INTRODUCTION
Please turn in your Bibles to Colossians 3:22-4:1.
We are continuing our study of the letter to the Colossians. In verse 17 where Paul said that we are to do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, which means to do it in a manner that is influenced by the gospel of Jesus Christ and which draws attention and honor to him.
We’ve looked at passages where Paul has applied this command to our marriages and our parenting. Today we look at the third and final relationship that Paul says must be lived in the name of the Lord Jesus. That is the relationship between a slave and a master. In the first century Greco-Roman world when this was written, it was common for a household to have one or more slaves doing work. And because Paul is addressing relationships particularly within the home, he addresses this common relationship of the time as well.
We’re going to have to address the issue of slavery and how this relates to our modern context. But let’s begin by reading the passage and then let’s pray for the Lord to bless the preaching and hearing of his word.
READ COLOSSIANS 3:22-4:1 / PRAY
We need to answer two questions before we can start to apply this passage to our 21st Century experience. Here is the first question.
1. Why is slavery regulated in this text rather than condemned?
Paul wrote to slave-owners who are Christians, “Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly.” He gives guidance on how a Christian slave holder should treat his slave, rather than condemning the practice of slavery.
And that creates some difficulty for believers who read God’s word. Isn’t slavery a bad thing? Isn’t this letter to the church of Colossae a good opportunity for Paul to say to Christian slave owners something like this: “Masters, free your slaves. Only God owns the world and the people in it, so you should not be playing God by owning someone. The gospel is about freedom from slavery, so demonstrate that by giving your slaves their freedom.”
Wouldn’t that be a good thing for Paul to say here? The fact that he doesn’t say that can be perplexing to believers. And some who want to disbelieve the Scriptures use this as an opportunity to criticize the Bible and Christianity as hypocritical or even immoral.
So what’s the answer? Why did Paul regulate slavery rather than condemn it in this passage?
Here’s why. It’s because God regulates undesirable relationships without approving of them as permanent ideals. It’s a fact of our fallen humanity that we enter into all sorts of situations and relationships that are not according to God’s perfect will. Sometimes these are forced on us. Sometimes we pursue them. And God in his grace provides guidance on how to honor him in the midst of difficult circumstances that are not easily changed or even beyond our control.
Let me give you an example. We know from Ephesians chapter 5 that God’s will for marriage is that a man and a woman honor God together by showing a picture of Christ and the church in their marriage. The wife demonstrates the church’s submission to Christ by submitting to her husband. The husband demonstrates Christ’s love for the church by loving his wife. Both husband and wife are to be motivated by the gospel in their marriage.
Now take a husband and wife who are unbelievers. The wife becomes a Christian. Now she sees what marriage is supposed to be about, but she knows she can’t have God’s ideal for marriage as long as her husband remains unsaved. So should she divorce her unbelieving husband so she can find a believing husband and seek God’s ideal?
Well, God answers that question. 1 Corinthians 7:13 If any woman has a husband who is an unbeliever, and he consents to live with her, she should not divorce him.
God regulates an undesirable state of affairs. She should remain in the marriage and honor God by submitting to her husband in everything that is not sin. By giving that regulation God isn’t saying that marriage between believers and unbelievers is his will. He isn’t giving Christian singles a reason to marry a non-believer. He’s simply providing guidance on how a woman can honor Christ in the midst of a situation that isn’t ideal but is beyond her control.
And so it is with slavery. In the first century Greco-Roman world, slavery was part of the fabric and economy of the empire. And if a slave-owner became a Christian, freeing his slave may not be easily done and may not be the best thing for the slave. He might free his slave but the slave has nowhere to go and has no means to provide for himself or his family if he has one. Or the slave may end up the slave of someone else who is a cruel taskmaster and his condition is only worsened.
So what do you do if you become a Christian as a slave-owner and you want to honor the Lord and do what’s best for the slave? God provides an answer in verse 1. You treat him justly and fairly.
And hopefully there will come a time when you can free him, because slavery is not God’s will. We know that from 1 Timothy 1:10, where Paul lists “enslavers” as those whose ways are not in accordance with the gospel.
