Household

Good morning, church.

Colossians, our reading today is from Colossians chapter three, verses verse 18 through four, verse one.

Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.

Fathers do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.

Bond servants, 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.

Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward, you are serving the Lord Christ.

For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.

Masters treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a master in heaven.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Good morning.

Thanks for joining us.

My name's James Rathman, I'm the pastor at here, Redemption Church Denver.

And uh um I was thinking this morning, this was one of those weeks, and I think it was for uh a couple of you as well that I talked to, of I was like preparing for um this sermon this morning, just like going over my notes in my office, and I was thinking, I feel like I like was just doing this.

Like just like three hours ago, I was preparing for last week's sermon.

It's one of those weeks where you there's so much packed in that it just flies by.

Anyone else?

That was a very mixed groan.

It's very hard to discern what that was.

I think for some it was like a mm-mm.

Like when somebody prays something really good.

For others, it's a mm-mm.

Mmm, nope.

Long week for me.

Boring.

All right, let's pray, and we'll move into our text for the day.

Holy Father, we thank you for the weekly gathering of your church.

That we can uh yeah, touch base each week, settle our hearts, participate in the patterns of the world that you have laid out, that our hearts might be formed to participate with exactly how you've shown the world to be in our relationships and the rhythms of our lives.

Lord, I pray that no matter what our weeks have been like, that this time might be an offering to you, that we might come with hearts of service and worship for you, that our we would take our eyes off of our own weeks, our own lives, and we would focus our gaze to you, the Lord of glory.

Lord, that that might form our lives.

We we pray that we would be able to attend to that this morning.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

So we're nearing the end of Paul's letter to the Colossians, and we've been in this letter throughout the whole summer.

Now that can be a bit disorienting in terms of scale, because we've been preaching through it about a paragraph a week, but you could sit down and read the letter to the Colossians in about 15 minutes.

And so that means that the ideas that Paul is working through in this letter, he actually views as really close to one another.

You know, he's not having to draw these, you know, months-long, three months-long, season-long pathways to move from this heights of glory in the description of the gospel and his description of who Christ is to a passage like today, which is just about the household.

How is it that the gospel plays out in the ordinary relational contours of our lives?

That's what Paul is interested in today.

And so I want our memories to be kind of jogged as we consider this that in Paul's mind, phrases like this description of Christ, where he is the in him, the fullness of deity dwells bodily, that he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, because through him all things were created.

And he has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred you to the kingdom of his beloved son, in whom you have redemption, the forgiveness of sins, these glorious, incredibly lofty, cosmic ideas that Paul is presenting to us in the gospel, we see that for Paul they become meaningful insofar as they are embodied in the ordinary, day-to-day relational patterns of our life.

Now we know that this is true, and this is the way that God calls us humans to participate with who he is, and God is so gracious that even the one who that he would take the fullness of his deity, and he would be so humble towards us as to dwell in a body like ours, to take on a humanity just like ours.

And so, God, as we understand the gospel and as the Holy Spirit works in our hearts, he calls us to that same pattern to see the glory of who he is and the glory of the life that he offers.

And then almost anticlimactically, until you understand it, and then it's radically climactic and transformative.

But what might appear anticlimactically, he just starts talking about the ordinary relationships and patterns of your life.

You know, in a blockbuster movie when somebody has like this transformative encounter, one of my favorite scenes in the Transformers movies is you remember Transformers 1?

That movie was so good when it first came out.

I don't think the franchise really found its footing again.

But Transformers 1 was really good.

And there's like these robot cars that talk to you.

And Shia LaBeouf, one of the robot cars in the towards the beginning of the movie in the first act, pulls up next to Shia LaBeouf and like opens its door for Shia LaBeouf to get into the car.

And uh he looks over at uh Megan Fox, and they're like, Should we get in the car?

It's like, we'll look back on this moment for the rest of our lives and think we should have gotten in the car.

Epic line, completely unearned as far as the movie goes.

They just said an epic line, they didn't deserve it yet, because they hadn't done anything, and we don't even really know what their lives will be like.

