Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us.
[00:00:06] Good morning, everybody. I'm Ben Fleming, one of the senior pastors here and excited to bring to you part six of our journey through the book of Ephesians. We're going to be in chapter five. We're going to start in verse 21. And as a recap real quick, just in case you've missed one or more, this is a book in which Paul spends especially the first four chapters describing the incredible magnificence of the grace of Jesus Christ that we inherited as a result of his death on the cross, and then his resurrection and defeating that death. And then he goes on into the importance of unity. For what is this new thing called the church at the time, it's important for the church to be unified so that we might reflect this gospel that we have received through the gift of grace of Jesus Christ. And then Paul moves into what we know as chapter five and again down to verse 21.
[00:00:59] And I just want to preface this with.
[00:01:02] I mean, first of all, I grew up in a Christian school that our church started when I was a kid. I was in second grade and this started, and I was pulled out of public school and put into this new private Christian school at our church that had a total of three students, including me.
[00:01:18] The other two were high school girls.
[00:01:21] So shout out to Vic Linder and Tina Marowski.
[00:01:26] You can imagine recesses were just a total blast, being ignored and, you know, kicking soccer balls against the wall by myself. But anyway, this can be a therapy session for me if you want.
[00:01:43] Don't feel too bad for me. I grew, I got some friends and all that kind of stuff.
[00:01:47] But of course, part of the curriculum as a kid was Bible in a Christian school. And I remember the teacher that was helping me through some stuff because, believe it or not, I wasn't very into the subject.
[00:01:58] She was encouraging me, saying, but the more you do this, the more you get into the Scripture, the more you will just be amazed and wowed by how God speaks through it.
[00:02:08] And I gotta be honest with you, that has not been my experience with scripture.
[00:02:13] Many times in reading Scripture, I will get done with a section and go, that's weird.
[00:02:18] Or I don't like that, or I don't understand that. And how do you make sense of this? And this doesn't seem to be going along with this. And how do we understand that? And today, the passage of text that we're going through is one of those passages for me. I have a lot of grievances and frustrations with what I'm about to read. Okay? And so what we're going to go through together is we're going to go through, and maybe you will be sharing this with me, some of the frustration and some of the worry that we have because of the historical interpretation of the text. And. And then ultimately we will move into what is the Apostle Paul's true intention in writing this, and in that, we will experience that grace and that unity that he is referencing in the passages before.
[00:03:05] So let's jump into it. All right, Here we go. Ephesians 5, 21 says, Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
[00:03:13] Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.
[00:03:17] For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, of which he is the Savior.
[00:03:23] Now, as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
[00:03:29] Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her, to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
[00:03:46] In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife, loves himself. And after all, no one ever hated their own body. But they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the Church, for we are members of his body.
[00:04:01] For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the Church.
[00:04:10] However, each one of you must also love his wife as he loves himself. And the wife must respect her husband. And it goes into chapter six. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment, with a promise, so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.
[00:04:31] Fathers, do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. And slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
[00:04:43] Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly as if you were serving the Lord and not people, because you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are A slave or free masters treat your slaves in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven and. And there is no favoritism with him.
[00:05:12] Let's pray. Father God, I thank you that we get to walk through these things together. Lord, I pray that you would speak to us through your word that is good for instruction and for teaching. Lord, we want to hear from your voice today that we might experience that grace and be unified as the apostle Paul is saying. In Jesus name we pray.
[00:05:31] Amen.
[00:05:34] Okay, where would you like me to start?
[00:05:40] I've got some beef with Paul here.
[00:05:44] First things first.
[00:05:46] I just want more from Paul in this.
[00:05:50] I want Paul to be an abolitionist.
[00:05:53] I want Paul in this letter to say slavery is bad, that too much to ask.
[00:06:03] Nothing. Slaves, obey your masters.
[00:06:06] This is terrible news, Paul. This is not what I'm looking for. This doesn't seem like the Jesus way. I'd rather have Paul be an abolitionist. I'd rather have him jump in. And to give him credit, maybe he didn't know that these letters would be put in a Bible that most of the world would read all these thousands of years later.
[00:06:27] But still I want him to speak against this. I want him to stand up against it. And by the way, in other writings and teachings of Paul, and he uses the phrase, there is no longer any slave or free.
