Being a
people-pleaser can be exhausting. What one soon learns is that the more you try
to please people, or even a certain person, the less successful at that venture
you become! The Christian faith was never devised by God to be lived on the
surface, seeking to please people with “eye-service.”
This word for people-pleaser that
the apostle Paul uses in Ephesians 6:6, “eye-service,” is only used this once
in all of the New Testament. “Eye-service” is a good translation of ophthalmodoulian, which
is a compound word made up of two words put together—eye + service. What does
this mean?
“Eye-service” has the basic and root idea of doing only
what pleases other people, “it is labor when the master is present, but
relaxing and laziness as soon as he is
gone” (Rogers & Rogers, The
New Linguistic and Exegetical Key to the Greek New Testament, 1998, p.
446). It literally carries the idea of service under the master’s eye. One
writer expresses it this way: “…For the master’s eye usually stimulates to
greater diligence; his absence, on the other hand, renders sluggish.”
Paul does not address the systemic issue of slavery as to
whether it is moral or not. Instead, the gospel demands that those servants who
are Christians care about the quality of their work. They are not to be
shirkers, claiming that their new life of grace gives them freedom to do
whatever they want. Rather, they are to work as to the Lord Jesus Christ. The
risen Lord is their true Master!
A lot of lessons are imbedded in this admonition that can
apply to us nearly 2,000 years later. We work for the Lord, not our bosses.
This means “eye-service” is not an option. We work hard regardless of who is
watching. This kind of work ethic is what commends the gospel to those who do
not know Jesus. Our sincere, hard-working, authentic lifestyle of living and
being accountable to Jesus, the higher moral ground, will commend the good news
to those who are not Christians. May God give us the daily motivation to live
like this all of the time!
In Christian love, Curtis
