A few years ago when I read through Ephesians, I underlined each instance of “in Christ,” “in Him,” “in the Lord,” and so on in purple. With a quick glance now, I count thirty times that Paul uses this phrase to emphasize Jesus’ redemptive work and the role it has in our identity. Each time I now read through a passage in Ephesians, my eyes are drawn to how woven into our identity this idea is. We are saved in Christ, by Christ, and now we live to Christ.
Earlier in his letter, Paul already sets Jesus Christ as the foundation of the family. Wives and husbands are exhorted to reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. They are called to love in the way of Christ, to love as Christ loved, selflessly and with a servant’s heart. Loving submission in marriage mirrors the submission of Christ to the church.
Paul’s exhortations for children and parents are no different. Children are told to obey their parents in the Lord. Loving obedience in a family mirrors the obedience we’re called to as God’s children.
Obeying from the Love We’ve Experienced
God’s desire for the family unit is that children would love, honor, and respect their parents in response to loving, kind, and gracious parenting. We do this in the same way that we love God the Father through obedience because He first loved us. We are able to freely and joyfully obey God because of Jesus Christ. It is in and through Christ that we are reconciled to God and adopted as His children.
This verse will apply differently to each of us, as we all find ourselves in different relationships and seasons. Some of us are in the midst of teaching our own children how to obey our God-given authority as parents. We might be battling pre-teen attitudes or toddler temper tantrums or a chorus of “you can’t make me.” Some of us are not yet parents, or grieving the loss of a child, or wading through a lonely season of infertility. Many of us are navigating what it looks like to honor and respect our own parents as we’ve grown and started families of our own.
For those of us with parents who are walking in obedience to God, this might come more naturally. For others, we’re seeking how to faithfully obey the command to love parents who have yet to love us first. Or maybe we’ve lost our parents and the urge to skip over this verse helps soften our grief. I pray that as you’re reading through today’s passage, that the Lord will bring you comfort and strength in whatever season you find yourself in.
May His abundant love reach to the corners of your heart where there is pain, frustration, or loneliness fighting to take root.
Loving from the Love We’ve Experienced
One thing that we all share as children of God is the deep comfort that comes from knowing that we can rest in the love our Heavenly Father has for us. Before we can learn how to raise our own children in obedience or how to honor our parents through service and obedience, we first need to rest and meditate in our Father’s care for us.
God is not an angry father, provoking us to sin, but rather He is a gracious, loving Father that invites us to be fellow heirs with His Son (Romans 8:17). Paul beautifully writes that he is “convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor heavenly rulers, nor things that are present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Once again, we are reminded that this loving relationship we have with the Father is rooted in Christ Jesus. Once we know the never-failing love of God, rooted in the redemptive work of Christ, we start to understand what joyful obedience to the Father looks like. And it’s this example that should guide our own parenting and obedience in earthly relationships.
As parents, as children, and as Christians, we are called to love each other in response to God’s own love for us in Christ Jesus. Let’s be quick to spend time with our Father, learning His patience, grace, mercy, discipline, and love so that we might follow in the example of Jesus’ own obedience to the Father.