God regulates undesirable relationships without approving them as permanent ideals. He’s gracious to give us guidance in non-ideal circumstances that are not easily changed. That answers the first question about slavery. Here is the second question.
2. What do commands to slaves and slave-owners have to do with us today?
Nobody in this room is a slave or a master of a slave. And that’s as it should be. So does this passage have anything to say to us? Are there any principles here that transfer to our lives?
Yes there are. It would be simple to say that the modern application to this passage is how employees relate to employers. So the commands to slaves are commands for workers, and the command to masters is the command to bosses. And that would be a right application, especially if you are in a job where you feel like you are “slaving away for the man.” You have no trouble identifying with the slaves and you may wish your boss was here to listen to his part about justice and fairness!
But this passage applies to more than just the jobs we get paid for. It applies to our relationship with anyone who is an ‘earthly master’ as verse 22 calls them. Earthly masters are those people who have a legitimate right to ask us to do something and we have a legitimate responsibility to do it for them.
So that includes situations like…
• Serving on a ministry team at WGD because you agreed to do it and a leader asks you to do things.
• Doing your chores as a child or teen because that’s been assigned by your parents.
• Caring for an ailing mother in her senior years because nobody else can do it and you want to honor your father and mother.
• Keeping your sidewalk shoveled because your homeowners association requires you to.
• Carrying out your commander’s orders because you’re in the military.
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The principles in this text are principles for Christian service in general. By Christian service I mean the responsibilities that a believer fulfills because he is a follower of Christ. The serving that a believer is to give is to be carried out in a certain manner, and with a certain motivation. And when it is done according to that manner and that motivation, then it is worship.
So let’s explore these principles of Christian service, beginning with…
1. THE MANNER OF CHRISTIAN SERVICE
Christian service is to be complete. That is to say, we are to do all that is our responsibility to do if we are able to do it.
This comes from verse 22, “Obey in everything those who are your earthly masters”. It is understood that “in everything” does not include anything that is sinful, for God would not have us follow anyone into sin. But “in everything” does mean “everything that is not sin.” When we have a responsibility to serve in some kind of role—be it your job, your position on a ministry team, your responsibilities in the home—then God’s will is that we do all that is asked of us if we have the ability to do it.
Now every one of us has jobs or roles where the number of things to do exceeds the time we have to do it. Nobody gets his to-do list done except God. We’re all limited both by our capacity and by our sin in what we can accomplish. This isn’t about becoming superhuman, and learning how to make more bricks with no straw.
This is about being a faithful and reliable servant—in the home, on the job, and in the many other roles we serve in. It’s about being the kind of person that our earthly masters trust to get things done that need to be done—whether that’s mom or dad, your boss, your ministry team leader, or anyone else who has a legitimate authority for you.
An example of this is the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. You’ll remember that a man went on a journey and he entrusted his property to his three servants. He gave five talents (a huge sum of money) to one servant, two talents to another and one talent to a third. And he expected a return on that money, that they would increase it by investing and trading.
When he returned the first two servants had been obedient and had doubled the master’s money. But the third servant didn’t do anything with it because he didn’t like his master, calling him a hard man, reaping where [he] did not sow. So the master called him a wicked and slothful servant. He wasn’t faithful or reliable. He didn’t do what was asked of him. His service wasn’t complete.
So here’s the question for us. What characterizes our service to others? Would those whom we serve say of us that we are faithful and reliable? Do they expect that we’ll get the job done that they ask us to do, or do we have a reputation as a person who can’t be trusted to do what’s asked? Do we gravitate only to the tasks we like, to the ones that aren’t boring or unpleasant and leave those tasks for someone else to do?
The serving that Christians do is to be complete. We’re to be reliable and faithful to fulfill our responsibilities to those who have legitimate authority to ask us to do things.
Christian service is also to be wholehearted. This comes from verse 23. Whatever you do, work heartily. Our service to others is to be done with a will, putting some energy into it, being internally motivated to do it. We’re not to be half-hearted, lazy, or disinterested. If someone has a legitimate claim on our service, then God’s will for us is to do it wholeheartedly.
