A young boy was talking to his father about what little boys know and what their fathers know. The boy asked, “Do fathers always know more than their sons?” The boy’s father answered, “Yes.” The boy asked another question. “Who invented telephones?” “Alexander Graham Bell,” his father replied. The boy then asked, “If fathers always know more than their sons, then why didn’t Alexander Graham Bell’s father invent the phone?”
Smart Boy!
Exodus 20:12 – “Honor your father and mother. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”
Parents of teenagers point to this commandment often. A father of four teens said, “There’s nothing wrong with teenagers that reasoning with them won’t aggravate,” and another said, “Insanity is contagious. You catch it from your kids.”
An astute teacher once complained, “Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for their elders. They love to chatter in place of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, babble before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.” Socrates made that comment more than twenty-five hundred years ago.
Let’s listen to a more recent philosopher and see if he has any wisdom on honoring parents.
Now you know!
This is Commandment #5 but it is the first that we will cover in this series. Today I want to look at two questions concerning this Commandment. Why? and How?
1) Why?
According to Ron Mehl in “The Tender Commandments -
“If you had a list of the Ten Commandments evenly spaced on a sheet of binder paper and folded that sheet in half, top to bottom, the fifth commandment would be right at the fold.
This is a matter so important to the Lord that Scripture puts it squarely in the center of these commands. I don’t think that was an accident. I believe these words are central to the Ten Commandments – and to life itself – because they affect everything about your life and mine. Just as the Fifth Commandment would appear at the fold of the piece of paper, so it also appears at the fold of our lives. In many ways, our destiny hinges on how we respond to this command. It affects our futures, it affects how we process the past, and it affects our right now – what God can and will do in our lives today.”
This is CRITICALLY important that we get this, that we understand this. This isn’t a suggestion, IT IS A COMMAND!
What this honor looks like changes as time goes on in our lives. In the early years, honoring your parents is expressed mainly through being obedient to their rules. As one becomes a teenager this need for obedience continues but is augmented by learning to show respect to your parent in your attitude. Even as adults we are to continue to show respect by listening to our parents advice and by caring for their welfare.
Some experts have pointed out that even the Bible takes into account how hard it is to get along with one’s parents. In his 1994 book Jewish Wisdom, scholar and writer Rabbi Joseph Telushkin discusses how ‘the often confused mixture of emotions that children feel for parents perhaps accounts for the peculiar fact that while the Bible legislates love of neighbor (Lev. 19:18), love of the stranger (Lev. 19:34) and love of God(Deut. 6:5), it does not do so for parents.
In so vital and intense a relationship, love is too volatile an emotion to be commanded; therefore the Bible demands a standard of honor and respect that can remain in force even in times of estrangement.
Even the specific word used in the Hebrew text of the Fifth Commandment illustrates the complexity of honoring your parents. If you look at the Hebrew text of Ex. 20:12, you’ll find the first word of the commandment is kahbeid, which has a two-sided meaning. On the one hand, kahbeid means heaviness, weightiness, difficulty, or burden. On the other hand, kahbeid also means to honor and give importance or weight to someone. Thus the reason for my message subtitle this morning – “Weighty Parents”.
So clearly the Bible doesn’t pretend that honoring your parents is always easy or light. The two-sided word kahbeid can mean honoring your parents is a heavy burden or, on the other hand, it can be an opportunity to give weight or importance, to bring honor and dignity to two people who need your support.
Each of us has some control over which sense of kahbeid actually occurs between us and our parents. Whether the process of honoring your parents tends to be an irritating burden or a heartful opportunity.
However, this commandment is not qualified. It does not mean:
- Honor only if the person is personally perceived as deserving.
- Honor only if the person always reciprocates.
- Honor only if it is pleasing to you to do so.
- Honor only if you get compliments for doing so.
- Honor only if it ‘feels right.’
- Honor only if other people also do so.
The commandment says, just do it. In fact, if your parents were deserving and worthy of your honor, it wouldn’t have to be commanded, would it? It is fairly easy to honor honorable parents. It is much more difficult to honor dishonorable, cruel, abusive, absent, apathetic, angry parents.
Someone may say:
This command obviously isn’t something that’s going to apply to me, because I don’t have the kind of parents who should be honored. I certainly don’t want to honor them and don’t intend to. If this pastor knew what I’ve been through in my life – if he knew the scars and the grief and the abuse – there’s no way in the world he would expect this commandment to apply to me.
Yet the fact remains, the commandment applies to all of us. It applies to those who have good, godly, loving parents, and to those who don’t. The Lord didn’t list any exceptions, exemptions, or special considerations. And just to make sure we understand how profoundly this command applies to us, He made sure it was repeated in the NT:
Eph. 6:1-3 – “Children, obey your parents because you belong to the Lord, for this is the right thing to do. “Honor your father and mother.” This is the first commandment with a promise: If you honor your father and mother, “things will go well for you, and you will have a long life on the earth.”
So WHY should you honor your parents?
1) It’s COMMANDED!
2) Honoring Parents is a Pathway to God’s Blessing.
