December 3 Daily Devotional

Bible Reading:

Ephesians 6:1-9

¹Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
²Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;
³That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.
⁴And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
⁵Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;
⁶Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
⁷With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:
⁸Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.
⁹And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.

Devotional:

Paul is still talking basically about the way in which we are to give evidence that we are filled with the Spirit, amplifying even more this factor of submitting to one another.

Children are to submit to their parents. But even as Paul says this he finds that he has to insert instructions to parents to bring up their children in the nurture of the Lord. They are to feed them on the Bread of Life, and to bring them up in the admonition and warning concerning the Lord and His judgment.

The teaching of submission is carried on through to the servant-master relationship. It is a teaching everywhere present in God's Word. God has set up some to be leaders and some to be followers. He has made some to command and some to obey. As the child learns in the home to submit and obey, he will be prepared to perform this role as student, as employee and as citizen. It may be that some day, according to the gifts given to him, he himself will fulfil the role of teacher, or employer or ruler, or of parent! Learning to submit to those whom God has placed over him is important now and also as preparation for a possible future role.

Indeed, it is a counterpart to his fulfilling the role of obedient child of God! To use the reasoning of John the Apostle, how can we obey God whom we cannot see, if we do not obey our parents whom we can see?

Being an obedient child will not come easily, even in a Christian home. Obedience needs to be taught around-the-clock, and the best teacher will be the parent who himself has learned what it means to be obedient to the heavenly Father.