But still, the pattern is you see an epic thing in talking robot cars.

And then in an in a in a movie, the way that that's conveyed is now everything, it's gonna be so unrecognizable.

You're gonna be doing orange-tinted, camera-tilted desert combat from now on.

Because you're in a Michael Bay movie, and everything's orange in Michael Bay movies.

In Paul's letters, it's this, it's it's much, it's actually more comprehensive, it's more transformative, but it's but you might miss it.

Because you get this news God became a man, dwelt among us.

God went to the cross and died like a criminal.

And we can share in his death and resurrection so that sinners like us might be united once again to the Father.

And it's like, oh my goodness, everything's gonna be orange tinted and camera tilted from now on.

And then Paul says, Wives, submit to your husbands.

Husbands, love your wives.

Children, obey your parents.

Fathers, don't discourage the hearts of your children.

Slaves and masters, slaves, work heartily for your masters.

Masters, be just and fair and kind towards your slaves.

Now, those are very ordinary household things.

It's but it's so transformative that we we might miss it.

So I want you to see this connection that when we're hearing these things today, in Paul's mind, he has not switched topics.

He hasn't switched topics from the glory of the gospel that he was describing earlier.

He's just speaking of that same gospel at the level of the patterns which we humans, humans like us, can engage with it, where we participate in it.

Now here's the switch.

In the movies, it's there's this, there's this ordinary life which is which is boring and to be disregarded, and then the talking robot car pulls up and you get to enter into the extraordinary life, and you still leave behind that ordinary life.

The gospel transition, the gospel transformation is different than that.

Because it's not that the circumstances of the character change, it's that the eyes and the hearts of the participants change.

So that now, when someone who is transformed by the gospel looks into the ordinary relationships of their lives, they can no longer see them as ordinary.

They can no longer see them as typical or to be written off, to be written off for something more extraordinary.

Instead, their eyes have changed.

And when they see, when a husband sees I'm going to love, I'm going to, you know, before I just walk out of my car and walk into the house, I'm going to take five deep breaths and say a prayer and say, okay, I'm walking in to serve today.

That type of transformation is actually extraordinary.

We're participating in the glory of the gospel.

It's just at a human scale.

As modernists, which we all are, uh just by nature of when we were born, we tend to flatten all of our thinking.

So that if one premise applies in one area of the world, then we have to make it apply at every single level.

And our thinking has become pretty foolish in that regard.

You can see it pan out in our culture with things of uh, well, if if men and women are equal, this is a biblical principle.

Men and women stand equal before the Lord.

There is no distinction between man, between male and female in Christ.

You know, we understand scripture speaking of this at this level of our relational um uh depth or capacity or uh the meaning of our lives before the Lord.

Because we understand that that's true at that level, but we're modernists, so we think if it's true at one level, it must be true at all other levels, then we start to take this principle and do all sorts of foolish things.

Where we say, okay, male and female, there's no distinction in Christ before the Lord.

This means that male and female, there's no distinction among them.

And there's no difference between them.

And so that means that male and female are just interchangeable.

They're categories that we can take off or put on, like uh like clothes or fashion.

But we need to learn to think at the levels that the Bible thinks at.

Because in the same vein that Paul that Paul is speaking, where he says that this is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, that God became a man and dwelt among us and was a fully God and fully man, that same, he's speaking of these just cosmic principles, these cosmic levels, displaying to us that the gospel means the redemption of all creation.

It's a new creation where all things are set right.

He's able to, at these other levels of reality, apply these same principles, but they're not precisely the same shape.

It's the same gospel image from the same gospel pattern, but it plays out at the level of reality in which it makes sense.

So that when we see that all of our relationships are to take the shape in the pattern of the gospel, it does not mean that the marriage relationship, because it's in the pattern of the gospel, is to look the same as the parent-child relationship in the pattern of the gospel, or is to look the same as a employer-employee or slave and master relationship as in the pattern of the gospel.

