Colossians 3:22

Paul wrote this letter to the church in Colossae, a city in what is now western Turkey, around AD 60–62. He was addressing enslaved people — a significant portion of the early church. In the Roman Empire, slavery was brutally embedded in everyday economic life, and enslaved people had almost no legal recourse or path to freedom. Paul is not endorsing the institution of slavery here; he's giving pastoral guidance to people who could not simply walk away from their circumstances. His surprising focus is entirely on the inner life: do your work with genuine heart and reverence for God, not as a performance for human approval. The underlying principle is about integrity — who you are when no one is evaluating you.

Lord, you see every corner I cut and every moment I put on a face for other people. I don't want to live a divided life. Help me to be the same person whether I'm being watched or not — not out of fear, but because you are always worth my honest best. Amen.

Let's be honest: this verse is uncomfortable, and that discomfort deserves to be named before anything else. The church has used passages like this to justify oppression, and that history is real and ugly. But look carefully at what Paul is actually doing. He's not writing to the slaveholders telling them the system is fine. He's writing to enslaved people — people with almost no agency — and he's doing something quietly subversive: he's telling them that their internal life belongs to them. Their masters can own their labor. They cannot own their conscience, their integrity, or their relationship with God. For those of us who are not enslaved, the principle cuts in a different direction. "Not only when their eye is on you." That phrase is a mirror most of us would rather not look into. Most of us carry two versions of ourselves — the one people see in meetings and on Sunday mornings, and the one we are at midnight when we're tired and no one's tracking us. Paul is quietly asking: who are you when the performance stops? That's the real you. And it's the you God sees all the time. The invitation here isn't to perform better — it's to become more integrated, so the gap between those two versions of yourself slowly, honestly closes.