[00:06:40] And then in another scripture, in Philemon, he writes to a slave owner who is wealthy, named Philemon, and he pleads with him on behalf of his slave Onesimus, who has stolen from Philemon, to not only let him go, but to restore him to the church to be equal to everyone else within that church.
[00:07:01] And Paul does this work in other places. And yet right here it just seems like he glosses all the way over what the problem is. And that problem is that any of us within the gospel of Jesus Christ could feel like we could make room for the idea that another person should have ownership over another.
[00:07:20] That is not the way of Jesus. It's not the gospel. It wasn't back then and it is not today.
[00:07:28] There is no place for that in the gospel.
[00:07:32] I want Paul to be an abolitionist.
[00:07:37] I want Paul to stand up for women's rights.
[00:07:42] I want Paul to say, wives, respect your husbands. Also, women should get to vote and be president and whatever the heck else they want to be.
[00:07:51] That's what I want.
[00:07:53] The idea that my daughter could potentially come to church and she could read a section of scripture that would make her believe that she could Be anything less than the leader of the free world is not a church that I want to be a part of. By the way, my daughter is 8 and she already practically runs the world anyway. And there's no one that's going to stop her.
[00:08:10] It's just how it's going to go.
[00:08:14] I want Paul to stand up for these things.
[00:08:16] I want Paul to stand up for children.
[00:08:19] By the way, I bet there's countless stories in here where you could look at me and say, if I would have obeyed my parents in everything, it would have gotten me killed somewhere along the way.
[00:08:30] Can you explain, Paul? Can you give me a flowchart when it comes to children? Like, if you have great parents, as exhibited by this, then do this. If you have terrible ones, do this. And then follow the flowchart. That's what I want from Paul.
[00:08:45] This is complicated. It's complex.
[00:08:48] By the way, where's the stuff for single people? In the middle of all this, no mention of single people.
[00:08:55] Again, Paul, in a different area of Scripture, he says it's better for you to be single.
[00:09:00] And yet, somewhere along the way, the church has used especially this section of scripture to glorify the institution of marriage while marginalizing single people within the church.
[00:09:13] There's no argument to be made with me here, by the way. That's the history of the church. That's a big part of it. It's a piece of it. That's where it's gone.
[00:09:19] And this whole section of scripture, the slavery piece, was used for plantation owners in our country to justify their ownership of slaves. They would issue Bibles to these slaves that would especially highlight these passages so that the slaves might believe that it is actually their calling in life to serve after their brutal and abusive masters so that they might stay out of fear of their master and out of fear of God.
[00:09:46] That's how this section was used.
[00:09:48] This section has also been used to teach women that they cannot lead in and of themselves. Instead, they should be relegated to other work and business and not possess the same rights that men do. It's also been used to keep children in abusive relationships. It's been used again to. To marginalize the single community.
[00:10:06] None of these things are the way of Jesus.
[00:10:09] And if you have been taught that way, and if you felt that in your stomach as I was reading the text at the beginning of this message, I want you to know that there is something better afoot here in this teaching.
[00:10:20] That's not where we're leaving it, because that is not where Jesus has left his Community.
[00:10:27] Now, what we have to understand is we have to delve deeper into the context of this scripture, like we need to do with all scripture.
[00:10:34] But some of us maybe were brought up or raised or experiencing right now kind of this prescriptive view of scripture that you can pull an individual line out and then make that your entire life's work and goal, when the hard work is found in understanding where the scripture comes from, when it was written to help prevent some of this chaos and confusion that we have created in our communities and in our churches.
[00:10:57] I'll give you, for instance, when Uber was pretty new here in Bend, I became an Uber driver.
[00:11:03] Perhaps you know me from my Uber days.
[00:11:06] It's kind of fun, I gotta be honest. Like at the time we were hurting for money a little bit. We had some medical bills to pay, so I just picked up some extra time. I'm half tempted to do it again just for the stories, because they were fantastic.
[00:11:19] But early on, as I'm driving around the Subaru Outback that's ours, I decided to work a pretty long day, I wanna say, like my family was out of town or something like that. I said, I'll work a 10, 11 hour shift on this, see how much money I can get.
