In the Lord

Scripture: Colossians 3:18–4:1

Read Colossians 3:18–4:1 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people

Colossians 3:23

Vocation and the Three Estates

The passage we come to in this session is one of the most ordinary and one of the most difficult passages in the captivity letters. Ordinary because it addresses the three most basic relationships of ancient (and modern) human life: marriage, parenthood, and the relationship between workers and employers. Difficult because the way Paul addresses these relationships, particularly the third one, the relationship of slaves and masters, has been the source of considerable pain in the history of Christian reading. The passage requires patience, care, and a willingness to let the text say what it actually says before deciding what to make of it.

The Lutheran tradition has read passages like this one through Luther’s teaching on vocation and on the three estates or orders (Stände) that God has ordained for human life, which Luther set out in his Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528). Later Lutheran theologians often called them the orders of creation. The first of these is the household: the oeconomia, the ordering of family and work. The second is the civil order: the politia, the ordering of public life under law and government. The third is the Church: the ecclesia, the ordering of the people of God under the Word and the Sacraments. These three orders are not human inventions; they are how God has structured human life. And the Christian is called to live faithfully within all three.

What this means is that ordinary human life is not a problem for the gospel to solve by escape but is itself the theater in which the gospel is lived out. The believer does not need to leave his family, his work, his civil station, or his country in order to live the Christian life; he lives the Christian life precisely in those places, in those relationships, in those duties. Vocation, the believer’s calling, is not the calling to ministry as a class apart from ordinary life. Vocation is the calling that everyone has, in whatever station the Lord has placed him: father, mother, son, daughter, husband, wife, worker, employer, citizen, subject. Each station is a calling. Each calling is a place where the gospel gets lived.

This is the frame within which the household table of Colossians 3:18–4:1 must be read. Paul is not laying down a timeless social blueprint that must be slavishly imitated in every detail. He is showing what the gospel does when it enters the ordinary stations of life in a first-century world. The estates are God-given; the way the gospel inhabits them is what Paul is sketching.

There is something else worth noticing before we begin. Each of Paul’s three pairs receives commands to both parties: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. This is striking. Ancient writers on household management typically spoke to the male head of the house, instructing him in how to rule his wife, his children, and his slaves. The wife, the child, and the slave were talked about; they were seldom talked to. Paul does something different. He speaks directly to wives, children, and slaves as moral agents in their own right, members of the congregation who would be sitting in the room when the letter was read aloud, and he gives each of them a calling before the Lord. And he lays real duties on husbands, fathers, and masters, men who held power in the household but who answer to a higher Lord. The Christian husband is told to love and not to grow bitter. The Christian father is told not to provoke. The Christian master is told to give what is just and fair, because he has a master too. The gospel does not merely reinforce existing hierarchies; it reaches into them and reshapes them from both sides.

Wives and Husbands

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. (3:18–19)

Paul addresses the wives first. Submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. The Greek verb hypotassō means to arrange oneself under, to take one’s place under another’s authority. It does not mean to be crushed or to be silent or to have no will of one’s own. It names a posture of voluntary placing of oneself within an ordered relationship. The wife’s submission is not the result of force; it is the gift she offers in the marriage. And the framing is critical: as is fitting in the Lord. The submission Paul commands is not unlimited, not unconditional, not free-floating. It is in the Lord, meaning shaped by, oriented to, qualified by the Lord whose own self-giving love defines what a covenant relationship looks like.

What submission means in practice has been worked out at greater length in Ephesians 5, where Paul develops the analogy between Christian marriage and the relationship between Christ and the Church. The wife’s submission is patterned on the Church’s submission to Christ, not as a humiliation but as a free response to the one who has loved her. And the husband’s love is patterned on Christ’s love for the Church: “Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her,” as Ephesians 5:25 puts it. Colossians is more compressed than Ephesians, but the same theology stands behind it. The wife submits as is fitting in the Lord. The husband loves as Christ loved.

Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. The command to the husband is striking in its cultural context. Ancient moralists could urge a husband to treat his wife kindly, but a command to love her with self-giving agapē, laid on him by the Lord he shares with her, is something new. Paul issues both commands, and the husband’s command is in some ways more searching. Love: agapē, the same word Paul has used throughout the letter for the self-giving love that does not depend on the worth of the beloved. The husband is to love his wife with this kind of love. And do not be embittered against them. The Greek verb is pikrainō, to make bitter: to let resentment sour the heart, to turn sharp, and then to use one’s authority as a weapon. The husband is not to do this. He has authority; he is not to abuse it.

The Lutheran reading of marriage has taken this passage with full seriousness. Marriage is one of the estates God has ordained; the headship of the husband is real; the submission of the wife is real. But the headship is the headship of the cross, not the headship of domination. The husband who loves his wife as Christ loved the Church is the husband Paul is describing. And the wife who submits to such a husband is submitting to a man who has already made himself her servant. The two commands, taken together, describe a marriage in which neither party is exploited and both parties flourish. This is what the gospel does to marriage. It does not abolish the order; it transforms the relationship within it.

It is worth noting that this passage, like all of Paul’s instructions, assumes that the husband is in fact loving his wife and not growing bitter against her. Where a husband becomes harsh or abusive, the qualification as is fitting in the Lord matters. Submission never obliges a wife to remain in danger, to join her husband in sin, or to shield his cruelty. She may, and should, seek safety and the protection of the civil authorities, whom God ordained for exactly this purpose (Romans 13), and her pastor and congregation owe her their help. Questions about the marriage itself belong to careful pastoral care, not to a husband’s convenience. The orders God has established are his good gift; they are not weapons to be wielded against the weak.

Children and Fathers

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is pleasing in the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they will not become disheartened. (3:20–21)

The second pair. Children, obey your parents in everything. The Greek word hypakouō (to listen-under, to obey) names the proper posture of children to their parents. The reach of the command is broad: in everything. And the reason given is simple: for this is pleasing in the Lord. The child’s obedience is not just a social convenience or a practical necessity for the running of a household; it is something that pleases God. The Lord himself looks at the child obeying his parents and is pleased by it. This is the same vein as the Fourth Commandment, which the Small Catechism explains this way: “We are to fear and love God, so that we neither despise nor anger our parents and others in authority, but instead honor, serve, obey, love, and respect them.”

The qualification in everything has its limits. Children are not commanded to obey parents who command them to sin. The Church has consistently held that where a parent’s command would require a child to violate the commandments of God, the child must obey God rather than people (Acts 5:29). But within the ordinary range of parental authority (the discipline of the home, the formation of habits, the teaching of values, the direction of work and study), the child is to obey. And the obedience is to be wholehearted, not grudging.

Fathers, do not provoke your children, so they will not become disheartened. The command to fathers is short but acute. Do not provoke. The Greek verb erethizō means to irritate, to exasperate, to push beyond endurance. Fathers (Paul singles out fathers, though the principle applies to both parents) are not to use their authority in ways that exasperate their children. The reason is given: so they will not become disheartened. The Greek word is athymeō, meaning to lose heart, to be broken in spirit. The father who provokes his children produces children whose spirits are broken: children who have learned that their efforts are never enough, that their failures will be magnified, that home is not safe.

This is one of the most pastoral verses in the captivity letters. Paul knows what fathers can do to children with carelessly used authority. The harsh word that lingers. The criticism that is never balanced by affirmation. The standards that can never be met. The discipline that is more about the father’s anger than about the child’s good. The child who grows up under such fathering loses heart. The father who has done this damage may not see what he has done; the child carries it for life.

The Lutheran reading of parenthood has taken both sides of this seriously. Parents are placed in their station by God; they have real authority; they are to use it. But the authority is to be used for the child’s good, not for the parent’s convenience. The father who exasperates his children has misused his vocation. The mother who provokes her children to despair has done the same. The household is one of the estates God has ordained; the father stands in it under God; and the father is accountable to God for how he has used the authority God gave him.

