Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the text before us tonight is radical. In fact, I daresay that nothing else in the book of Ephesians is so obviously countercultural as this text — what Martin Luther termed the “Household Code,” a name that has stuck to it ever since. The problem is this: the code tells slaves to obey, wives to submit, and children to obey. But now that the slavery has been totally discredited as one of the most evil practices in history, and now that feminism has discovered that wives have no business submitting to their local patriarch, how in the world can we take this advice as morally serious? It is at best hopelessly irrelevant to modern social conditions, but more likely unspeakably immoral because it endorses slavery and the subjugation of women. Brothers and sisters, if you don’t feel the social pressure behind those objections, you need to get out more. The claim of Ephesians’ household code to represent universally binding moral instruction from God Himself is either dismissed out of hand or regarded as one more reason to think that the God of the Bible is an immoral joke, “one of the most unpleasant characters in all fiction,” as Richard Dawkins has it. But as I will show you tonight, with God’s help, this passage is far from immoral. In fact, it truly does describe how God wants a Christian household to look. If I had to sum up how the Christian home should operate in a single word, I would use the word “harmoniously.” We have seen the call to walk in unity and purity; tonight we turn to an introduction to the call to walk in harmony.
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Caleb Nelson grew up in Ft. Collins, CO. Born into a Christian home, where he eventually became the eldest of 11 children, he has been a lifelong Presbyterian. He professed faith at the age of six, and was homeschooled through high school. He then attended Patrick Henry College...