[00:11:33] And I went downtown around noon or 1 o' clock in the afternoon. I picked up a guy downtown and then I took him to what I believed to be his house. It was an apartment complex. I was kind of on the other side of town and it was a pretty big complex. And so I pulled in to the place where the Uber was telling me to go ahead and drop the passenger off.
[00:11:51] And I looked at the guy and I said, hey, this looks like a big space. I can drive you right up to your front door. And he was like, great, that's awesome. I mean, I'm fishing for tips here. I'm not that nice. But, you know, little tip motivation never hurt anybody.
[00:12:04] And so I'm being very generous and I'm offering this opportunity for this guy to be dropped off at his front door. And he says, okay, we'll turn right in here and then go left to take another right. And then my number's right there. And so we go up and I drop him off right in front of his door, watch him go in, take off the whole thing.
[00:12:18] I pick up a woman later that night around 11pm all by herself from downtown.
[00:12:24] I take her to the exact same apartment complex that I had taken the man earlier in the day. I pull up, I stop where the Uber app tells me to go ahead and drop off the passenger. And instead I say, hey, tell me which one's yours. I would love to drop you off at your front door.
[00:12:40] She said, you will leave me right here and you will drive away before I walk anywhere near my home.
[00:12:48] And I was like, huh, this is different.
[00:12:52] I feel like I'm not getting a tip, this one, for whatever reason.
[00:12:57] And literally, a quarter mile down the road, I'm going, I'm an idiot.
[00:13:03] The guy earlier in the day heard, I would love to drop you off at your door. So it's a quick walk into your house. The woman at the end of the day in the dark, by herself heard, I want to watch you enter your room so that I can come back and murder you.
[00:13:18] That's what she heard.
[00:13:21] And so for a quarter mile, I'm kind of offended. And I'm like, oh, sheesh. I'm just a nice guy, just wants a couple bucks for a tip.
[00:13:29] And of course, she was threatened by the same message that I had given earlier in the day. And it makes perfect sense. If I take a moment to stop and to understand how she is perceiving the situation, then I'm incredibly empathetic and understanding. And I never offered to drop a woman off at her front door ever again.
[00:13:50] It all begins to make far more sense. And that's what we're intended to do with this scripture. We're to understand the context. The context in which this is written is a Greco Roman context in which three groups of people in this passage of scripture are considered less than.
[00:14:06] And of course, those three groups are women, children, and slaves.
[00:14:13] And so remember and don't lose sight of the fact that Paul writing this book for the entire reason that people would understand the grace that comes from Jesus Christ, and that's for Gentiles and Jews alike.
[00:14:25] And that the second part is that they might be unified in the middle of their context. And so, yes, I still have grievances and wish that Paul was an abolitionist, but he is not. And instead, he uses the current context in order to create a unity that might reflect the gospel of Jesus Christ. And he does so by doing two things. One, he addresses those groups that are considered less than.
[00:14:48] He addresses the women and the children and the slaves in the group, and he gives them commands that they are already completely familiar with.
[00:14:57] So how this would work is that these writings would come from Paul. Somebody would stand up in the church, and they would read them aloud to the church under the sound of this person's voice, the women and the children and the slaves would have heard three commands that they have already heard over and over and over and over again in their lives.
[00:15:13] Wives, respect your husbands, serve them.
[00:15:17] Children, obey your parents. Slaves, obey your masters and work hard for them.
[00:15:22] Those groups, those three groups would have heard those commands and been like, okay, thanks.
[00:15:29] Any new information? This is how we live our lives.
[00:15:33] Thanks for using parchment to go ahead and communicate this profound new truth to us. The Apostle Paul.
[00:15:40] And so the Apostle Paul just continues to reiterate the cultural norms of the time. And then where he departs from the cultural norms is in the other pieces of these sections.
[00:15:50] He looks at husbands and he says, husbands, your job is to love your wives as Christ loved the church. And by the way, he goes on, Christ gave himself up for her. He sacrificed everything and was beaten and broken and bloodied and spit on and surrendered his life in service for the church.
