The Text: Ephesians 6:5-9
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.
Masters, do the same to them, and forbear threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.
Introduction: Work Is Not a Side Room
Pawson opens by naming his subject plainly: not the most popular topic, but one of the most practical — work, our daily work. Paul is ruthless in applying Christian faith to every department of life. He will not allow Christ to be kept in a small chapel of the soul, visited on Sundays, while every other room of life is furnished however we please. As Pawson puts it plainly: if he’s not Lord of all, he’s not Lord at all.
Paul has already applied this principle to marriage, to family, to leisure, to church life — and now to the part of life that occupies most of our waking hours. If Christ has no place in our work, Pawson warns, we waste at least half our waking lives; if Christ can only be served in leisure time, most Christians will lose the majority of the hours God has given them. And since most Christians have more contact with unbelievers at work than anywhere else, it is there, above all, that light must be allowed to shine — light being something that reaches the eyes, not the ears. People ought to see Christianity at work, not simply hear a running commentary on it; using the boss’s time to preach to the whole office is not right, though there will be moments the Lord makes plain must be seized.
Christianity’s Radical Change of Attitude to Work
Just as Christ transformed attitudes toward women, children, widows, and orphans, he transformed attitudes toward work just as radically. He came into a world that despised work and dreamed only of escaping it. Every man’s ambition was to afford a slave to do his work for him — the price of status was thirty pieces of silver, the price of a slave, and Pawson notes it is presumably no accident that this was also the price for which Judas sold the life of Jesus. In Greek and Roman society, two out of every three people were slaves; every doctor, every teacher, was a slave, freeing the remaining third for leisure and culture.
Pawson draws an uncomfortable parallel to his own day: modern society, increasingly, replaces slaves with immigrant labour — hospitals, he notes, would close without it — while simultaneously drifting toward the very symptoms of a sick, decaying society: more money, less work, more leisure, talk of four-day weeks. Whatever became of the commandment, six days shalt thou labour? We are drifting further and further from the divine pattern.
Christianity’s new attitude to work rests on one basic fact: God himself works. Not constantly — six-sevenths of the time, by the pattern of Genesis — but genuinely. Man, made in God’s image, finds truer fulfilment in that same rhythm of work and rest than in endlessly shortening the working week until some are permanently idle and others permanently labouring. Jesus himself was a worker: eighteen years in a carpenter’s shop before three years of public ministry — and Pawson observes how easily those eighteen years of ordinary work are forgotten in favour of the three years of ministry. Even the Holy Spirit, he notes, seems at times the busiest of all three persons of the Godhead. Jesus said simply: my Father has been working until now, and I am working.
Two Things the Bible Says About Work
First, the Bible upholds the plain duty of work. Scripture never promises that work will be pleasant, congenial, or suited to our personality — only that it must be done well. Paul states the principle so seriously that he instructs a church: if a Christian refuses to work when able, do not feed him. Pawson notes with some concern a strand of the contemporary Christian youth movement that urges believers simply to drop their jobs and go out and preach — a position, he says plainly, untrue to the whole teaching of the New Testament, where the rule remains: if a man will not work, neither shall he eat.
Second, the Bible upholds the dignity of work. A job need not itself be dignified — any job becomes dignified when it is done for Christ. Both Jesus and Paul, men of formidable intellect who could easily have become philosophers or lecturers, chose instead to work with their hands, setting an example that there is genuine dignity in manual labour offered to the Lord. There is dignity, too, in the most menial tasks: washing feet was the dirtiest job in an ancient household, reserved for the newest and lowest slave — a task even other slaves refused. And one day Jesus took a towel, knelt, and washed feet himself, saying afterward: I have given you an example. No task is too menial or too manual to carry the dignity of the Lord upon it.
What Is Vocation?
Against this background, Pawson turns to the meaning of vocation as applied to daily work. Over twenty-two years of ministry, many people have come to him wanting to apply their Christianity to their job — a fine impulse — but almost always going on to ask which job they should be doing. That, Pawson insists, is the wrong question.
Vocation is not what job you should do, but how you should do the job you already have. A road sweeper’s calling is not to abandon the broom for the mission field, but to sweep roads as a Christian, to the glory of God — Pawson recalls a Christian road sweeper in a northern town who leans his brush and shovel against the communion rail each morning to pray over his work. In all his years of pastoral conversation about work, Pawson has never once been asked how to do a job to the Lord’s glory — only ever what job to do. Christ, he concludes, is more interested in how we work than in what work we do.
