher and deeper spirituality involving angelic visions, Paul says here that if you really want to set your mind on things above and serve the Lord who is enthroned above, you obey your boss on earth.

 

And you do it, verse 22 says, not by way of eye-service, as a people pleaser, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. To obey by way of eye-service, as a people pleaser, is to obey only when the boss is watching, to do what it takes to stay employed or get the next promotion, but not really to serve your boss. Pastor Ed Moore, a pastor in New York City, once told a story about a job he had as a teenager painting houses with his brother. One time he got up on a ladder to paint a window high up on the wall of a house, which was under the soffit of the roof. He painted the visible window frame, the bottom, and the two sides, and then he thought: “Nobody’s going to see the top of this thing,” so he took his bucket and paintbrush and descended the ladder. When he got to the bottom, his brother asked him, “Did you paint the window?” and he said, “yes,” and his brother asked, “all of it?” and he said, “Well no I didn’t paint the top, but I don’t think even a bird could see that, let alone a human.” His brother said nothing, took the paint and the brush, climbed the ladder, and painted the top of the window. He came back down, put the paint and the brush down, and said, “Eddie boy, God sees the top of that window.”

 

What was his point? His point was even when it comes to painting houses, if you are in Christ, if you have been raised with Christ, you work for him. That’s what gives all work meaning. Unless your job requires you to sin, like you work at a strip club or sell drugs for a living, in which case you need to quit that job, but unless you have a job like that, if you are in Christ, you do work for the Lord Jesus Christ when you go to work. Does it really make sense for you to do anything less than work heartily at it, as verse 23 says, given what he has done for you, given what he is now doing in you, and given what he promises to do to you when he comes again in glory? Look at what verse 24 says he will do: It is from the Lord that you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

 

The inheritance there, as it is throughout the Bible, is the inheritance of a new heavens and new earth. Where one of the key differences between a slave and a son in the ancient world is that the slave received no inheritance, here a better inheritance than any earthly master can give is promised to those who work heartily for their heavenly master. This doesn’t mean our good works merit that inheritance, but they are a subordinate condition of it, as true faith in Christ does produce good works, and the thing to notice here is that those works are not just the “good works” we might typically think of—praying, gathering for worship, giving to the poor, taking the gospel to a foreign nation. They are also the works you do when you go to your job insofar as you do them unto the Lord. To the degree you do, Jesus receives them as done unto him, and promises to reward those who do them.

 

Remember verse 17, the verse just before this passage, told us to do everything, whatever we do, in word or deed, in the name of the Lord Jesus. Christians can so easily get bored with their lives—they think, “All I do is love my wife, feed my kids, and go to work,” but do you see that if you do those things unto the Lord, he does not view them as a boring waste of time?! What difference would it make to your work, or even your day, if you woke up every morning believing that you were going to work for Jesus that day? No doubt you would work hard, as our text says. Might you also work more peacefully, more joyfully? The demands of an earthly boss can be fickle, the work may feel beyond your ability, and you may worry about how people will evaluate it. But Jesus is a gracious master who is more concerned with your heart in your work than your output. You may not be the most skillful or successful employee in your field, but if you work heartily at whatever you do, Jesus, your ultimate master, is pleased with it. Do you believe that about your job, or do you subtly think you need to do something bigger and better? Why?

 

Not only will Jesus reward the one who works heartily unto him; he will repay the wrongdoer, verse 25 says. Jesus is a just judge, no less than his Father, and with him there is no partiality. If you claim to be his while you persist in cheating your boss out of the work you owe him, your works reveal that you don’t actually accept Jesus as your Lord and savior, and so you will meet him as your judge. And that applies not only to the bondservant, but to the master, who is finally addressed in chapter 4, verse 1: Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.

 

To treat a servant or employee justly means to obey what God commands as far as how we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is easy for bosses to feel exempt from this because they are in a position of authority, but you owe your employees love as much as you owe it to anyone. You owe it to your employees to pray for them, tell them the truth, seek their good, guard their purity, respect their property, and honor their name. You owe them kindness. And, verse 1 says you owe them fairness. If you have agreed to pay them a certain wage, you owe it to them, and you owe it to them to pay them a fair wage. If you have committed to them a certain mount of paid time off, don’t make it impossible for them to use it. If you demand extra hours of them, consider ways to give them extra compensation either in terms of time or money. Don’t play favorites among your employees because one of them happens to be your friend.

 

If you are in Christ, this is what makes sense as one who also has a master in heaven. If you were at the top of the org chart, perhaps you’d feel free to use your position to your own advantage, come what may of the employees under you. But in the kingdom of Christ, whatever position you may hold here on earth, you are never at the top of the org chart. Christians are those who have died and risen again with Christ. Who we were on earth is now dead, and yet we still have a life to live on earth. Wives still have husbands, husbands still have wives, children still have parents, fathers still have children, employees still have bosses, bosses still have employees, and the one who truly sets their mind on things above will not try to escape, demonize, or neglect such relationships. Rather, now that our truest self, our new self, risen with Christ, is hidden with him in God, we let our relationship to Christ shape all our earthly relationships, whether husband or wife, parent or child, boss or employee. Let it shape yours.