Ordinary Holy | Week 3 | Living for Jesus at Work

Now, I know some of you probably heard those verses at first and thought, Emily, you're talking about serving one another in our workplaces, talking about employees and employers and how to treat one another.

And then you read verses on slaves and masters.

Well, there's some context around it.

It really helps us to remember that Paul isn't describing the institution of slavery as we would understand it today.

In the Roman world, slavery took many different forms.

People could be slaves through debt, war, birth, economic circumstances.

They worked in various different places like households, businesses, educations, governments, skilled trades.

And it was very common for them to actually earn their money and then purchase their freedom and become citizens.

So if you walk down the streets of Ephesus at this time, you actually wouldn't be able to tell necessarily who was a slave, who was a master.

Now, that doesn't mean that this system was good, just, or ideal.

It wasn't.

But Paul was writing in a culture where this was the nature of work at that time.

You know, we see through these verses that he starts to actually share with them something that would be counter-cultural.

And through his words, we actually see that he wasn't content to leave it like it was.

He wasn't content with just that this was the nature of work.

But what he does is he addresses those who are followers of Jesus and says to them, bring your faith back.

Bring your love for Jesus into those things, into your everyday responsibilities, into your everyday relationships.

That's what he's concerned with at that time, whether you're an employee or an employer.

Your worth isn't defined by your title or your paycheck.

It's defined before you're standing with God.

And that's exactly where this passage speaks to each of us today.

Our workplaces, the places where we serve, probably look very different than Ephesus at that time.

But we still, all of us, navigate relationships of authority, responsibility, leadership, and service.

We have coworkers and supervisors, team members, employees, managers.

So what does it look like to make our work ordinary holy? How do we bring Jesus into our workplace and into our working relationships? Well, through Paul, God paints a picture for us here about how really the gospel changes the view of our work and our working relationships.