Obeying in the Lord

When I wrote "obey your parents in the Lord" and then "honor your father and mother" (Ephesians 6:1-2), I did not choose two words carelessly. To obey is the daily thing a child does under a roof; to honor is the weightier thing that outlasts childhood — to reckon your father and mother as heavy, as worthy, as those to whom something is owed. And when I told servants to serve "as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart" (Ephesians 6:6), the phrase behind that is a service done not for the eye of a watching master but from the soul, the way you would work if Christ himself stood in the doorway — for he does.

I take up this same thread in Colossians, where I wrote nearly the same words to children, fathers, servants, and masters (Colossians 3:20-4:1). I press the honor owed to parents again when I remind the young that this is the first commandment carrying a promise (Ephesians 6:2-3, drawing on Exodus 20:12). And the ground under all of it — that masters and slaves stand level before one impartial Judge — I have set down elsewhere: "There is neither slave nor free… for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).

These lines are written into a household, for that is where most of life is lived — under one roof, among fathers and children, masters and those who serve them. The churches in and around Ephesus met in such houses, and the same room held the master who owned and the slave who was owned, now brothers, both eating at one table of the Lord. That was no small thing, and it could easily have curdled into either contempt or rebellion. So I speak to each one in turn, that the gospel might order the very floor they stood on. And I write it, as ever, from within my own house that is not mine, chained to a guard, myself a bondservant with a Master in heaven.

The honest difficulty is plain: I tell servants to obey, and I do not there and then command every master to open the door and set them free. Does the gospel then bless the chain? Read the words again. I strip the master of the very thing that makes him a master — I tell him to stop his threatening, and I set over his head a Master "who shows no partiality" (Ephesians 6:9), before whom he is himself a servant. Put a man under that, and you have not baptized his mastery; you have undone it from the inside. What I planted here, I watered in my letter to Philemon, where I asked him to receive back the slave Onesimus "no longer as a bondservant but… as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). Sit with the tension; do not soften it. The seed is in the soil.