The People in Your Way
Ephesians 5:22-6:9
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.
We usually meet a hard person and assume they are the problem. If my spouse were easier, I would be more patient. If my father had been kinder, I would not still be guarding my heart. If my boss were fair, I would not be tempted to grow bitter or cut corners. We carry a quiet theory about our own holiness, that we would look a great deal more like Jesus if the people around us were not making it so difficult. Ephesians 5:22 through 6:9 turns that theory on its head. The difficult people in our lives are not what stands between us and Christ. Most of the time they are the road to Him. The Lord sets them in front of us on purpose, because the love He is forming in us can only be learned on people who have not earned it.
That is a hard thing to hear, so start with a smaller picture. Anyone who has climbed knows you do not get stronger on only the easy routes. You get stronger on the wall that pushes your limits, the one with the awkward reach and the hold that is never quite where you want it. The resistance is not the obstacle to becoming a climber. It is the training. And you can give yourself to a wall like that, fully and without panic, because you are held from above. I will say more about that picture on Sunday. For now, hold onto the two halves of it. The hard relationship is the training ground, and you are held the whole time you climb it.
Watch what Paul does with the relationships that fill an ordinary life. He takes marriage, parenting, and work, the three places where most of our friction actually lives, and he anchors every one of them to the Lord before he says a word about the other person. Wives submit "as to the Lord" (5:22). Children obey "in the Lord" (6:1). Servants work "as to the Lord and not to man" (6:7). Even the man in charge is told he answers to a "Master in heaven" who shows "no partiality" (6:9). Not one of these duties rests on whether the other person deserves it. The audience is Christ. That single move is the hinge for everything else, because once the other person's worthiness is off the table, the relationship stops being mainly about them and becomes about who I am becoming in it.
This is why the people who are hardest to love are not in the way of our growth. They are the means of it. We are called to "walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us" (5:2), and the astonishing thing about that love is its direction. Christ did not wait until we were lovely. He loved us while we were still unlovely, still set against Him, and He gave Himself for us anyway. If that is the love we are meant to emulate, we will never learn it on people who are easy to love. Easy people ask nothing of us that we did not already have. We learn the love of Christ in the exact place we are tempted to believe we cannot, on the spouse who is hard to live with, the parent who was hard to grow up under, the boss who has not earned our respect. They are the only school where this kind of love is actually taught, and the Lord enrolls us in it deliberately.
Paul begins with marriage, and the surprise is who carries the weight of the command. In his world a wife's submission was simply assumed, so telling her to order herself under her husband would have raised no eyebrows at all. The shock was the command to the husband, who is told to love "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (5:25). Marriages then were arranged for property and family alliance, not affection, and a man owed his wife little beyond provision and heirs. Paul tells him to lay his life down for her. The husband grows into Christ not by being served but by serving, and he learns it in the daily, unglamorous work of loving one particular, imperfect woman over a lifetime. Then Paul lifts the whole thing onto another plane. He quotes Genesis, "the two shall become one flesh," and says the union "refers to Christ and the church" (5:32). Marriage was always meant to be a picture of the gospel, which means the patience and forgiveness it asks of you are not interruptions to your spiritual life. They are the assignment itself.
The same logic runs through the command to honor parents. Paul reaches back to the fifth commandment, "Honor your father and mother" (6:2), and the honor he has in mind outlasts childhood. Obedience belongs to the years under a parent's roof and rightly ends as a child grows. Honor never expires. It only changes shape as parents age and the roles slowly reverse. If you are caring for an aging parent now, perhaps one who made your early years hard, you already know how much of Christ that requires of you. You are not honoring them because they earned every bit of it. You honor them in the Lord, and in the honoring you are being shaped into someone who can love the way you were first loved.
Then Paul reaches the hardest relationship in the ancient household, slave and master, and we have to be honest about what he is doing here, because this text has been badly misused. Paul is not blessing slavery. He is regulating a brutal arrangement that already structured his world, and he is planting a truth inside it that will eventually tear it apart. He speaks to slaves as full moral agents who do "the will of God from the heart" (6:6), which the institution itself denied they were. He tells them their reward comes from the Lord "whether he is a slave or free" (6:8), so no cruel master can rob them of it. Then he turns to the masters and tells them to "do the same" and to "stop your threatening" (6:9), reminding them that they and their slaves answer to one impartial Master in heaven. Once you say that the powerful and the powerless kneel before the same Lord, you have knocked the foundation out from under the whole system. It is the same logic that let Paul send a runaway slave back home and ask that he be received "as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). The gospel does not leave slavery standing. It hollows it out from the inside until it falls.
That same honesty protects us closer to home. Being held from above while you climb a hard wall is not the same as being roped to someone who is crushing you. Paul treats slaves as people with agency and tells them in another letter to gain their freedom if they can (1 Corinthians 7:21). To order yourself under the Lord is never to surrender your safety. If you are in danger, the call to submit was never a call to stay and be destroyed. The God who frees the slave does not chain the abused.
So the question this passage leaves us with is not how to get the difficult people out of our way. It is what the Lord intends to make of us through them. We keep waiting for our circumstances to change before we will grow, and Paul keeps pointing us back to the people already in front of us. They are not the obstacle to becoming like Christ. They are the avenue to it. He loved us long before we deserved it, and the only way we will ever learn to love like that is to be handed people who do not deserve it either. The spouse, the parent, the person we answer to at work, every one of them is the wall where that love gets built into us, and we can give ourselves to the climb because we are held by the One who loved us first. More on the rope on Sunday. For now, look again at the person you have been treating as the thing standing in your way, and ask whether the Lord may have placed them there to make you look more like His Son.
