Jay Reynardus started with a diagnosis. Our culture is adrift because it has abandoned God — his way of doing things, the things he considers vital — in favour of our own preferences.
And every generation, he said, comes up with a fresh way to do that. Each one promises that you will flourish. This is how you raise your kids. This is how you husband. This is how you be a good wife. Each is announced as the fix for the last one, which was a disaster. Then it is a disaster too, and we go looking for something new.
Colossians 3:18-4:1 is not another one of those. It is not a chart of who outranks whom. It is a household with Jesus at the centre, and Paul walks through three relationships to show what that changes.
Husbands and wives
Start with something obvious that we have somehow made controversial: every relationship on earth involves submitting. There is no relationship with another human being that does not require you to give way to their preferences, their dislikes, their proclivities, their baggage. Paul says as much before he says anything else — submit to one another out of reverence for Christ — and only then turns to wives and husbands.
To hear what he is asking, you have to know who he is asking it of. In the Roman world the father was the paterfamilias, the dominus. One man was the law of that household. He owned every asset, he decided what debts it took on, and when a child was born he decided whether that child joined the family or was thrown out with the rubbish.
That is the man Paul addresses. And notice what he says to the wife: submit as is fitting in the Lord — which can be translated, as long as it is proper. So if the head of that household, the priest of the family cult, tells you to do something contrary to Christ, you stand up and say no.
In that world, at that moment, this was revolutionary. It also sets the priority for every household since. Most of what a marriage argues about is secondary. Christ is not. Do not spend on the small things the credibility you will need for the ones that matter.
Then Paul turns to the husbands: love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Be tender. Jay has taught men's Bible study in this city for more than twenty years, and he says the thing men still need to hear two thousand years later has not changed. Be more loving. Be more tender. His own daughters tell him so regularly — that's not loving, dad — and, he admits, they are always right.
So what is the goal? Not self-fulfilment. If you marry to fill a hole, your marriage will not fill it. Nor will the kids. Nor will the big house in the Gables with the Mercedes out front. The goal is the glory of Christ seen in your spouse — and hers is the same for you.
Your marriage, in other words, is not primarily about you. It belongs to God.
A friend asked Jay, thirty-four years in, what the secret was. His answer was one word: outserve. Make the bed. Do the dishes. Serve her as though you were serving Jesus. Serve him as though you were serving Jesus — especially when he is not acting like Jesus. Then watch what happens.
Parents and children
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.
Paul gives the instruction and then immediately fences it. Do not break their spirits, do not make them hate you, do not drive them out of the faith.
Because the goal of parenting is not what most of us have quietly substituted for it. "The goal is not to raise well-educated, well-mannered, good kids that don't do drugs," Jay said. The goal is to point them to Christ. They are already, as he put it, wretched little sinners, and nobody has to teach them that part — mine, mine, mine is installed at the factory. They need a Saviour exactly like their parents do.
And here is the thing about children: they live with you, so they know. If Jesus is at the centre on Sunday morning and absent from the house Monday through Saturday, they will draw the obvious conclusion — that Jesus is something you do on Sundays. Nothing you say will outweigh what they watch. So let them see the Bible open on a weekday. Let them catch you praying. And be quick to apologise when you are wrong, because that is the gospel demonstrated rather than described.
Then he stopped for the people who had none of this — whose fathers were the opposite of every word of it. Jay described sitting with a therapist who walked through the relationships in his own history, showed him how dysfunctional each one had been, and asked how he could possibly know what a good one looked like when he had never seen one.
He knew the answer. He had met his heavenly Father.
Whatever your father was, in Christ you have a true and perfect Father who will not forsake you and will not fail you. The damage was not from God — it was sin and it was ugly — and the cycle can end with you.
Work
Finally, bondservants and masters, which in that household meant work.
Paul does something remarkable here. He tells the servant that how he works matters to God — do it from the heart, not for show — which lifts a man the whole culture considered property. Then he turns to the master and says: you think you are the dominus, but you have a Master too. The low are raised, the haughty are brought down, and both end up serving the same Lord.
Your honest work is as important to God as God is important to your work. And when the result belongs to God, the pressure to perform loosens its grip and you can actually enjoy the work.
Marriage, parenting, the job. Put yourself at the centre of any one of them and you get a personal little kingdom. Put Christ at the centre and the same house becomes the household of God — which is where flourishing has always started.
