Explore the Bible: November 21

The Gospel and Relationships • Colossians 3:18-4:6

By Don Hicks

HAPPY THANKSGIVING! This is perhaps the most American holiday. In 1621, the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving Day with 90 Wampanoag native American tribe members near Plymouth Colony. As God would provide, a Wampanoag named Squanto could speak English.

This First Thanksgiving lasted three days and emphasized thanking God for providing for the Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims were English Christians with a strong belief in God’s care and provision. They were Puritans who had separated from the Church of England. Their faith was important to them and they began their colony in the New World with the Mayflower Compact, the colony’s first governing document.

In today’s lesson we find Paul telling us: “Devote yourselves to prayer, stay alert in it with thanksgiving” (Colossians 4:2 CSB). It is staying alert to prayer with thanksgiving that will be a good guide for us in this season.

The American tradition of giving thanks to God should guide us every day and in all of the relationships we encounter in daily life. The Sunday School lesson this week titled, The Gospel and Relationships, deals with our most basic relationships. It includes major teachings about marriage and parenting, for example.

The most challenging parts for me, personally, comes in verses 19 and 21: “Husbands, love your wives and don’t be bitter toward them” (Colossians 3:19 CSB); and “Fathers, do not exasperate your children, so that they won’t become discouraged” (Colossians 3:21 CSB).

You might be surprised that I would say loving my wife is challenging, but understand that this means every day even if you’re tired, discouraged, or even sick. This challenge only increases for me when I remember it is vital to study related passages of Scripture to have a more thorough understanding of its deepest meaning.

Paul wrote in Ephesians 5, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy” (Ephesians 5:25-26a KJV). My love for Judy is supposed to be as pure and caring and protecting as the love Jesus Christ has for His church.

I cannot think of a greater challenge than to love as Christ did and to protect Judy as Jesus protects His church. That gives a deeper, greater meaning to, “devote yourselves to prayer, and stay alert.”

Ephesians also teaches us about fathering our children. “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4 NIV). This verse commands to raise our children in the training of the Lord.

Proverbs gives us a very reassuring promise about how to do that: “Train up a child in the way he should go: And when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6 KJV).

You probably noticed that I missed the first verse of our focal passage: “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord” (Colossians 3:14 CSB). Again we can turn to the Apostle Paul’s letter to Ephesians for more clarity. Paul writes: “…submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.”

“Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything” (Ephesians 5:21-24 KJV).

Some have read this to mean the wife is inferior or of less value than her husband. This is not the teaching of Scripture. At the very beginning of the Christian Scripture, God inspired His author to write, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them” (Genesis 1:27-28a KJV). Both men and women are created “in the image of God.”

“And God blessed them,” means both husband and wife are blessed by God.

Slavery is never pleasing to God. Human slavery is and always has been wrong. Some of the New Testament teachings that reference slavery that existed at that time were written to teach common sense principles that apply even to our modern-day employee/employer relationships, such as, “Don’t work only while being watched, as people pleasers, but work wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord” (Colossians 3:22 CSB).

In Philemon 16, Paul tells Onesimus to take back his runaway slave Philemon, “no longer as a slave, but more than a slave — as a dearly loved brother” (CSB).

Next week’s lesson comes from Philemon and addresses this subject more deeply.

Hicks is missions director for Jasper Association in Bay Springs. He may be contacted at donaldwhicks@gmail.com.