Proverbs 10:26 shows the negative example that we’re to avoid. Like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, so is the sluggard to those who send him. The sluggard is the exact opposite of wholeheartedness. He’s given a job to do but he’s lazy, he’s slow, he’s dragging his feet, he’s almost certainly going to get distracted along the way because he’s really not that motivated to do the job he was sent for; he’s not as concerned about how it turns out as the person who sent him. And as the Proverb says, he’s like smoke to the eyes of those who send him. He pains the earthly masters who are counting on him.
In contrast we’re to be wholehearted in our service. To take up the cause of the person we are serving; to own it for ourselves. And when we do that, we are really benefiting our earthly masters.
In a former job, I supervised some technicians in my department which was weapons element. One technician in particular demonstrated this wholehearted manner of service. I could hand him a project, and I knew that he would own that project. He would go after it and do even more than what was asked. I didn’t have to keep prodding him to get it done or send him reminders. He was internally motivated to do it. He was not smoke to the eyes of those who sent him, & he earned the respect of those around him.
Christian service is to be like that. It’s to be wholehearted. And one more thing is mentioned about the manner of our service. Christian service is to be impartial.
This applies primarily to those who are the earthly masters requesting the service—the business owners, the bosses, the team leaders, the parents. The way you serve those who are serving you is in chapter 4 verse 1: Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly. Remember, the people who do work for you are not your slaves. But the principles apply to you. These two words justly and fairly are closely related and together they describe impartial treatment.
The application if you are in a position of authority over others is to not have double standards, preferring some people over others because of superficial distinctions like their personality, skin color, or whether they are related to you or not.
Earthly masters are not to reward one person’s work but not another who does the same work. Neither are they to penalize one worker for wrongdoing but not another. Neither are they to keep changing the rules of how they deal with people. They are to treat others according to known and fair standards, just as they would want to be treated themselves.
A classic example of what not to do is to be like Denethor, the steward of Gondor in the Lord of the Rings. He had two sons, Boromir and Faramir. Boromir could do no wrong in his eyes and Faramir could do no right, even though he was a man of quality. Denethor treated them differently.
Christian service is to be impartial and even-handed for those in authority. And Christian service is to be complete and wholehearted for our earthly masters. That is the manner of how we do what we do for those with legitimate authority in our lives. Now, if the conviction meter is starting to creep into the red zone, hang on, encouragement is coming at the end. But let’s move on to the topic of motivation first. Let’s consider…
2. THE MOTIVATION FOR CHRISTIAN SERVICE
If we said nothing more about how we serve others, we wouldn’t have said anything distinctly Christian yet. There are plenty of non-believers who are reliable and wholehearted workers, who are impartial employers and leaders. The technician who worked for me had all those qualities in her work ethic. It isn’t distinctly Christian to do those things.
But the motivation for serving this way is what makes all the difference. For our service to be truly Christian, for it to be service in the name of the Lord Jesus, it has to be motivated by something more than just the desire for a paycheck, or to please ourselves, or to please others.
I think we can summarize the biblical motive as this: to please the Lord. I take that from verse 22. “Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.”
The godly alternative to being a people-pleaser is to be a Lord-pleaser. It’s to be motivated to serve completely, wholeheartedly and impartially because that is your heavenly Master’s will for you, not just your earthly master’s will for you. Verse 1 says “you also have a Master in heaven.” That is the Master that we ultimately are to please if we are believers in Christ.
There is a pleasure that God takes in us inherently as sons and daughters who have placed trust in Christ and who are joined to Christ by faith. But there is also pleasure that we give to God when we do what we do because of our love and devotion to Christ, who is a most loving Master, one who has gone so far as to lay down his life for us.
Verse 24 says you are serving the Lord Christ. That is both a statement of fact and an exhortation to work with the motive to serve Christ and do that which pleases him. It means that behind every authority in your life or mine stands the heavenly Authority who is working his will in our lives and in the world through those earthly authorities. It is Christ who has assigned to us these tasks, whether it’s programming a computer, caring for babies in the intensive care ward, bookkeeping, taking out the garbage, running the sound board, driving your ailing mom to the hospital, hammering a nail and a thousand other occupations and services.