He's saying that we need to understand the principles that these things hold in the level of reality, and then we need to, at their own level of reality, and then we need to use our imaginations to see how the gospel pattern transforms and redeems these things.

Do you do you understand what I'm saying?

I I think maybe some of you are like, yeah, I finally get it because it's so heady, and others are like, no, I don't, I don't get it at all.

And thankfully, Paul does wonderful work for us.

But I want us to see what he's doing with his imagination.

He's saying, look at the way that the Lord has laid the world out, but see its corruption and its sinfulness.

How is it that the gospel pattern transforms these particular relationships?

And how is it that we enter into those?

That's the that's wisdom.

That's a practice of wisdom, and it's an exercise of imagination.

Okay.

So Paul does this.

He moves into this from this cosmic perspective down to our earthly one in the ordinary relationships of our lives, and he deals with three relational couplets.

The first couplet is husbands and wives, he speaks to.

He's basically just moving through an ordinary household.

If the gospel doesn't apply at the level of your ordinary day-to-day relationships, then it probably doesn't apply in your life.

Because where else are you?

This is very simple.

First, wives and husbands.

Second couplet is children and parents.

And the third couplet, where he spends the most time, which we'll look into as reasons why, is bondservants and masters or slaves and masters, depending on how gentle your translation wanted to be.

Okay, ready for wives and husbands?

Here's how you participate in the gospel at the level of wives and husbands.

Chapter 3, verses 18 and 19.

Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

I've been told that some some of these passages have uh been a bit controversial.

I tried to pick out which ones.

Paul's instruction here is simple and pointed.

This is not a uh uh, you know, there's there's books and books of what a uh healthy marriage should look like and how a healthy marriage should be properly ordered.

Paul does uh, you know, a couple of volumes of books.

He's like, I can do it in two sentences.

Give me two sentences, I can make that happen.

Then he went back and finished his coffee.

That's the way I picture Paul.

Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

And these instructions, we see that Paul is describing to us this pattern.

He's not saying it's not like a list of tasks or a list of things to do.

He's saying it don't worry about that.

That will come down the line.

First, live into this pattern that actually conforms with the image of the gospel.

And that image of the gospel, first, how do wives participate in that?

It's in submission to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.

Now, submission means that there's this there's this relational orientation that husbands and wives are meant to have.

Now, this has been written off as a sort of Pauline, or like just just from Paul, we say Pauline.

The highest compliment you can be paid is to have your name turned into an adjective.

So we'll do that for Paul.

This Pauline, this is not just a Pauline idiosyncrasy, although it's often described that way.

This is true throughout scripture.

There is a real pattern of masculinity and femininity that are built into the world.

Now, in our attempt to draw an equality, we do that at the expense of the good diversity that the Lord has put into the world.

And the shape of this relationship is hierarchical.

I went to my thesaurus to grab the most offensive words I can find for this morning.

Now, but there's not another way to describe this shape.

I mean, it's a it is a hierarchical shape where the husbands are called to be leaders and wives are called to submit to that leadership.

This pattern is throughout all of Scripture.

That is the picture of what a healthy marriage looks like.

Now we see this demonstrated to us in the gospel itself.

That's why Paul is thinking in this pattern.

Because Jesus leads and cares for his church.

He provides the order for the church and then draws out the glorious potential of what the church is called to be.

And the church receives this good ordering from Christ.

And obviously, it is not, you know, you can't flatten everything because it's not, but husbands and wives are not exactly the same as the way Christ relates to the church, but it's this, if you look through it, you can see the same pattern.

And that's the pattern we are meant to participate in.

Husbands and wives are meant to relate to one another, where you can you can see this.

This may this may come across as grotesque, but I'm trying to sort of break open your imaginations.

You can see this most clearly at just a biological level of the ordinary working of the masculine and the feminine.

The masculine provides a a pattern, a seed pattern.

And the feminine acts as this potentiality which gives body to that pattern.

And what comes from that?

Humans.

Life comes from that.

All human people come from that.