A third location – Deut. 5:16 – “Honor your father and mother, as the LORD your God commanded you. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”
Obedience offers the promise of a long life. In Hebrew thought this was not a guarantee of many years. It referred more to quality than quantity of life. It was a promise of personal fulfillment.
Do you want to be blessed by God, HE has told us HOW right here!
3) Honoring Parents Teaches Your Kids How to Treat You
Gal. 6:7 – “Don’t be misled—you cannot mock the justice of God. You will always harvest what you plant.”
You have perhaps seen the bumper sticker: “Be nice to your children, they will be picking out your nursing home.”
Why we honor our parents: It’s commanded, it’s a pathway to God’s blessing, it teaches our children how to treat us and…
4) Because WE Love God
John 14:15 – “If you love me, obey my commandments.”
John 15:10 – “When you obey my commandments, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”
Ron Mehl says about those two verses, “That’s the best reason I can think of for obeying the Ten Commandments. I want to abide in His love. I don’t want to live or abide in any other place for any other reason. For me, life means walking and talking and ministering while I’m being swept along in the main current of His love. And that means I need to obey, even when the obeying is difficult.”
That is WHY we HONOR our parents.
Next Question:
2) HOW?
Notice that there’s no age limitation in this commandment. It doesn’t say ’honor your father and mother until you move out of the house and start paying your own auto insurance, cooking your own meals or paying your cell phone bill.’ It simply says, “Honor your father and mother.” It’s something that you’re supposed to do your whole entire life! So HOW?
1) By Valuing Their Advice
Honor your parents by valuing their advice.
“A wise son heeds his father’s instruction…” Proverbs 13:1
So, a lot of kids say, “Sweet! Once I’m out of the house, I don’t have to obey any longer. I hate these rules, and when I’m 18, I’m OUTTA here, baby!”
Parents are not always right, but their wisdom is rarely foolish or arbitrary. As a child, still in the home, honoring = obeying, unless they suggest you do something that violates Scripture. God’s Law trumps parental authority.
As an adult, to honor them, doesn’t mean that we will always follow their advice, but that you give a fair hearing to their advice. You value their input, their wisdom. So we honor our parents by choosing to value their input.
2) By Showing Respect
Prov. 30:11 – “Some people curse their father and do not thank their mother.”
Ezek. 22:1-3-”Now this message came to me from the LORD: “Son of man, are you ready to judge Jerusalem? Are you ready to judge this city of murderers? Publicly denounce her detestable sins, and give her this message from the Sovereign LORD:”
Want to hear one of the judgments God speaks?
22:7 – “Fathers and mothers are treated with contempt.”
According to dictionary.com contempt means: “the state of being despised; dishonor; disgrace.”
I have already gone over the why question. It doesn’t matter if they are respectable. In that case, we choose to respect their position. Much like we should respect the office of the President of the U.S. regardless of whether you respect the person in that office.
Thus we honor them by choosing to respect.
3) By Forgiving Them
I know there are some of you here today thinking, “I am NEVER going to be able to honor HIM/HER. . . Not after what he/she’s done.”
I’m probably talking to some people whose parents:
- divorced, and left you hanging.
- fought, and you were caught in the middle.
- abused you physically.
- was apathetic
- abandoned you.
Again, Mehl says, “Because I want His blessing and I want to be a blessing, I am willing to obey…even when it hurts. The hurt, after all, will pass away. The smile of God is forever.”
Lewis Smedes offers valuable perspective: “The commandment to honor parents doesn’t tell children to feel happy about their parents or to enjoy camping with them or even having them over to dinner. It says nothing about happy emotional relationships. All that it commands is honor.”
As I conclude, I have focused on children’s response to their parents because the Commandment is given to all of us AS those having parents and our attitude towards them. Let me speak to us AS parents now, BRIEFLY.
Make it easy on your children to honor you!
- Be honorable!
- Be respectable!
- Be godly!
- Be selfless!
Understand what it is that you have! I want to close out this message with one last clip. It is pointed to father’s, but it applies to mom’s as well. It is a clip from the movie “Courageous” by the same people that made “Fireproof”. It arrives at the Theatre in September. Let’s watch.
- REALIZE how rich YOU are today, strive to live up to that!
This is our first Commandment that we are dealing with in The Ten. We must remember that we have Weighty Parents!
“Honor your father and mother!”
It applies to all of us. And please hear this: No matter what has happened to us in the past, God is interested in YOUR RIGHT NOW!
He wants to change your heart and mine RIGHT NOW. Not tomorrow.
He wants to walk with us and fellowship with us RIGHT NOW. Not later on, after we ‘get things straightened out.’
He wants to teach us and bless us RIGHT NOW. Not on some mythical future day when we’re ‘more prepared’ or ‘have our act together.’
He wants to protect us from destructive thoughts and attitudes RIGHT NOW. And RIGHT NOW, if I settle this matter of honoring my parents, I can be a different person. A son or daughter who forgives from the heart can be a different kind of parent to his or her own children. An honorable parent. A parent free from bitterness.
What will you choose RIGHT NOW? Choose to value, respect, forgive. Choose to HONOR your father and mother and it WILL go well for you. It’s a promise!
