Exalting Christ in Our Family and Workplace
Exalting Christ in Every Corner of Your Life
What does it actually mean to make Christ's Lordship real in your daily life? Not just on Sunday mornings, not just in the quiet moments of private prayer, but in the middle of a disagreement with your spouse, a frustrating shift at work, or a tense conversation with your teenager? The call to exalt Christ is not reserved for the sanctuary. It reaches into every room of your home and every corner of your workplace.
There are four areas where this kind of Christ-exalting life takes shape: our faith, our focus, our family, and our field of work. The first two deserve their own full treatment, but today the focus turns to the places where life gets most personal and most complicated — our homes and our jobs.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like in Marriage
Few things reveal the condition of our hearts more honestly than how we treat the people closest to us. Marriage, in particular, has a way of exposing selfishness with remarkable efficiency. The Bible does not shy away from this. It speaks directly into the marriage relationship with specific, sometimes uncomfortable instructions — and those instructions are worth sitting with carefully.
Ephesians 5, beginning at verse 25, describes the husband's role with striking clarity. The standard set for husbands is not cultural preference or personal comfort. It is the love of Christ for the church — a love defined by self-sacrifice, by giving, by nourishing and caring. The husband is not positioned as a manager or a boss. He is positioned as a servant-lover, someone whose energy and attention are directed outward toward his wife's well-being, not inward toward his own preferences.
Colossians 3:19 reinforces this with a pointed warning: husbands are to love their wives and not be harsh with them. Harshness and love cannot occupy the same space. A husband who is harsh is not leading — he is damaging. And the damage is real. As one well-known pastor and author has observed, a wife often becomes a mirror that reflects back what she receives from her husband. That is a sobering thought for any man willing to look honestly at his marriage.
The questions worth asking are not comfortable ones. What have you given up for your wife lately? What has it cost you to be her husband? What sacrifices have you made, not to get something in return, but simply to enhance her flourishing? 1 Peter 3:7 calls husbands to treat their wives with respect, recognizing a tenderness of spirit that requires gentle, nurturing love rather than domination. The goal is that a husband's love would cause his wife to open and bloom, not shrink and retreat.
For wives, Colossians 3:18 and 1 Peter 3:1-6 speak to a willing, honoring posture toward a husband's leadership. This is not a statement about a woman's worth or value before God. Peter makes clear in 1 Peter 3:7 that wives are co-heirs of the gracious gift of life — equal in dignity and standing before God. The submission described in Scripture is a matter of function within relationship, not a hierarchy of value. Even Christ, fully equal to the Father in nature, submitted himself to the Father's will. Different roles, fully connected, both honored.
What Scripture describes in marriage is not a power structure. It is a partnership in which both husband and wife are asking the same question: what does God ask of me in this relationship? When both people are oriented toward that question rather than toward their own rights and preferences, something extraordinary can happen in a home.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like in Parenting
Colossians 3:20-21 speaks plainly to both children and parents. Children are called to obey their parents in everything, because this pleases the Lord. Disobedience toward parents, the passage implies, is not simply a family matter — it is a posture of rebellion toward God himself. That reframes the entire conversation about authority in the home.
But the instruction does not stop with children. Fathers are warned not to embitter or discourage their children. Correction without encouragement produces discouragement. Boundaries without love produce resentment. Children need all of it — correction, boundaries, encouragement — but above all, they need to grow up inside an environment saturated with God's love. That environment is something parents create, or fail to create, by how they live in the home every day.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like at Work
The workplace may seem like an unlikely venue for spiritual transformation, but Scripture treats it as one of the most important mission fields available to a believer. Colossians 3:22-24 addresses the dominant workplace dynamic of Paul's day — slaves and masters — but the principle translates directly to employees and employers in any era. The command is simple and demanding in equal measure: work as if you are working for Christ himself.
This means the quality of your work, your attitude toward difficult coworkers, your integrity when no one is watching, and your willingness to serve even when you are not recognized — all of it becomes an act of worship when it is offered to God rather than performed for human approval.
The book of Philemon offers a vivid illustration of what this looks like in practice. A runaway slave named Onesimus, having stolen from his master and fled, encounters the apostle Paul and comes to faith in Christ. Paul sends him back to his master Philemon with a letter asking Philemon to receive Onesimus not as property, but as a brother. Paul even offers to cover whatever Onesimus owes. The relational transformation that Christ makes possible — between a master and a slave, between an employer and an employee — does not come from demanding structural change. It comes from both parties being changed by the same gospel.
The Invitation
Exalting Christ in every area of life will cost something. It will cost the comfort of putting yourself first. It will cost the satisfaction of demanding your rights. But what it produces — in marriages, in families, in workplaces — is something no amount of self-assertion can manufacture.
The invitation is to begin each day with a simple reorientation: Lord, whatever I face today, it will be my joy to exalt you in it. That single shift in perspective has the power to transform not just your own life, but the lives of everyone around you.