And this is the ordering of meaning in the world, and therefore it is the ordering of meaning in the relationships that we participate in.

And so there's all this gymnastics that we can kind of do to show, like, yeah, but Paul didn't really mean submission.

He did.

He did.

But just as the in our action movies, it's not the people that changed, it's the circumstances that change.

What Paul is hoping for us here is that we have glasses now, which when we look out and we see how our culture condemns this vision of submission as always bad and always negative.

We need to have our eyeglasses changed so that we might see that this submission is a participation in the glorious pattern that Christ has put into the world.

Now, we're uncomfortable now because we're thinking of just femininity so far.

But Paul doesn't speak in those ways.

Paul speaks in couplets.

And that's because what we're uncovering here is a proper relational dynamic.

And relational means we have to talk about both sides.

We have to talk about the masculine and the feminine together, wives and husbands.

And so the wife is called to submit as is fitting in the Lord.

Then husbands are called to love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

Okay, so this call of husbands, and this is Paul's pattern throughout all of Scripture.

This is what he talks about in Ephesians, this is what he talks about in 1 Corinthians, where wives are called to submit to a loving husband.

Now, love, why is this the What I want you to see is that the order is meant to flow from the husband to the household.

And the way that this order flows is always through the pattern of love.

Now, why is it love that sets the pattern?

Well, I want you to see.

Paul helps us understand by placing it, he sort of shows there's the opposite way to create this pattern of headship and body, of you know, answer and question, of actualization and potentiality, of masculine and feminine, husbands and wives, leader and follower.

You see, this is this is embedded in the way we understand the world, the pattern of masculinity and femininity.

Okay, I got distracted there.

He shows us that love is the center of this, and then he shows us what love is partially by showing us what the opposite of it would be, and that's harshness.

Because here's what harshness says: I will establish this pattern of my leadership in a way which depends upon me manufacturing or creating my position of leadership.

But here is the reality of the husband's call to love, of the husband's leadership in the home.

It is not something that he manufactures or that he earns.

It is a demand placed upon him by the Lord.

It is something that he receives femininely from his Lord.

When you come in here and you participate as a church, I was once talking with someone right before church, and they were describing, they do they were describing their uh a church that they had gone to, which sounded very clever.

And and during the creeds, they replaced all of the masculine language uh like father and son in the creeds with feminine language like uh mother, mother, and and daughter, to describe the persons of the Trinity.

And this sounded like we're gaining, we're experimenting with this process of equality.

But they weren't.

What they were doing was they were denying the relational pattern that we, the church, get to participate in.

Because why why is it Father God?

Why is it the son who who rescues us?

And his question was because where is the feminine in all of this?

You know, where is the celebration of the feminine in all of this?

I said, it's us.

The singers, the gathered church worshiping.

And when we come together and worship by embodying this feminine posture towards our Lord, then we get to participate in the meaning and the order that he has shown us.

You see, this is not a, but it's because we weren't thinking at this relational level.

I'm sorry, I I I apologize and I hate apologizing from up here because it makes me because it's kind of like saying to you just write off what I've just said.

What it really means is I'm going in a bit of a different order than I had expected myself to go.

Okay, husbands, love your wives.

Here are the options of love.

Here's why it must be love.

One option to establish a husband's leadership is to cause his wife to become enmeshed with him so that she is no real person, but that she would lose her identity and just move into a uh whatever he thinks, I think, whatever he does, I do, whatever.

Uh, you know, there's there's there's no real person there, and there's no real dialogue that can be entered into.

That's enmeshment.

That's that's not love.

Because what love does, this is why it's the highest of the virtues, is it sees the other and upholds them, seeks their good as the other.

So that it maintains this unity.

It's a connection of unity that does not destroy the respective identities of each party.

The other option is a harshness.

So there's enmeshment, which dissolves the wife's identity.

That's not submission.

Or there's a harshness, which says, I am just going to get obedience out of you, no matter what.

Now, that's the opposite of love, because although it might maintain some sort of distance, it destroys the connection.