Whatever you do… the Scripture says, do it as for the Lord. Do it out of love to Christ and devotion to Christ who is your true Master. What you’ve been given to do may seem pointless and unproductive. But nothing is pointless and unproductive if you do it as an act of obedience to the Lord. You are serving the Lord, who was himself willing to do seemingly pointless things like wash dirt out of his disciples’ toes.
It’s probably worth inserting here that this doesn’t mean you never change jobs or bring to an end something you signed up for by way of service. This isn’t just a ‘grin and bear it’ mentality we’re talking about, where we just have to accept our lot in life and stay in a dead-end job till we drop. No, it could be that the job you’re doing now isn’t where God wants you to be long term; that it’s just for a season. There’s no reason not to pursue something else that may make better use for your gifting and abilities.
But this is speaking to the motivation for why we do what we do today and tomorrow and the next day.
Are we doing it just to earn a paycheck? Are we doing it just by way of eye-service, meaning we mainly work hard just when people are watching but when they aren’t we do something else? Are we serving as people-pleasures, only interested in praise? Is there any difference between why you work at your desk and why the non-Christian in the cubicle next to you is working at his desk?
Christian service is different than non-Christian service because the motivation is to please the Lord by being faithful to do what he has called us to do.
And that can be hard to do sometimes. Especially if you are working for an unjust boss, or for a company that doesn’t reward your hard work, or you serve faithfully on a team or at home and it doesn’t get noticed or commended. That’s the kind of situation Paul especially has in mind in this passage because his immediate counsel is to real slaves, people who in that culture were often at the mercy of difficult masters.
And so Paul gives the Christian slaves of Colossae and us two encouragements to persevere in working wholeheartedly for the Lord at our work, our home, our church, and in any other setting that we serve in.
The first of those encouragements is in verse 24. We’re to work heartily …knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.
In other words, even if you don’t get immediate reward for your complete, wholehearted and impartial service, you will get an eternal reward. You may not be paid for what you do, you may not be paid adequately for it, you may not get a promotion or praise or any immediately tangible benefit from your earthly masters, but your heavenly Master has something far better than that for you.
You have a hope laid up for you in heaven (Col. 1:5). You have the inheritance of the saints in light (Col. 1:12). You have Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27), in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Col. 2:3). Your life is hidden with Christ who is your life (Col. 3:3-4). Shouts of joy and pleasure and happiness forever in the presence of God are your inheritance and your reward.
So remember those promises when you are passed over for promotion, or your project gets cancelled, or someone else is honored and not you, or you are scorned or persecuted as a believer in your workplace. You have an inheritance being stored up for you by your heavenly Master.
That’s the first encouragement to press on in pleasing the Lord through your service to earthly masters. Here’s the second one, and it may not seem like an encouragement at first, but it is. It’s in verse 25: For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality. Now it’s not clear if the wrongdoer that Paul is talking about is the slave or the master or both. Certainly the principle applies to both. What this is saying is that God is going to settle all accounts on the final day. It’s a sober truth that all wrongdoing, that is, all sin, will be dealt with. Justice will be served without partiality, without any double standards. Masters do not get preferential treatment in God’s courtroom, and neither do slaves. All sin has its just punishment.
But I think in the context of the passage that Paul means it as an encouragement to the slaves and ultimately to us. He’s been telling Christian slaves to obey in everything their earthly—and probably unbelieving—masters, even though they may be unjust or difficult or even cruel. So he wants to encourage them that even though they obey and suffer at the hands of their masters, all wrongs will be made right in the great courtroom of God on the final day.
And when you or I suffer injustice in our service to please the Lord, God promises that it will all be answered for. God has not forgotten any of it. He remembers your ill-treatment, and he will address it in time. All sinful judgments against you, all persecution in various forms, and all the instances of sin that make your life difficult have their appointed recompense.
