Greater Than Our Relationships: What Actually Changes When Jesus Is at the Center

Our culture is adrift. Not because people stopped caring about their families — most people I meet care enormously — but because we abandoned God’s way of doing things and went looking for our own.

And every generation finds a new one. Each promises that this is how you raise your kids, this is how you be a husband, this is how you be a good wife. Each one is offered as the correction to the last disaster. And then it becomes the next disaster, and the generation after us looks back and says, well, that didn’t work — let’s try something new.

If you have lived long enough to watch that cycle two or three times, you start wanting solid ground.

The passage everyone flinches at

Colossians 3:18-4:1 is where Paul gets practical about the Christian household. It is also, for a lot of people, the passage they would rather skip. The words land badly in our moment.

Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them.

Before anything else, notice four small words: as is fitting in the Lord. You can render it another way — as long as it is proper in the Lord.

Which means there is a line.

There are things it is right to yield on, and there are things it is not right to yield on, because they run against Christ. If what is being asked of you is contrary to God, you do not go along with it. Standing up and saying no there is not rebellion. It is faithfulness.

That was radical when Paul wrote it. In the Roman household the paterfamilias was the law. He owned every asset. He decided what debts the family took on. When a child was born he decided whether that child was kept or discarded. Into that world Paul says: he is not your final authority. Christ is.

And Paul does not stop with one side. The very next breath is aimed at husbands — love them, and do not be harsh with them.

I have taught men’s Bible study for over twenty years, and the thing men most need to hear has not changed in two thousand years: be more loving, be more tender. We are rough around the edges. My own daughters tell me so, and they are always right.

Let me say something plainly. Men have spent generations acting like ogres. Is it hard to be a husband today? Yes. Is a good deal of that our own harvest? Also yes. This passage is not a weapon, and it never was.

What is actually being asked

Here is what I think Paul is doing.

Every relationship you will ever have involves submitting to somebody. There is no relationship with another human being that does not — to their preferences, their dislikes, their history, their baggage. If you want to be close to a person, you will yield somewhere.

So the question is never whether you yield. It is what you yield on.

Most of what we fight over is secondary. Paul is telling a wife: do not let the small things become the center of your marriage and spend your credibility there, so that when the thing that actually matters arrives you have nothing left to spend. Focus on what God cares about. Let the nonsense go.

And to the husband: if she is genuinely loved, if she feels your tenderness and your kindness and your mercy, the secondary things are not hard to yield. Submitting is easy when you are loved like that. If you want the one, you have to bring the other.

The goal you did not know you had

Ask yourself what you are actually for as a spouse.

If your goal is self-fulfillment — if you came into marriage with a hole from your own childhood and expected a person to fill it — your marriage will struggle. If you think children will do it, they will not; children are hard. If you think the house in the right neighborhood will do it, it will not.

There is one goal that holds:

The glory of Christ, seen in the person you married.

That is what I am for as a husband. Not my fulfillment. Not my preferences. His glory in her. And her goal for me should be the same.

Which means your marriage is not primarily about you. God established marriage for His glory and for your good — in that order, and do not reverse them. Your marriage belongs to Him. Your spouse is not your possession; your spouse is a gift.

Submit your marriage to the Lord and watch what He does with it.

A friend of thirty-four years of marriage asked me recently what the secret was. Here it is: outserve each other. Want your wife to flourish? Serve her. Make the bed. Do the dishes. Wives — and I know these are difficult words in our culture — serve him. Love him. Keep serving. Scripture says that when we serve each other we are serving Christ Himself. Serve your husband as though he were Jesus, especially on the days he is not acting like it.

Children, and the thing they can always tell

Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.

Paul says obey — and then immediately, before anyone can turn it into leverage, he closes the door: do not provoke them. Do not discourage them into running. Do not break their spirit.

The goal of parenting is not a well-mannered child who gets good grades and stays off drugs. That is a fine outcome and a poor aim. The goal is to point them to Christ.

And here is the uncomfortable part. They live with you. They know.

If Jesus is at the center on Sunday morning and absent from the house Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and then reappears the next Sunday, we are teaching them something — that Jesus is a thing you do rather than someone you follow. They will believe what they see far more than what they are told.

So let them see it. The songs sung at home. Prayers prayed at home. The Bible open at home, on an ordinary Tuesday.

You will not be perfect. You do not have to be — He does, and He is. What your children need to see is a parent quick to repent and quick to apologize. That is the gospel, demonstrated where it is hardest.

And if you are reading this having had the opposite — a father who was cruel, a mother who was absent — hear this. That was not God. That was sin, and darkness, and it was evil. But in Christ you have a true and perfect Father, who loves you beyond measure and will never forsake you. The cycle can end with you.

Your Monday matters more than you think

The last relationship Paul addresses is work.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men… You are serving the Lord Christ.

Then, remarkably: Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.

Watch what he does. He lifts the person with the least power in the room — your work matters to God, and how you do it matters to God. Then he levels the most powerful person in the room — you think you are the master; you have a Master.

There was a monk in the seventeenth century named Brother Lawrence who worked in a monastery kitchen. He wrote that the clatter of his pots was no different from the hour of prayer, and he left a small poem behind:

Since I have no time to be a great saint by doing lovely things, make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.

Your work — your honest work, whatever it is — is as important to God as God is important to your work.

Work for money and it is a dog chasing its tail. Work for fame, the same. But work done with integrity, offered to God, is worship. It does not matter whether you are a police officer, a nurse, a bus driver, a teacher, or a lawyer preparing a contract that is genuinely well made. What matters is that Christ is at the center of it.

One thread

Marriage. Parenting. Work. Three arenas that could not be more different, and one thread running through all of them.

Someone watches how you carry it and asks how you manage.

How do you husband? It’s Jesus. How do you parent? It’s Jesus. How do you keep going when the job is falling apart? It’s Jesus.

A household does not flourish because the people inside it try harder. It flourishes when Christ is at the center — and everything else, finally, falls into place around Him.

Preached at Christchurch Miami on August 23, 2026, as part of the Greater Than series through Colossians.

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