This willing connection between both parties.

That's why, what is it that holds up marriage?

What is it meant to demonstrate?

It's it's love is what provides the unity of marriage.

So that's why harshness would be the opposite of it.

Where I was going with that discussion about the creeds, the masculine nature of the creeds.

Well, now I forget.

I must be tired.

Okay, so there's this.

This is the marriage pattern throughout scripture.

Now, I want us to touch base just on one last component in this pattern, in this orientation.

It says, wives submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord.

Now, how is it that there can be no loss of dignity for a wife, for a woman, in her submission to her husband?

Because isn't that just bowing the knee to another human?

Bowing the knee is not a good analogy for this type of submission.

But you understand my point.

It's because this submission is always with an eye to her immediate submission to the Lord.

And her husband also bows the knee to the Lord.

So they are participating in this pattern, but always with this limit factor of this is our means, our creaturely means of our participation with the Lordship of Christ.

This means that a wife's submission to her husband is never a turning a blind eye or participating with in any way her husband's sin, be that his sin against her, or his sin against others.

Because her submission is with a view to the Lord.

This is the limit factor.

So do not hear this as though this is some call to just sort of bear with some wicked and abusive husband or to not participate in the sanctification of a wife's husband.

That is, that is not what this is.

That's a neglect.

That's that's that's once again this practice that we have of not being able to see these things at the levels in which they're operating in.

Because we're learning to participate with reality.

And the way that we see that reality lay itself out is not a it's it's it's not a just gain submission at any cost, and then I'll be able to participate in it.

No, it's always with an aim of submitting to the Lordship of Christ.

So it must be as is fitting in the Lord.

Okay, so that's husbands and wives.

Sure, there are no questions.

Children and parents.

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.

Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

So this is another image of how the gospel transforms our relationships.

But it's not the, it's not exactly the same, right?

The marriage relationship is not the same as children and their parents.

This call for children is to obey your parents in everything.

And what is the reason for this?

It's to please the Lord.

This is a proper participation with a creational ordinance.

You know, it's honor your mother and father.

It's in the Ten Commandments.

Because this is the way that creation is laid out.

Now, part of what we can see in this call to obedience for children and this particular talking to parents and children is that the categories of parenthood and childhood are real.

This means that there are decisions which ought not to be made by children.

Because there's such a thing as childhood.

There's such a thing as this time of life where you are safely under the authority of a loving and caring parent.

That's a real category.

It's built into the world.

It's not just an accident of age.

But there's a real relational reality to parents and children.

There's a covenantal structure to that relationship.

So, how do children participate in that structure?

It's by obedience.

They participate in that structure by living in accord with the ways in which their parents have laid out their household.

Now, we have this fear of if we're always calling our children to obedience, then aren't we just going to be crushing their spirit and crushing who they are and who they were made to be?

There is a way of doing that, which we'll get to in the instructions to fathers.

Paul is not naive about how dysfunctional families can be.

But when we understand this rightly, our call to their obedience is a call to embodying the reality of the position that they are in before the Lord, which now is child.

And God willing, it won't be that forever.

But for now, it's a child.

And so in calling them and pursuing their obedience, we are allowing them to fully embrace this type of thing that God has made them to be, while He has made them to be it.

Now, his instruction next is to fathers.

Now, this is kind of a this is one of those ambiguities in Greek because the the uh word for fathers is also just the word for parents.

So hear parents.

When I'm saying fathers, this is not something that this is not a oh this is not reserved just just for fathers.

But I but I also want you to be thinking in terms of the ordering of the household in the leadership position that God has called husbands to and fathers to.

So there's an there is still an emphasis that I want us to hear.

He says, Fathers do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.

Okay, now there is a way of gaining our children's obedience that is really just a provocation that is about us.

Perhaps because of our embarrassment, and so we just want to shut them down, because of our impatience, because we just want to move on, because they're just annoying, and we aren't, we don't want to be bothered.

And so we act in a way which is not calling them to a joyful obedience as our own obedience is before the Lord, but we act in a way that is just provocative.

