Serve Your Employers Wholeheartedly and with Love

Never saw it quite this way before....

"Serve your employers wholeheartedly and with love, as though you were serving Christ and not men. Be assured that anything you do that is beautiful and excellent will be repaid by our Lord, whether you are an employee or an employer."

This is Ephesians 6:7&8 from a recent translation of the earliest and best Greek and Aramaic texts of this letter from the Apostle Paul. As I read that this morning it spoke directly to me more clearly than ever before.

What I found as I compared it to a more familiar English version of the Bible is the words "slave" and "master". I have read this passage many times over the years, and I have always understood the point and tried to follow this instruction.

But I never felt it so directly pointed at me as I did today. Then it hit me: always in the past I have, at some level, seen this instruction as written to slaves. And while "slave" is the actual translation of the Greek word that Paul used, this instruction really applies to anyone working for someone else, as this translation points out.

Chalk up one more reason for reading the Bible in various translations!