Slaves and Masters

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in every respect, not only when they are watching—like those who are strictly people-pleasers—but with a sincere heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people, because you know that you will receive your inheritance from the Lord as the reward. Serve the Lord Christ. For the one who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there are no exceptions. Masters, treat your slaves with justice and fairness, because you know that you also have a master in heaven. (3:22–4:1)

The third pair is the hardest, and it requires the longest walk. The Greek word Paul uses is douloi, which the NET renders plainly as slaves. It is a word Colossians has already used with honor: Paul calls Epaphras “our dear fellow slave” (1:7) and “a slave of Christ” (4:12), and elsewhere he calls himself and Timothy slaves of Christ (Philippians 1:1). In the household table the word refers to actual slaves in the Greco-Roman sense: people whose labor and persons were the legal property of another. The institution was widespread in the Roman world. Estimates vary widely, but slaves may have made up somewhere between a tenth and a third of the population of the empire’s cities. In the church at Colossae there were almost certainly slaves and masters worshiping side by side, and Paul is addressing both.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in every respect. Paul begins, as he did with children, with the subordinate party. The slave is to obey his earthly master in every respect, within the ordinary range of his master’s commands, which would have covered nearly every aspect of his daily life. The qualification, again, is implicit: where the master commands sin, the slave must obey the higher Lord. But within the ordinary range, the slave is to obey.

Not only when they are watching, like those who are strictly people-pleasers, but with a sincere heart, fearing the Lord. The deeper command. Behind not only when they are watching stands a single Greek word, ophthalmodoulia, literally eye-service, a word Paul may have coined. It names the work that is done only when the master is watching, the half-hearted compliance that depends on supervision. People-pleasers: anthrōpareskoi, those who arrange their behavior to win human approval. Paul forbids both. The Christian slave is not to be the slave who works only when watched and slacks when not. He is to work with a sincere heart, with integrity, from a single motive: fearing the Lord. The slave’s deeper master is the Lord; his daily work is offered to the Lord; his integrity in his labor is a matter between him and the Lord.

Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people. And here Paul gives the verse that has been read by Christians in every station of life for two thousand years. The NET says with enthusiasm; Paul’s phrase is literally from the soul (ek psychēs), with the whole self, heartily. As to the Lord and not for people. The slave’s labor, however lowly, is being offered to the Lord. The Lord sees it. The Lord values it. The Lord rewards it. The slave’s earthly master may be unworthy of the labor he receives; the slave’s heavenly Master is not, and the slave works for him.

Because you know that you will receive your inheritance from the Lord as the reward. Serve the Lord Christ. Two extraordinary claims. The slave will receive an inheritance from the Lord, and in the Roman world, slaves could not inherit. The very status of the slave was that he had no legal capacity to be an heir; his master could leave property to his children but not to his slaves except by manumission. Paul takes this most legally definitive marker of slavery and reverses it. The Christian slave will receive the inheritance from the Lord. The slave who could not inherit on earth will inherit in heaven. Serve the Lord Christ. The NET takes the Greek as a command; it can also be read as a statement, you are serving the Lord Christ. Both are true, and each implies the other: the slave who is told to serve the Lord Christ is being told whom he already serves. His true master is not the earthly one whose property he is; his true master is the Lord Christ, in whose service the slave is now living his life. The hierarchy of the earthly household, in which the slave was at the bottom, is overturned in the heavenly reckoning.

For the one who does wrong will be repaid for his wrong, and there are no exceptions. The warning that follows applies, in its phrasing, primarily to the slave who might be tempted to wrongdoing in his work: to steal, to deceive, to retaliate against his master. But the principle is universal. Paul’s word for exceptions is prosōpolēmpsia, partiality, literally the receiving of faces: God does not look at the face to see whose it is before he judges. The master is no more exempt from God’s judgment than the slave. The reckoning will come for both.

Masters, treat your slaves with justice and fairness, because you know that you also have a master in heaven. And finally, the address to the masters. With justice and fairness. The Greek words name two distinct dimensions of moral conduct in the master’s treatment of his slaves: the just (what is owed in justice) and the fair (the equity that goes beyond the strict requirement). Both are commanded. And the reason given is decisive: you also have a master in heaven. The earthly master is also a slave, of the Lord. His authority over his slaves is given to him by the Lord, and he will answer to the Lord for how he has exercised it. The same Lord who is the Master of the earthly slave is also the Master of the earthly master. Before that Lord, the social difference between them dissolves into the more fundamental fact that both are servants of Christ.