And that provocation is a way of us saying, it's a way of fathers saying, this authority that has been given to me in your life is not for your good, it's for mine.

Now that is precisely out of step with the pattern of the gospel.

Because in the very pattern of the gospel, what is it that we see?

What is how does this transform and subvert and completely change, give us new glasses for these words like authority?

The authority that God has by his right and nature as being God, he uses for our good.

Once we obey, praise God.

Not once we obey does he start acting for our good.

He does not wait till then.

But God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

How many little deaths are you called to each day as a parent?

What a participation in the gospel do we get, do we get to experience and know at this deep experiential level, this embodied level of like this is this is you know, this is the fellowship of Christ's sufferings.

I can know more deeply even his own love towards me.

Do you see how your glasses have changed by the gospel?

And no longer, no longer is it just like you've climbed into the car, why will you not get into your car seat?

Instead, it's not just a petty annoyance, it's this is a participation in Christ's sufferings for the love of my child.

And my job is this is hard for me.

My job as a parent is not to make my children fast.

That is not my job.

My job is to make them gracious and wise and loving and kind, obedient.

Those things can be done with patience.

Oh man, I should probably try and have them be patient as well.

We can be patient when we're done.

We can be patient once we've gotten there.

We're running late already.

Why do we not provoke our children?

In our provocation, they become discouraged.

Listen to Paul's heart.

What's the how can you this is almost a test for your parenting?

Are my children encouraged by me?

Or are they discouraged by my presence?

Do I see more of their hearts and the goodness of who they are come out when I'm around, or do I see it, do I see it crushed?

When we're provocative, that means we're owning this position of leadership as though we have to, as though it exists for our own benefit.

But that would imply that we got it because we deserved it, that position of leadership.

No, we received it as a gift and a responsibility from the Lord to be used for the good of those whom He has placed us in authority, for the good of our children.

It's to be held as such.

That means we ought to see them be able to participate in the encouragement of the Lord.

Okay, lastly, bondservants and masters, slaves and masters.

Now, you may be thinking I can probably check out during this time.

But what Paul is why why does Paul switch to this?

I mean, wives and husbands, you know, marriage is like it's a creational ordinance.

There is no humanity or or family or civilization outside of the context of marriage.

There's Adam and Eve in the beginning, be fruitful and multiply.

This is a creational norm.

Children and parents, same thing.

You know, if the initial command, the initial blessing from the Lord is be fruitful and multiply, then you're gonna have children as a part of that.

And, you know, husbands and wives, that's where children come from.

You guys know.

But bondservants and masters, this is not a creational ordinance.

This is an accident of history.

This is a pattern of the world, but one in which that is not necessary for the way that the world would lay itself out.

Praise the Lord, less and less our world lays itself out in this pattern.

That's not promised or inevitable.

It might return.

But for now, we can praise the Lord that we don't live precisely in these categories of servants and masters.

But at the time of Paul's writing, about one-third of the Roman population were slaves.

Uh, it's not the same as the chattel slavery in the United States.

But I'd say, as far as economic systems go, it's not ideal.

Slaves had no rights in their society.

They were treated as property, and they could be uh bought and sold at will, but also it was typically not for a lifetime, uh, would have a uh a beginning and an end, uh, which is a good differentiator.

But one-third of the population of Rome was slaves, and and they estimate that more than that was the population of slaves in the early church.

So the so the early church, this first century church, Paul is speaking to a lot of slaves, a lot of people who are living in this category of life, and so that's most of their days.

And it's and it's most of the pattern of the relationships that they need to be working in.

And so Paul is saying, look, you can participate in the pattern of the gospel even in this extremely corrupt institution where you find yourself literally powerless, you are able to participate in the pattern of the gospel.

Here's how.

It's Paul's way of saying temporal or not of the Lord.

But these are your masters, and there's a reality to that.

And Paul calls them to this gospel participation by calling slaves to obedience of their masters.