Nobody, humanly speaking, would have chosen carpentry as the task for the Son of God — such an ordinary, down-to-earth use of eighteen years. But Jesus made a square door and a chair that did not rock, and it was how he did that work, not what the work was, that mattered.
If God does want to move someone into different work, Pawson says, he will make it unmistakably clear — effectively throwing a person out of their present job into the next, never simply because the present job is disliked. Most new Christians, he admits, initially want either a Christian workplace or the mission field; God’s usual answer is simply: start where you are.
The Context: Leadership and Loyalty
How we do our work inevitably brings in relationships and attitudes with those around us — Pawson, being self-employed, has the peculiar experience of needing to apply both halves of Paul’s instruction to himself, as both employer and employee. But most people work under, or over, others, and it is exactly this relational dimension Paul now addresses.
The whole passage flows from chapter 5, verse 21 — be subject to one another — the same principle Paul has already applied to marriage and to parents and children, now applied to employer and employee. God’s pattern for any group of people is neither democracy nor dictatorship: democracy leaves no room for leadership, dictatorship leaves no room for loyalty. Neither works — not in marriage, not in family, not in a factory. It works only when both sides think in terms of responsibilities rather than rights; and Pawson observes that much of what troubles industrial relations is exactly this shift toward rights-language and away from responsibility. A factory with good relationships sees strikes fall and production rise; a factory with poor relationships and wrong attitudes sees one trouble follow another. It is not the work itself but the way it is done that Paul is addressing.
To Employees: Three Marks of Christian Work
Paul says nothing to employees about time or money — as if to signal these must not be a Christian’s first concern. Three things instead mark the Christian at work: respectful obedience, conscientious loyalty, and cheerful service.
Respectful Obedience
This means doing what you are told, with the mind engaged and not merely the hands — not privately convinced you know a better way, but genuinely believing that the one who instructed you knows better, and doing it as told. Pawson acknowledges how difficult this can be for some, and how great a joy it is when someone can simply be relied on to complete a task exactly as instructed. Paul adds the striking phrase with fear and trembling — not terror or cringing, but a reverent care, a wholesome fear of doing the work wrongly, of trembling at the thought of the job being found badly done. That, Pawson says, is a situation no Christian should have to find themselves in.
Conscientious Loyalty
Pawson recalls the RAF slang term skiving — appearing to be in one place while actually in another, or appearing to work while doing nothing at all, a skill some servicemen developed to a fine art. Paul rules this out entirely: work does not depend on whether the boss or foreman happens to be watching. Someone’s eye is always on you — and even when the human boss is absent, Pawson reminds himself that Somebody, with a capital S, is not.
Cheerful Service
Not mere grinning compliance, but a genuine yes, I’ll do that — not a grudging “if you insist,” not an excuse about already having too much on, but real willingness. Paul repeatedly uses the word heart: work begins there before it ever reaches hand or head — doing it with a will, as Nehemiah’s workers had a mind to work and so rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall. Watching a mixed group of men construct a building, Pawson notes, it becomes obvious very quickly which have that mind to work, which respond readily to instruction, and which simply do things their own way and have to be corrected — and how much faster and cheaper any project moves when everyone shares the first attitude.
This will not always be easy — working harder than colleagues may draw unwelcome attention from a shop steward, and Pawson recalls a bricklayer who knew he could lay far more bricks in a fair day’s work than his fellow workmen were permitted to lay, a genuine dilemma requiring real prayer and wrestling before God, sometimes at real personal cost.
Two Reasons Why
First, your work is regarded by the Lord: there is always an eye upon you, and the aim is never to please men through mere outward show, but to satisfy the One who is actually watching. Second, you will be rewarded by the Lord: there may be nothing extra in the pay packet on Friday, but there will be more treasure in heaven. No one will ever put God in their debt — God will owe no one anything, and wages will always, eventually, be paid. Pawson notes that Jesus himself encouraged people with the promise of reward — great is your reward in heaven — simply requiring patience for it. The significance is sharpest for a slave, who received no wages at all under Roman law, yet as a Christian could now say: I am employed by the Lord, and I will be paid by him. That single realisation, Pawson says, changes everything about how the work itself is done.