That is a hard thing to hear, so start with a smaller picture. Anyone who has climbed knows you do not get stronger on only the easy routes. You get stronger on the wall that pushes your limits, the one with the awkward reach and the hold that is never quite where you want it. The resistance is not the obstacle to becoming a climber. It is the training. And you can give yourself to a wall like that, fully and without panic, because you are held from above. I will say more about that picture on Sunday. For now, hold onto the two halves of it. The hard relationship is the training ground, and you are held the whole time you climb it.
Watch what Paul does with the relationships that fill an ordinary life. He takes marriage, parenting, and work, the three places where most of our friction actually lives, and he anchors every one of them to the Lord before he says a word about the other person. Wives submit "as to the Lord" (5:22). Children obey "in the Lord" (6:1). Servants work "as to the Lord and not to man" (6:7). Even the man in charge is told he answers to a "Master in heaven" who shows "no partiality" (6:9). Not one of these duties rests on whether the other person deserves it. The audience is Christ. That single move is the hinge for everything else, because once the other person's worthiness is off the table, the relationship stops being mainly about them and becomes about who I am becoming in it.
This is why the people who are hardest to love are not in the way of our growth. They are the means of it. We are called to "walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us" (5:2), and the astonishing thing about that love is its direction. Christ did not wait until we were lovely. He loved us while we were still unlovely, still set against Him, and He gave Himself for us anyway. If that is the love we are meant to emulate, we will never learn it on people who are easy to love. Easy people ask nothing of us that we did not already have. We learn the love of Christ in the exact place we are tempted to believe we cannot, on the spouse who is hard to live with, the parent who was hard to grow up under, the boss who has not earned our respect. They are the only school where this kind of love is actually taught, and the Lord enrolls us in it deliberately.
Paul begins with marriage, and the surprise is who carries the weight of the command. In his world a wife's submission was simply assumed, so telling her to order herself under her husband would have raised no eyebrows at all. The shock was the command to the husband, who is told to love "as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (5:25). Marriages then were arranged for property and family alliance, not affection, and a man owed his wife little beyond provision and heirs. Paul tells him to lay his life down for her. The husband grows into Christ not by being served but by serving, and he learns it in the daily, unglamorous work of loving one particular, imperfect woman over a lifetime. Then Paul lifts the whole thing onto another plane. He quotes Genesis, "the two shall become one flesh," and says the union "refers to Christ and the church" (5:32). Marriage was always meant to be a picture of the gospel, which means the patience and forgiveness it asks of you are not interruptions to your spiritual life. They are the assignment itself.
The same logic runs through the command to honor parents. Paul reaches back to the fifth commandment, "Honor your father and mother" (6:2), and the honor he has in mind outlasts childhood. Obedience belongs to the years under a parent's roof and rightly ends as a child grows. Honor never expires. It only changes shape as parents age and the roles slowly reverse. If you are caring for an aging parent now, perhaps one who made your early years hard, you already know how much of Christ that requires of you. You are not honoring them because they earned every bit of it. You honor them in the Lord, and in the honoring you are being shaped into someone who can love the way you were first loved.
Then Paul reaches the hardest relationship in the ancient household, slave and master, and we have to be honest about what he is doing here, because this text has been badly misused. Paul is not blessing slavery. He is regulating a brutal arrangement that already structured his world, and he is planting a truth inside it that will eventually tear it apart. He speaks to slaves as full moral agents who do "the will of God from the heart" (6:6), which the institution itself denied they were. He tells them their reward comes from the Lord "whether he is a slave or free" (6:8), so no cruel master can rob them of it. Then he turns to the masters and tells them to "do the same" and to "stop your threatening" (6:9), reminding them that they and their slaves answer to one impartial Master in heaven. Once you say that the powerful and the powerless kneel before the same Lord, you have knocked the foundation out from under the whole system. It is the same logic that let Paul send a runaway slave back home and ask that he be received "as a beloved brother" (Philemon 16). The gospel does not leave slavery standing. It hollows it out from the inside until it falls.
That same honesty protects us closer to home. Being held from above while you climb a hard wall is not the same as being roped to someone who is crushing you. Paul treats slaves as people with agency and tells them in another letter to gain their freedom if they can (1 Corinthians 7:21). To order yourself under the Lord is never to surrender your safety. If you are in danger, the call to submit was never a call to stay and be destroyed. The God who frees the slave does not chain the abused.
So the question this passage leaves us with is not how to get the difficult people out of our way. It is what the Lord intends to make of us through them. We keep waiting for our circumstances to change before we will grow, and Paul keeps pointing us back to the people already in front of us. They are not the obstacle to becoming like Christ. They are the avenue to it. He loved us long before we deserved it, and the only way we will ever learn to love like that is to be handed people who do not deserve it either. The spouse, the parent, the person we answer to at work, every one of them is the wall where that love gets built into us, and we can give ourselves to the climb because we are held by the One who loved us first. More on the rope on Sunday. For now, look again at the person you have been treating as the thing standing in your way, and ask whether the Lord may have placed them there to make you look more like His Son.
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