There are people at church potlucks who eat with the caution of a bomb technician. They take small portions. They angle the spoon just so. Most of all, they work hard to keep the baked beans’ juices from touching the coleslaw. The line on the paper plate is sacred, and anything that crosses it gets its own trip back to the table for a clean plate.

I think most of us do something similar with our Christian lives. There are corners of our days where we are happy to let new-creation character have its run of the place. Our character shows up on Sunday morning. It shows up when someone is watching. It shows up when we are the ones telling the story later. The character we have been given in Christ is allowed to operate in the public-facing rooms of the house.

The private rooms are a different matter. The marriage. The kitchen table at 9:47 p.m. when everyone is tired and nobody has the energy to be kind. The group text with the extended family. The parking lot at work. These are the places where we unfortunately decide that new-creation character has gone far enough. It can wait here while the old self takes over for a while.

Paul’s letter to the Colossians will not let that arrangement stand. In Colossians 3:18–4:1, he takes the new-creation language he has been building through the whole chapter and walks it straight into the hardest rooms in the house. He starts with marriage. He goes to children and parents. He finishes at the workplace. The argument is simple but uncomfortable: the character that Christ is forming in you does not get to stop at the threshold. It walks into every human relationship you have, or it is not really forming you at all.

The Rooms Where Character Is Tested

Paul’s first move is a sobering one. The sphere where new-creation character meets its hardest test is the one where you have no audience. Family is the place where the cracks in your character have nowhere to hide. You cannot take a break from the people you live with, you cannot save face for very long in front of them, and all the flaws of all the people in the room eventually collide. That collision is the test. It is also the reason Paul starts here because if Christ is not transforming you at home, He is not really transforming you.

Wives Who Willingly Follow

“Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” (Colossians 3:18)

The word submit has been so thoroughly dragged through the culture that it arrives in the ear with the bruises already forming. Every Christian wife reading this has heard the word used as a weapon, as a joke, or as evidence of Christianity’s supposed backwardness. Paul’s instruction deserves to be heard on its own terms before the culture gets to finish its argument.

Submission, in Paul’s instruction, is not a statement about worth. The command does not say that wives are inferior, less gifted, or less capable. Paul could not say that even if he wanted to, because the Son submits to the Father in the Godhead. If submission meant inferiority, the Son would not be fully God. Submission is a statement about order and role, not about value.

Paul anchors the point in creation itself. First Timothy 2:13 drops the rationale without any softening: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” Adam first, Eve second. The order is not a statement that Adam is better or that Eve is worse. It is a statement that God built the relationship with a shape, and the shape serves a purpose.

Our culture has worked incredibly hard to hijack this. Sometimes the pushback is loud and ugly. More often it is quiet and almost imperceptible. It shows up in a thousand small ways that tell Christian wives that the biblical vision of marriage is old-fashioned at best and oppressive at worst. Submission, as Paul means it, is none of those things. It is the willing choice to place yourself under your husband’s authority. It elevates him to carry the weight of the final word. It encourages him toward better spiritual leadership instead of resenting him when he fails at it. In disagreement, it gracefully reasons rather than refuses.

The command to submit is not easy. It is, however, made considerably easier by the command Paul gives next.

Husbands Who Actually Lead

“Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.” (Colossians 3:19)

Love, in this context, has two load-bearing components: understanding and leading. Peter sharpens the first one: “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7). Peter is telling husbands that if they will not grow in understanding their wives, God will actively interrupt their prayer life. That is a consequence worth contemplating for a minute. Your prayer life is hitched to how you treat your wife.

Understanding a wife is hard work. Someone once described the effort as trying to figure out what the color seven smells like, and I cannot argue with that. The responsibility still lands on the husband. You draw her out with questions. You notice what she loves and what she fears. You pay attention to what she carries that she has never asked you to see. That kind of attention is a God-given job for the husband.

The second component is leading, and leading is where most of us crash. If the wife is called to submit, the husband has no choice but to lead. The trouble is that there are two miles of ditch for every mile of road, and both ditches have claimed more marriages than I care to count.

The first ditch is leading like a dictator. The dictator husband rules with an iron fist. He does not listen to his wife’s counsel. He does not consider her feelings. He does not consider her needs. He cares about himself and the authority he thinks his position grants him. He confuses headship with tyranny and calls it biblical.

The second ditch is leading like a doormat. The doormat husband does not lead at all. He is a placeholder. He is a decoration. He defers every hard decision to his wife because he is afraid of being called old-fashioned or of getting a difficult call wrong and wearing the blame. He has abdicated the call of God on his life, and he has told himself he is being humble while he does it.

A husband who learns to say let’s with any regularity has already found the path most men spend decades looking for.

When bitterness starts to crust over your affection for your wife, it is almost always a signal that you have drifted toward one of the cliffs. The dictator gets bitter because she is pushing back on a rule that was never loving. The doormat gets bitter because she is stepping into a vacuum he refuses to fill. The repair starts with the husband saying out loud, to her, that he has been wrong. “I have not been loving and leading you well. My heart has been chafing against you, and I was wrong. Will you forgive me? Let’s try to restore this.” That sentence, said honestly, has saved more marriages than any book on the topic.

Children Who Obey and Parents Who Listen

“Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” (Colossians 3:20)

The motivation Paul gives children is not “obey because mom and dad are always right.” The motivation is that obedience pleases the Lord. That is the same logic he will apply to employees in a few verses. The target isn’t merely the earthly authority; it’s God Himself.