What does it actually mean to make Christ's Lordship real in your daily life? Not just on Sunday mornings, not just in the quiet moments of private prayer, but in the middle of a disagreement with your spouse, a frustrating shift at work, or a tense conversation with your teenager? The call to exalt Christ is not reserved for the sanctuary. It reaches into every room of your home and every corner of your workplace.
There are four areas where this kind of Christ-exalting life takes shape: our faith, our focus, our family, and our field of work. The first two deserve their own full treatment, but today the focus turns to the places where life gets most personal and most complicated — our homes and our jobs.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like in Marriage
Few things reveal the condition of our hearts more honestly than how we treat the people closest to us. Marriage, in particular, has a way of exposing selfishness with remarkable efficiency. The Bible does not shy away from this. It speaks directly into the marriage relationship with specific, sometimes uncomfortable instructions — and those instructions are worth sitting with carefully.
Ephesians 5, beginning at verse 25, describes the husband's role with striking clarity. The standard set for husbands is not cultural preference or personal comfort. It is the love of Christ for the church — a love defined by self-sacrifice, by giving, by nourishing and caring. The husband is not positioned as a manager or a boss. He is positioned as a servant-lover, someone whose energy and attention are directed outward toward his wife's well-being, not inward toward his own preferences.
Colossians 3:19 reinforces this with a pointed warning: husbands are to love their wives and not be harsh with them. Harshness and love cannot occupy the same space. A husband who is harsh is not leading — he is damaging. And the damage is real. As one well-known pastor and author has observed, a wife often becomes a mirror that reflects back what she receives from her husband. That is a sobering thought for any man willing to look honestly at his marriage.
The questions worth asking are not comfortable ones. What have you given up for your wife lately? What has it cost you to be her husband? What sacrifices have you made, not to get something in return, but simply to enhance her flourishing? 1 Peter 3:7 calls husbands to treat their wives with respect, recognizing a tenderness of spirit that requires gentle, nurturing love rather than domination. The goal is that a husband's love would cause his wife to open and bloom, not shrink and retreat.
For wives, Colossians 3:18 and 1 Peter 3:1-6 speak to a willing, honoring posture toward a husband's leadership. This is not a statement about a woman's worth or value before God. Peter makes clear in 1 Peter 3:7 that wives are co-heirs of the gracious gift of life — equal in dignity and standing before God. The submission described in Scripture is a matter of function within relationship, not a hierarchy of value. Even Christ, fully equal to the Father in nature, submitted himself to the Father's will. Different roles, fully connected, both honored.
What Scripture describes in marriage is not a power structure. It is a partnership in which both husband and wife are asking the same question: what does God ask of me in this relationship? When both people are oriented toward that question rather than toward their own rights and preferences, something extraordinary can happen in a home.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like in Parenting
Colossians 3:20-21 speaks plainly to both children and parents. Children are called to obey their parents in everything, because this pleases the Lord. Disobedience toward parents, the passage implies, is not simply a family matter — it is a posture of rebellion toward God himself. That reframes the entire conversation about authority in the home.
But the instruction does not stop with children. Fathers are warned not to embitter or discourage their children. Correction without encouragement produces discouragement. Boundaries without love produce resentment. Children need all of it — correction, boundaries, encouragement — but above all, they need to grow up inside an environment saturated with God's love. That environment is something parents create, or fail to create, by how they live in the home every day.
What Exalting Christ Looks Like at Work
The workplace may seem like an unlikely venue for spiritual transformation, but Scripture treats it as one of the most important mission fields available to a believer. Colossians 3:22-24 addresses the dominant workplace dynamic of Paul's day — slaves and masters — but the principle translates directly to employees and employers in any era. The command is simple and demanding in equal measure: work as if you are working for Christ himself.
This means the quality of your work, your attitude toward difficult coworkers, your integrity when no one is watching, and your willingness to serve even when you are not recognized — all of it becomes an act of worship when it is offered to God rather than performed for human approval.
The book of Philemon offers a vivid illustration of what this looks like in practice. A runaway slave named Onesimus, having stolen from his master and fled, encounters the apostle Paul and comes to faith in Christ. Paul sends him back to his master Philemon with a letter asking Philemon to receive Onesimus not as property, but as a brother. Paul even offers to cover whatever Onesimus owes. The relational transformation that Christ makes possible — between a master and a slave, between an employer and an employee — does not come from demanding structural change. It comes from both parties being changed by the same gospel.
The Invitation
Exalting Christ in every area of life will cost something. It will cost the comfort of putting yourself first. It will cost the satisfaction of demanding your rights. But what it produces — in marriages, in families, in workplaces — is something no amount of self-assertion can manufacture.
The invitation is to begin each day with a simple reorientation: Lord, whatever I face today, it will be my joy to exalt you in it. That single shift in perspective has the power to transform not just your own life, but the lives of everyone around you.
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