Colossians 3:22

This verse continues the theme of motivation. The wives are supposed to submit to their husbands as it is fitting in the Lord, the children are supposed to obey their parents because it is pleasing to God, and the slaves are supposed to fear the Lord.

This is the Lordship of Jesus manifesting in our personal lives, making the Christians different. The reason Christians are different is not so much what they do but why they do it. 

And that is a big deal. The Christian life is beyond a list of things to do to fit it; rather, the Christian is changed in the depth of their motivation.

The Christian slave sees beyond the human master, in this case, to the Lord as the real master. With that kind of thinking, you have a level of consistency.

Joseph was a slave in Egypt and was living with the reality that God was watching him, so he said “No” to Potiphar's wife who wanted to draw him to sexual immorality (Genesis 39). That was his workplace, and his priority was to please God there. He knows God was watching him. 

Joseph's story — and how even doing the right things got him into trouble, but afterwards he came out on the other end justified — is an eternal example of doing the right thing no matter what.

The focus verse said there are two kinds of motivations: being a people pleaser or fearing the lord. The lack of sincerity marks the people pleasers; the sincere heart is one that is controlled by the fear of the Lord.

If it is the fear of man, that means we are doing right when we are observed. But not the Christians, whose priority is to please the Lord. 

The Christian lives in the presence of God as a subject of the Kingdom of God, knowing that God looks at the heart and not the appearance (1 Samuel 16:7). So, again, it is not enough to act; we need to have the right motivation.

The whole point is how the Lordship of Jesus is more than something we say with our mouth, but has influence over our lives, and leaves a mark on our relationships.

The list of human relationships in the passage we are currently exploring is a sample of our existence. And Paul does not go on and on about how the slave can work to stop being a slave, he said, do the right every day, regardless of your circumstances.

He has no promise of a glorious earthly destiny for the slave or a social ladder to climb; rather, he puts the promise of the afterlife in front of the slave. That is the definition of true faith: living based on the reality of the unseen.

Rather than giving you a list of how to make it in life, setting you on the pursuit of worldly ambition, or making the slave feel insecure about being a slave, he said it does not matter if you are on the lowest rung of the society, you are truly in the highest rung with Christ in the heavenly places and you should not feel bad for yourself because you are a slave, or go seek a prophet to prophesy money over you.

Do that slave task as if doing it for Christ who will reward you for it, is what the next verses say. The slave working for the master is working for his inheritance in Christ. How profound is that! That gives “Jesus is Lord” a new meaning. His lordship is expressed in the slave doing his work as if doing it for God. That blows my mind.  

There is a contentment factor that I see here.

Paul urges contentment, once we have food and shelter (1 Timothy 6:8). 

In our days, those words are seen as curse words. We have a christian books that ensure that Christians do not see themselves based on God. Therefore, we are not different from the world in our motivation and pursuit, and we define ourselves according to our bank account. And it is a shame.

The slave basically has no money and is actually owned. If you tell me that was thousands of years ago, I would say that I agree, but the point is that God allowed this letter to be written with what we can call a worst-case scenario for a reason, just like the story of Job similarly represents a worst-case scenario, becoming an eternal example of perseverance (James 5:11).

So God allowed the words “slaves” and “masters” in the bible as a challenge to all coming generations.

This is a rebuke to people in our generation who are fed on how to compare themselves to others, who have long rejected, either tacitly or blatantly, the truth of God’s word.

The words of Paul to the slave would stand in judgment against the Christians of this generation, who define themselves by the pursuit of earthly things, and say (either plainly or behaviorally) that is what Christianity is all about. 

The bible says something about seeing godliness as a way of making profit (1 Timothy 6:5). But these people wrongly equate money with God (Matthew 6:24).

Jesus said, Watch out and guard yourself from all types of greed, because one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions (Luke 12:15). You can make of that what you will, but that is the way Jesus sees it.

The point is that we have a generation of Christians who do not know the meaning of contentment. And we focused on pursuing what the book of Ecclesiastes concluded was vanity!

There is a problem if the whole church system is bent towards the claim that Christianity is supposed to lead to money in your pocket. 

And people want to give us several caveats when interpreting the focus verse. Specifically, they say that the slaves can buy themselves out of slavery.

But that is not the point of the passage. Slavery is never good in any generation, at least not something the slave would choose, if he can help it, or rewrite his history. But the passage is not about lessening the badness of slavery. The point is, regardless of how bad it is, Jesus is Lord, and the focus must be on his lordship and eternity. 

We know that the kind of open slavery we see Paul write about is all but eradicated in this world, and we can have a whole lecture about that, but that is not the point of the passage. 

Again, we need to confront the corruption in our hearts, how the love of the world has been preached, and we are not distinct as Christians from the world. And the whole point of Paul writing these words was for Christians to be distinct in their motivation; motivated by pleasing the Lord and nothing else, even for the slave, being what you can regard as an extreme example, so that the rest of us would not have an excuse.