And a it says not by way of eye service as people pleasers, this word sincerity of heart, it's a wholeheartedness.

It's um a psychos, you know, the like psychology, soul.

He's saying serve them with your whole soul.

A whole not as a divided person, where you're just trying to get by.

But instead, serve them.

With a fear of the Lord.

Now, what Paul is doing here is this radical transformation of their eyes to see the world that they are in.

No longer are they a subhuman who is just cursed by their circumstance to not really be able to participate in the free service that they would like to participate in.

Paul is saying that even this service that you are commanded to do, you can participate in freely.

As one who is directly serving the Lord.

Now you can imagine what this might mean, the subversion that Paul is actually introducing here.

Here's how he offers this encouragement.

In Colossians 3, 23 through 24, he basically reiterates what he had said a couple of verses earlier.

He says, Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

You are serving the Lord Christ.

You know, a slave might be working right next to a son.

And they might even have the same list of tasks for the day and get the same lunch breaks and eat the, you know, eat the same food.

But the difference is that the slave knows that he will never share in the fruit of his labor.

He will never participate in the efforts that he is putting out.

And the son knows that he is sharing in right now, building in something which he will get to own one day, which will one day be his, and he'll get to share in the fruit of it.

But Paul is saying to the slave, all of your invisible service will be seen.

All of the service that you're rendering, which appears fruitless, God sees.

Now I know many of you are in jobs where you just feel constrained, and you're rendering service to people who you don't respect, and you're in a position where you won't get to participate in any of the fruit of it.

Here's this hope that God gives to you.

There is no invisible service rendered when it is rendered as to the Lord.

He will see all of it.

Now, can you think of why that might be an encouragement to a slave?

A slave has no rights before the law.

They have no system of appeal to their masters.

They are the most easily taken advantage of group in society.

And so they are consistently and repeatedly taken advantage of in society.

And Paul says to them, All of these invisible oppressions that you experience every day, God sees.

More than in any other of his letters, especially when you consider that husbands and wives get two verses, where in Ephesians they get like half a chapter, and slaves and masters get like a couple of sentences.

What is it, what's happening in Colossae?

Well, this letter is written to the church in Colossians, and it's carried with another letter that we have in the New Testament.

And this letter is not written to the church as a whole, it's written to one man in the church, a man named Philemon.

That's also the name of the letter.

And Paul writes this letter to Philemon, and the church meets in Philemon's house, and Philemon is a slave owner.

Now, one of the slaves that Philemon had owned was a man named Onesimus.

I call him onesie.

That's how it's spelled.

Onesimus was a runaway slave from Philemon.

And as Providence would have it, he meets Paul.

Onesimus becomes a Christian.

And he seeks restoration with his former master, who is also a Christian.

But there's bad blood between them.

So Paul writes this letter advocating for Onesimus to be received back as a bondservant into the household of Philemon.

And so the church that they're meeting in, why is there so much slave and master talk?

Because this dynamic and the difficulties associated with this dynamic are being, you know, exploded by the gospel taking place.

And so when Paul's writing this, he's not thinking generally, he's thinking of Onesimus and Philemon.

These are some good general principles, but I'm gonna have to write a whole other letter.

This is what Paul writes to Philemon.

You can read the whole letter, it's very short, but I won't.

Verses 15 and 16.

For this perhaps is why he was parted from you for a while, that you might have him back forever, no longer as a bondservant, but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

You see, when we have an imagination that's shaped by the gospel, it would cause us to look out into the ordinary relationships that we're a part of, and see these are radically transformed.

Chains shall he break.

For the slave is our brother.

And in his name, all oppressions shall cease.

Look at what the gospel can do.

Consider the patterns that you are called to, the participation in the experience of the living out of the gospel.

Where did you fit in this?

Look at the hope that you're participating in.

You know, some people might look at it and see, this just looks backwards and and upside down.

You know, or or perhaps it looks too ordinary.

Or even worse, traditional.

Ugh.

Something to be written off.

Through the lens of the gospel.

It might look as glorious as the Lord who dwelt bodily among us.