This is the gospel doing its work inside the institution of slavery, without yet abolishing it. The implication is unmistakable: a slave who is a brother in Christ and a master who is a brother in Christ stand on equal ground before the Lord they share. The earthly relationship of property and ownership persists, but it has been relativized. The master cannot treat his slaves as mere property if he is to answer to the Master in heaven. The slave is not less of a Christian than the master who owns him. The category of brother in Christ has been laid alongside the category of master and slave, and the brother-relationship has the longer reach.

A Word About Slavery

The passage we have just walked has been weaponized through history in ways Paul could not have foreseen. American slavery in particular drew on these verses to justify what was in fact a brutal racial chattel system that Paul never imagined and would not have countenanced. A word of historical and theological honesty is needed before we leave the passage.

Roman slavery and American slavery were not the same institution. Both were evil (the ownership of one human by another is intrinsically a violation of the image of God in the enslaved person), but their evils took different shapes. Roman slaves remained, in law, their masters’ property. They could not legally marry; the unions they formed (contubernium) were not recognized as marriage. Nor could they own property outright; whatever savings they were allowed to manage (the peculium) belonged in law to the master. Yet Roman slavery was not racial; slaves came from every people the empire touched. Manumission was common, and the freed slaves of Roman citizens could themselves become citizens. Some slaves were highly educated, serving as teachers, physicians, and secretaries, and some were more learned than their masters. None of this made Roman slavery good; it was still ownership of one human by another, with all the cruelties that accompany such ownership. But it was structurally different from the racial chattel slavery practiced in the Americas, in which an entire race was permanently and hereditarily enslaved on the supposed basis of inferior nature, with almost no path to freedom.

Paul, writing in the Roman world, addresses the institution he found. He does not endorse it. He does not bless it. He does not invent a theological defense of it. He simply addresses Christian slaves and Christian masters as those who are, in fact, in those relationships, and he tells them what the gospel does within the relationship. Slaves are to work as to the Lord. Masters are to treat their slaves with justice and fairness, remembering their own Master in heaven. Both are accountable to the same Lord. Both are brothers in Christ.

What this brief instruction sets in motion can be seen most clearly in the letter Paul wrote at the same time he wrote Colossians: the brief letter to Philemon. Onesimus, a slave who had run away from his Christian master Philemon, had encountered Paul in his imprisonment and been converted. Paul writes Philemon to return Onesimus to him, but no longer as a slave. No longer as a slave, but more than a slave, as a dear brother, Paul writes (Philemon 16). Therefore if you regard me as a partner, accept him as you would me (Philemon 17). If Onesimus owes Philemon anything, Paul will pay it himself. The implication is unmistakable. The brother-relationship in Christ has the higher claim on Philemon than the master-relationship in the household. Paul does not explicitly command manumission, but the letter makes it almost impossible to imagine Philemon doing anything else.

The gospel, in other words, was a slow corrosive on the institution of slavery from within. It did not topple the institution in Paul’s generation; the social conditions for that toppling did not yet exist. But it laid down the principles that, eighteen centuries later, would lead the great Christian abolitionist movements of England, the United States, and elsewhere to bring the institution down. The Wilberforces and the Frederick Douglasses and the Christian leaders of the abolitionist movement were not departing from the apostolic gospel when they fought for the end of slavery; they were drawing out what was already implied in the apostolic gospel. The slave is a brother. The brother cannot be owned. The institution cannot stand where the brother-relationship is real.

For the modern reader, then, the passage is not a defense of slavery but a witness to how the gospel works inside fallen human institutions until it transforms them or undoes them. The Lutheran tradition, with its doctrine of the two kingdoms (the spiritual kingdom of the Church and the temporal kingdom of civil order), has held that the Church’s task is to preach the gospel that creates new humanity in Christ. The implications of that new humanity then work themselves out in the temporal order, often over generations. Slavery has not vanished from the human race even now; it persists in trafficking, in coerced labor, in many forms across the globe. The gospel’s work against it continues. Christians today who oppose modern slavery in its various forms are doing what Paul began in this passage: letting the brother-relationship in Christ have its full implications for how human beings treat one another.