Parents, this means that the single most effective thing you can do to raise obedient children is to teach them to love God. Children who want to please God are going to obey their parents as a downstream effect. Children who do not love God can be forced into compliance for a while, but the compliance will collapse the moment the pressure lifts.

The next verse hands the parents their own command, and it is aimed particularly at fathers.

“Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.” (Colossians 3:21)

Commentaries will give you long lists of ways parents provoke their children. I will not add to the lists. I will give you one instruction that covers most of the territory: listen to your children. If your children can learn algebra, chemistry, a foreign language, a musical instrument, or a sport, they can carry on an intelligible conversation with you about the things in your home that do not line up with the character of Christ. Most of the ways parents build resentment in their children boil down to a refusal to listen. Children stop telling their parents the truth because they have learned it is not safe.

You can prevent most of this by being a parent who listens. It is even healthy for your children to occasionally see you and your spouse work through a disagreement in front of them. Many disagreements belong in private, but if your kids never see you extend a gracious, listening ear to criticism, they will assume you do not know how, and they will stop trying to give you any.

There is a related pastoral concern I carry for our church family, and I will say it plainly. If you look around on a Sunday morning and keep your ears open, it is not hard to spot kids who are exasperated with their parents. Every week I watch them gravitate toward other voices in the building, looking for someone to talk to. Some of those voices are good ones. Others are not. There are many voices in this world competing for the hearts of the kids who sit in our pews, and I have no greater burden right now than that the voice capturing them would be the voice of Christ spoken through caring people in this church. If you are a senior saint or part of another family in the church, you have a role to play here. Step into the void. Walk alongside the struggling parents. Pay attention to the exasperated kid. The stakes are high, and kids need more voices telling them the truth about Jesus, not fewer.

The Concrete I Threw Over the Fence

Paul turns from the home to the workplace next, and he spends far more verses on the employee than on the employer.

“Bondservants, 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.” (Colossians 3:22–24)

The instruction is pitched at servants in Colossae, but the logic runs straight into the modern workplace. Paul’s central move is to pull the eye off the earthly boss and put it on Christ. The Christian does not work hard because the manager is walking through the floor. The Christian works hard because Christ is watching, Christ will reward, and Christ does not render verdicts with partiality.

This is where I have to tell on myself.

The summer before my junior year of high school I worked for a general contractor. The big project of the summer was finishing a modern A-frame home on a beautiful piece of property by a private lake. The owner was an engineer, which meant every detail had to be exact. The project soured on me early. I dug trenches for a week. I mixed concrete by hand for another week. I laid out ruined bags of concrete to mark the path of the long, meandering driveway. I crushed my middle toe with an eighty-pound bag of cured concrete. I spent an evening on a steep roof in the pouring rain at 8 p.m. on a day I had not been able to stop for lunch or supper. By the end of the summer, I had a bad taste in my mouth about that job.

My last week of work came around, and I was back at the top of the driveway pouring concrete for fenceposts and mailboxes. When I finished, my boss told me to haul the scrap pile from the top of the driveway down to the dumpster at the bottom, almost a half-mile away. I did not do it. On my last day, with nobody watching, I tossed the pieces of ruined concrete over the fence into the ditch and hoped the weeds would hide them. The weeds cooperated beautifully.

Three months later, when winter came, the weeds died back, and the concrete was right there for anyone driving by to see.

That is the exact shape of the temptation Paul is naming. The lazy employee does the bare minimum when the boss is gone and counts on the weeds to grow. The Christian employee has no weeds to hide behind, because Christ never leaves the jobsite. Your work is an act of worship. It is a gift from God, given to you in order to be a gift given back to Him.

Do you say “later” when you mean “never”? Do you dream big and do little? Do you work hard to defend and enable your own laziness? Those are all roads back to the ditch where the concrete eventually gets found. When you lose motivation because nobody is watching, remember who you are actually working for. When you gain motivation because your boss is watching and there is a raise on the table, remember who you are actually working for. Your work is not ultimately for you. Your work is a place where the new-creation character that God has planted in you becomes visible to the watching world.

Bosses Who Know Who Owns the Ladder

Paul gives the employer a single verse, and it does most of the work in one sentence.

“Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” (Colossians 4:1)

The motivation comes in the second half of the verse. The boss has a Boss. The person at the top of the org chart is not actually at the top of anything. Christ is at the top of the ladder, and the Christian employer manages a business that is, at the end of the day, a tool in Christ’s hands.

That reframing changes everything downstream. The business is not ultimately about profits. The business is about people, and the business exists to advance the cause of Christ with the resources God has placed under your authority. Employees are not interchangeable units of production. They are image-bearers of God who have trusted you with a piece of their lives in exchange for a fair wage and fair treatment. Reward their diligence with recognition. Celebrate their success publicly, not only in the executive meeting. Pay them well. Consider how Christ treated you when you were His enemy, and let that generosity shape how you treat the people who are working to make you successful.

Every Room in the House

Paul’s argument lands where it started. The character that Christ is forming in you does not get to sit out any of the hard rooms in your life. At home, husbands love and lead while wives willingly follow, and children obey because they love the Lord. At work, employees work diligently because Christ is their true employer, and bosses treat their people fairly because Christ is theirs.

Every human relationship you have is either being transformed by new-creation character or quietly resisting it. There is no third option. The question Paul puts in front of you is whether you are willing to let Christ have the rooms you have been keeping locked.

Will you submit to God’s call on your life both inside the home and outside of it?

2022.08.21 / New-Creation Relationships / Pastor Daniel Steeves