To Employers: Verse 9 Is a Revolution
In the Roman and Greek world, a slave owner bore no responsibility whatsoever for a slave. If a slave broke a cup while washing up, the master could legally put him to death. A slave had no rights, and therefore an owner had no responsibilities; the slave was simply a tool, to be discarded or destroyed once sick or useless. Against that appalling backdrop, Paul tells slave owners plainly: you have a responsibility toward your slave. Treat them exactly as I have told them to treat you — as people, no longer as things.
Pawson draws a parallel with the early industrial revolution in England, when workers were simply called hands — a factory owner asked not how many people but how many hands he employed. Today, he suggests, we might just as easily say heads. But Paul insists that employees are people, never to be exploited, and never to be ruled by terror — whether terror for their families, their livelihoods, or their futures. Consideration replaces exploitation.
Two Reasons Given to Masters
First, remember the power of the Lord — remember that you too are employed. However high a person rises, to managing director or beyond, they still answer to a Master above them. Pawson names Sir Alfred Owen among British industrialists who openly acknowledged themselves employees of the Lord even at the very top of their firms — and notes that Owen’s company had one of the lowest strike records in British industry, a connection he considers no coincidence at all. Recalling the Roman centurion’s words to Jesus — I too am a man under authority, and I say to this one, go, and he goes — Pawson observes that true authority flows from being genuinely under authority; it is the arbitrary self-appointed dictator, the man who fancies himself the great “I am”, who creates trouble.
Second, remember the judgment of the Lord. One day employer and employee will stand naked before God, absolutely equal, with no difference of status — for God shows no favouritism and no partiality. God will ask the employer to answer for their conduct as an employer, and the employee to answer for their conduct as an employee: did you employ as unto the Lord? Were you employed as by the Lord? The two will stand together in that day, though they may never once have shared a table, or even entered a factory through the same door in life. When two people genuinely remember that coming reckoning, Pawson says, they treat one another very differently now.
The Deeper Answer to Social Injustice
Pawson closes by pointing to something far deeper hidden in these five verses: the Christian answer to social injustice itself. Slavery was a dreadful evil — two-thirds of the population with no rights and no income whatsoever. How did the early church tackle it? Not through revolution, not through rebellion, not by shouting about rights. Pawson names a subtle temptation the church still falls for today: imagining that the fight for social justice requires believers to become embroiled in revolution — a path, he insists, that only ever replaces one tyranny with another, and never truly resolves the underlying situation.
The genuine Christian method, instead, is to undermine injustice by injecting into it new attitudes and relationships. It is slower, but surer — and it was precisely this injected change of relationship that eventually brought slavery crashing down. Paul writes to a church where slave and master sit together in the very same pew — a genuine revolution, unheard of in the pagan temples of the day, where masters and slaves stood at opposite ends of the building. In the church, Paul insists, there is no distinction of employer and employee, rich and poor; the church pioneers social justice precisely because it levels everyone equally as sinners before God. Slaves and masters together, as brothers in the Lord, in the same fellowship — that was the new situation, and that was the injected attitude that ultimately dismantled a social evil no revolution ever could.
Pawson confesses with evident sorrow that England no longer has enough Christians to inject this kind of attitude into its trade unions, its business circles, its political life — and out of frustration at that shortage, believers are tempted toward shouting and marching instead, imagining a shortcut that does not exist. His own first prayer and target for the nation, he says plainly, is simply to treble the number of Christians in it; only then would society genuinely begin to change. Paul’s method, in the end, was simple: he turned the master’s eyes to the Lord, and the slave’s eyes to the Lord, and because both looked to the same Master, they were able to look at one another with entirely new eyes — a new relationship born from a shared vocation in daily work.
Closing Prayer
Father, we do thank you that you’ve given us all some work to do, maybe with our hands, maybe with our heads. We pray that you will help us to be Christian in our work as well as in our worship, that life may be all of a piece — everything sacred, nothing secular, all holy to the Lord. We know that your eyes are upon us here while we gather to worship you; we sense that. We pray that we may sense it everywhere. So we offer to you our thoughts and our feelings and our reactions as we’ve studied your word, and we thank you that it’s so relevant, so real, so practical. Lord, we know that you’ve given us the responsibility to practise it as well as preach it. Give us grace to do so, in Jesus’ name. Amen.
© David Pawson Ministry CIO
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© David Pawson Ministry — Transcript prepared for Koinonia.nu | koinonia.nu