Gathering the Threads

The household table of Colossians is brief but consequential. Paul has addressed the three most basic relationships of ordinary human life (marriage, parenthood, and labor) and has done so with the conviction that the gospel reaches into these ordinary relationships and reshapes them from within. Wives submit as is fitting in the Lord; husbands love their wives and are not embittered against them, patterned on Christ’s love for the Church. Children obey their parents in everything because this is pleasing in the Lord; fathers do not provoke their children, so that they will not become disheartened. Slaves work as to the Lord and not for people, knowing they will receive an inheritance from the Lord even though they are excluded from inheriting on earth; masters treat their slaves with justice and fairness, knowing they themselves have a master in heaven. Each pair receives commands from both directions. Each relationship is relativized by the deeper relationship of all parties to the Christ who is all and in all.

For the Lutheran reader the passage is the household working-out of Luther’s teaching on vocation and the three estates. The believer is placed by God in particular stations of life (as wife or husband, as child or parent, as worker or employer), and the Christian life is lived faithfully in those stations. The gospel does not call the believer out of his vocation; it calls him to live the vocation under the lordship of Christ. The mother is not less of a Christian than the missionary; the worker is not less of a Christian than the pastor; the believer in the most ordinary station of life is doing holy work when he does it as to the Lord. The whole of human life is reframed by whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people.

The passage on slavery is the difficult one, and it has been handled honestly here. The gospel does not endorse slavery; it does not need to abolish it by direct command in order to undermine it eventually. The brother-relationship in Christ is laid alongside the master-slave relationship of the household, and the brother-relationship has the longer reach. What Paul began in Philemon, the abolitionist movements would carry out across centuries. The Christ who is all and in all does not let the institution stand where his brothers are being held in it.

For Discussion

The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.

1. The Lutheran doctrine of vocation holds that every ordinary station of life (parent, spouse, worker, citizen) is a calling from God. How does this teaching shape your sense of the holiness of your own daily work and daily relationships?
2. Paul addresses both parties in each pair: wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. What does this say about how the gospel reshapes relationships that the surrounding culture might treat as fixed hierarchies?
3. Husbands are commanded to love their wives and not be embittered against them. Fathers are commanded not to provoke their children. Masters are commanded to treat their slaves with justice and fairness. The dominant party in each pair is given a real and searching charge. How does this counter the way these passages are sometimes read?
4. Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people. Where in your daily work do you find it hardest to remember that your true Master is the Lord, and how would your work change if you remembered it more steadily?
5. The passage on slavery has been read in ways Paul never intended. What does it mean for you that the gospel works as a slow corrosive on unjust institutions from within, rather than always toppling them by immediate command?
6. Luther spoke of three estates (household, civil government, and Church) as God’s good ordering of human life. Where in the contemporary world do you see these estates most under strain, and what does it look like for the gospel to reach into them?

Looking Ahead

Next session takes up Colossians 4:2–6, where Paul turns from the household table to a brief passage on prayer, on the apostle’s own situation in prison, and on the wisdom that should characterize the Christian’s speech to outsiders. The passage is short but pastorally rich. Paul asks the Colossians to pray for him, that God would open a door for the message, that he would proclaim the mystery of Christ, and he closes with a charming instruction about how Christians should speak to those outside the faith: Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you should answer everyone. This is one of the most quoted passages of the captivity letters, and its wisdom about Christian witness is as practical now as it was then.

Before next session, read Colossians 4:2–6 at least twice. Pay particular attention to the connection between prayer for the apostle’s ministry and the believer’s own speech in everyday encounters. The two are linked in Paul’s mind, and they bear on each other. The reading rewards careful attention.

Closing Prayer

Lord God, You have placed each of us in particular stations of life: as husband or wife, as parent or child, as worker or employer, as citizen or subject. Teach us to honor these stations as Your gift, and to live in them faithfully as those who have died with Christ and been raised with Him. Where we are husbands, give us love that does not grow bitter. Where we are wives, give us submission that is fitting in the Lord. Where we are parents, keep us from provoking our children, so that they do not lose heart. Where we are children, give us obedient hearts that please You. Where we labor, let us work with our whole heart, as to the Lord and not for people. Where we hold authority over others, let us treat them with justice and fairness, remembering that we ourselves have a Master in heaven. Let the gospel reach into all our ordinary relationships and reshape them from within. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with You and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever. Amen.