This is where we participate in it.

Okay.

No questions today.

Just kidding.

We'll do questions.

See if there are any.

How do you submit to your husband if he is not submitting to the Lord first?

Paul talks precisely about this in 1 Corinthians.

And the good news is that for a wife to practice this sort of submission, it's the same sort of boundary, right, that this submission is couched in.

And the boundary is that a wife's submission to her husband is grounded in, nested in her submission to the Lord.

So that she can in no way, if she has a husband who is not seeking the Lord, then she cannot participate in his not seeking the Lord.

You know, she cannot be a support of that or an encouragement to that.

And yet there are still, I'm sure, all kinds of ways in which you are able to submit to your husband who is who is not a Christian, in a way which it, in a sense, calls him to the position that he ought to be freely stepping into.

This position of leadership, which he ought to be stepping into.

This is the way that Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians, when he talks about this very dynamic.

And he says, perhaps in seeing your love and joy and kindness in the Lord and in the service that you render to him, he might be able to, he might even be won over to the Lord.

Now that's not a guarantee, but what it shows us is that there is not a position in our lives, no matter how difficult, in which it can't be oriented by our submission to the Lord.

So I want you to just kind of have those categories.

Sure, there are all sorts of ways where I can participate in this.

By the way, that's a that's that's an ordinary feminine call, by the way.

That's like what feminine power looks like.

Jacob the other day, he preached on the wedding at Cana when Mary, when they're sitting at the wedding and they run out of wine, remember?

And Mary says they're out of wine.

Now that's like a perfect picture of femininity.

But you might have you might have missed it.

Because femininity is a question.

You know, this is why our culture, like feminism in the way that it plays out in our culture, is basically just like a, it's like a um self-imposed devouring of the masculine.

Because femininity is a private space.

It's a question, it's a call.

Our culture wants to devour and destroy any private spaces.

We we say that's not true.

Uh that's not there's no actual value there.

There's no uh there's no meaning, there's no uh influence in those places.

But the the Bible understands those those places are are of absolutely necessary and essential influence for the world to work and to be meaningful.

And so for the for the wife to, this is why it's even kind of like in our jokes, you know, like there's a um like the honey, the honeydew list, you know, of like, oh man, like my wife always finds these, you know, I'm making a sitcom joke right now.

There's a reason why this is in our sitcom jokes, and we all are familiar with the pattern.

It's because femininity calls and orients to right action.

We're we're a culture that's that has almost no femininity expressed in it, or celebrated in any way, or or or protected for its use in the private space.

And so we have a lot of useless action that does and accomplishes nothing.

That's a good way to tell that a culture has destroyed the feminine.

We have no good questions.

You know, our culture asks all the wrong questions.

Okay, that was a that was a lot and kind of diverted, but I I want you to have these categories in your mind of the limit of the Lordship of Christ that orients these relationships.

And then consider how I can participate in that, even if it's my service is raising a question for my husband.

That's a good thing.

Okay.

Now let me pull up text for today.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 11, verse 23, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

1 Corinthians 11:23

That the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given it, he broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Jesus, in the sacrament that he gives us for this participation in the new covenant, he doesn't give us some incredible magic trick that we can take around to town squares and perform.

He gives us something that's ordinary and embedded in our lives.

He gives us a meal.

This is where we participate in the patterns of the gospel.

He calls us to eat with him as a proclamation of who he is.

Might our lives be that same way.

In the ordinary patterns that he calls us to, we are participating in this pattern of the gospel, which is almost unthinkable in its glory.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this meal, that we might consider it a participation in the glory that you've shown us in your word and your gospel.

Lord, I pray that you might give us wisdom and imagination to think through the contours of our lives so that we might participate in your gospel in the places that you've called us to.

Lord, protect us from foolishness and the application of texts like this.

But give us wise imaginations so that we might see them applied well in ways that truly show your glory and the glory of your gospel.

Lord, transform our hearts by your gospel.

Help us to see the patterns in it and live them out.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.