The motivation for Christian service is to please the Lord. That’s what makes it distinctly
Christian. And the encouragements for doing it are the hope laid up for us in heaven, and the knowledge that all wrongdoing against us will be dealt with in God’s court of law.
Now, there is one more thing to say about Christian service, about fulfilling our responsibilities as believers who serve in any capacity, be it the home, work or elsewhere. And that’s this.
3. ALL CHRISTIAN SERVICE IS WORSHIP
Now by saying that, I don’t mean that once you become a believer in Christ that everything you or I do from that moment on is worship. We still do a lot of things in the flesh. We can do a lot of things, even good things with an evil desire for self-exaltation and self-reliance.
But if we follow the command, obey in everything …your earthly masters…fearing the Lord; if we follow the command, whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men…, then in fact whatever you do in that manner and with that motive is worship.
Worship is the human response of adoration to God because of the glory we’ve seen in Jesus Christ. We show that in our singing. But we are to show it in our actions as well. Romans 12:1 says present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. That means we set ourselves apart to God, to bring him honor and praise in our lives.
And when we do whatever [we] do …fearing the Lord and for the Lord, we are fulfilling that command and we are engaged in worship. We are responding to God’s glory shown to us through Jesus Christ. We are offering up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ as 1 Peter 2:5 says.
So you know what that means? It means any vocation or career that we pick can and should be worship to God. It means every vocation can be a Christian vocation, a sanctified arena of serving the Lord.
That invests all work with ultimate significance. You can be an engineer to the glory of God. You can worship God as a physician’s assistant or a mechanic or a lawyer or a programmer or yes, even flipping burgers at McDonalds.
No work has to be pointless or meaningless. No work is pointless or meaningless if you are doing whatever you do to please Christ by doing it faithfully and wholeheartedly from devotion to him. It’s all worship. And it’s all pleasing to God as spiritual worship when you are serving the Lord Christ through it.
So you don’t have to go into the Christian ministry to serve Christ. You can do it, in fact you are called to do it, in your current job, in your chosen career, in your faithfulness at home, and in your serving in the church. When it’s done out of love to Christ, it’s all worship.
And that’s good news on Monday. Unlike those who can find no meaning in what they do other than earning a paycheck and pleasing people, Christians have the only truly satisfying and fulfilling reason to go to work. It’s to worship God. It’s to bring pleasure to our heavenly Master, Christ the Lord.
CONCLUSION
And that’s how we’ll conclude, with a reminder of the hope that our heavenly Master holds out to all of us. It’s possible or even probable that as we compare our current service at work or in the home or in the church or someplace else with this passage, that we are aware that we fall short of these principles; that our work isn’t always faithful and wholehearted or impartial; that we can go through hours and days on the job and rarely have any thoughts of Christ, but only thoughts about what the next task is.
Though we want to worship God in all things, functionally we may be serving as for men and not as for the Lord, working as people-pleasers and not as pleasing the Lord. We are aware of being wrongdoers in our service and we are aware that our Master in heaven will settle all accounts of wrongdoing with no partiality. He will treat [his] slaves justly, which means he will deal with our sin justly.
So where’s our encouragement when we fall short? Because if God treats us justly, according to what our wrongdoing deserves, should we not expect judgment rather than reward? Well, we should expect that if it weren’t for the truth of Romans 3:26.
God is both just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. In other words, God made a way for us, his wrongdoing slaves, to be justly declared righteous and saved from sin’s penalty. He made a way for wrongdoers to receive reward and inheritance and hope instead of receive judgment, and to do it in a way that allows him to do it without being unjust.
He did it by treating his own Son Jesus as the wrongdoer in our place, and he justly judged him for our sins. And he credited Jesus’ obedience to God in everything to our account, so that it is just for him to give us the inheritance of the righteous. That is the Master we have in heaven. A most gracious and loving master.
And that is our daily hope as we go about serving the Lord in all the ways that he calls us to in this life. We can look forward to bringing pleasure to the Lord in our daily work and service, and we can look forward to the inheritance that is laid up for us heaven. That is what belongs to all who have faith in Christ. And that’s good news.
PRAY