[00:16:09] So it shall be with you and your wife, not the job of the husband at the time. By the way, the job of the husband at the time was to create as much success as he possibly could for himself and then hope that he had a male heir that he could pass off all of his success to. That was the gist of how the men were supposed to function in this Greco Roman society. Many of them were leaving wives with no real grounds for divorce simply because they wanted to take on more lovers and wives in the culture. And in the process, and what Paul is saying is all these cultural norms that you have now inherited, all the power that you hold, husbands, you now must surrender in order to serve your wife, just as Jesus served the church.
[00:16:50] That's your job now.
[00:16:52] A huge departure from the cultural norm at the time.
[00:16:57] And he goes on, he says, fathers or parents, don't exasperate your children. Don't crush them beneath the weight of your parenting. Instead, rather than raise them up in a way that offers grace and forgiveness and patience, at the time, there was no need for patience with children.
[00:17:14] Many of them were raised to work simply as early as possible. And in many contexts, they weren't that different from the slaves that worked alongside them.
[00:17:26] And then finally, of course, the slaves and the masters.
[00:17:30] Paul encourages the masters to give forgiveness and patience to slaves, which of course is the farthest disconnect in this culture. There was no reason to love and to care for your slaves, and especially there was no reason to see them as another human being that deserved honor, integrity and respect, just like you do.
[00:17:49] Instead, they were to be treated as slaves, less than and owned by someone else.
[00:17:59] And so what we see in the middle of this is while Paul again doesn't become an abolitionist, Paul pushes the ball down the field by saying, if we are truly to reflect the work of Jesus in the gospel, we must now live in a world in which mutual submission becomes the name of the game.
[00:18:16] We are to be mutually submitted to each other in every relationship in our life, in our singleness, in our marriages, in our families and in our workplaces. We are now to do the countercultural thing. And that is not to continue to accumulate power, but instead those of us who have power are now required to lay it down.
[00:18:34] This is a direct reflection of the gospel of Jesus Christ, in which we learn that Jesus is God, come to earth to put skin on, to then be allowed himself to sacrifice himself for the sake of all of humanity, the One who had the ultimate power, the One who could come and change the world with authoritarianism and then force everyone to be drawn to himself. Instead come some humbly as a carpenter, he lives through the early stages of a human life and he dies a brutal and a bloody death. Those who have all of the power in the name of Jesus are called to then surrender that power.
[00:19:08] That is the world in which Paul is encouraging this group to live in.
[00:19:13] And the same can be said for us today.
[00:19:15] If we are to be unified, understand the grace of Jesus that we all receive, then we are all called to a mutual relationship, a mutual submission that requires us to lay down our power for the sake of the good of humanity.
[00:19:29] That is the power of this section of Scripture, that those who do not have to surrender what they have in their power choose to do so to reflect the grace of Jesus.
[00:19:42] And thus Paul's vision in Ephesians isn't about good behavior.
[00:19:47] It's about living out the gospel in every way possible. In every area of our lives, we're to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
[00:19:57] This is about humility and servanthood instead of the accumulation of riches and success and authority in every relationship, whether it's singleness, family and work. We are to mirror this idea.
[00:20:11] So in gospel and marriage, wives are called to respect and support their husbands, not out of inferiority, but out of love and trust.
[00:20:20] Husbands are called to love their wives as Christ loved the church self, sacrificially, humbly and unconditionally.
[00:20:29] Marriage is a reflection of the gospel, a covenant of love and grace, not of convenience.
[00:20:38] Gospel shaped marriage is marked by this forgiveness, service and grace.
[00:20:44] Gospel and parenting Children are called to obedience as a reflection of God's Order and design.
[00:20:50] Fathers and parents don't provoke, but nurture instead with grace and gospel.
[00:20:57] Grace based parenting and not rule based authoritarianism is what I invite the parents into the, in this room to enter into the world with.
[00:21:07] We raise children in a way that models God's patience and love.
[00:21:12] Now, the gospel and work, and I want to make it clear this is not an equivalent necessarily. We can draw this truth from it.
[00:21:19] Workers and bosses should not be slaves and masters. Just want to make that clear.
[00:21:24] Some of you are like, you haven't been to my job. Okay, so sorry.
[00:21:32] As we work, we're called to work with sincerity and integrity, as if we are serving not just our boss, but instead we're serving Christ directly.
[00:21:43] Employers, bosses, overseers, supervisors are called to treat workers with respect and fairness, remembering that it is not you that is the master of all, but instead it is God.
[00:21:55] And work in this context is not just a means of earning and paying the bills.
[00:22:00] Instead, it's a calling to glorify God. It's an invitation to glorify God.
[00:22:09] I worked with young adults for a long time in ministry, like 11 years or something like that.
[00:22:14] And I love young adults because they're always on the verge of something.
[00:22:18] You know what I mean? A 19 year old is always like, I'm about to.
[00:22:22] It's so exciting. You know, Evan and I lead this church and you know, we've got a couple kids that are of a certain age and you know, you talk to us and you go, what did you do this weekend?
[00:22:34] I don't know, but I'm very tired.
[00:22:38] Can't remember much of anything except exhaustion. Like, that's kind of where we're at.
[00:22:43] He talked to the young adult and it's like, oh, I'm gonna ask this girl out. I'm gonna apply for this job. I'm thinking about moving to Europe.
[00:22:51] I'm gonna do the thing, I'm gonna get a puppy.
[00:22:54] And it's like, oh man, the world is like about to break loose for you. This is so cool.
[00:23:00] It sounds like I'm making fun and I am, and I'm a little jealous. Like there's a little bit of both.
[00:23:05] But one thing, one thing that happens a lot with young adults is because they're on the verge of something that always makes things feel exciting.
[00:23:12] What can happen for them, and I would say for the rest of us, no matter our age or context, is that we can believe that the calling of God is always on the other end of whatever I'm going through right now.
[00:23:25] If I can just find a spouse.
[00:23:28] If I can just find a job. I want that job.
[00:23:32] Maybe someday when I'm not a student and instead I'm working as this or that. Maybe when I don't live in Bend and I live here, maybe when I don't live here and I live in Bend, then the cool thing will begin. The calling of God will be upon me. And I gotta tell you, based on what I understand of Scripture, and by the way, I've spent so much time in church and services and in prayer and all these things, I have so rarely heard God say, and then you must go from this place to that city and then start doing that. I think it happens. It's been rare.
[00:24:05] And what I've seen in Scripture, especially in stories like Jonah, right, where God's like, jonah, go to Nineveh. And he's like, no, I don't want to do it. And God's like, fine, a whale's gonna come and deliver you.
[00:24:16] So go.
[00:24:19] God's got the same power. If you're sitting around going like, I wonder if God's really gonna start working with me once I move to Venice, you know? And of course, for all of us, that would be the case.
[00:24:30] But once I get there, and then God will work. I gotta tell you, if God really wants you, he's gonna make it happen.
[00:24:36] God's God. Like that.
[00:24:39] Because the greater calling exists outside of those places. It exists outside of exactly what we're doing and where we're doing, exists in the why we're doing it and how we're doing it. Who is it for?
[00:24:51] You want to walk into a calling to glorify God? Then I would submit the calling to be mutually submissive to the people around you.
[00:25:00] That's the calling.
[00:25:03] And maybe it'll bring some sense of relief, or maybe it won't. But if we are mutually submitted with each other, walking in grace and unity, it does not matter what you're doing. If you're emptying trash cans or you're an Uber driver, or you are a barista, or you are the CEO of a large company, if you are existing in the mutual submission that God has modeled for us on the cross, that we exist in that victory that happens in the form of grace, then I promise you, no matter where you are and how much you're making and what kind of family you have and what house you live in, every single moment of every day, you will find yourself smack dab in the middle of the calling of God.
[00:25:44] It happens when we live in mutual love and submission and care for one another, not when we've accessed the right prophetic word and walked into the right city in the right job.
[00:25:55] And so I want to challenge and implore you today.
[00:25:58] Live in mutual submission as a father and a mother. Live in mutual submission as a husband and a wife. Live in mutual submission as a single person that even has no plans for marriage or a family. In all of these contexts, no matter where you find yourself, find yourself in the middle of the of the calling of God through the beauty of mutual submission and love and care for each other, that we would lay down our influence and our power for the sake of the greater good.
[00:26:25] The gospel should transform every relationship that we have is the takeaway.
[00:26:33] No matter what context you find that in, we are called to reflect Christ. Amen.
