Honoring our Parents
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· 27 viewsHow to honor our parents in the Lord
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Happy Mother’s Day! I hope you all have a chance to celebrate the mother’s in your life and for many, it is also a day to remember the special women who have gone on to be with the Lord. As we honor our mothers specifically, we also want to acknowledge those women in our church who don’t have children of their own for whatever reason but they care for us and serve the church as spiritual mothers. This morning, we’ll be jumping to the end of Ephesians and looking at a couple of verses that will be familiar for most of us.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise),
In this message, we want to look at three different applications of honoring our parents and why it’s so important to teach our children how to honor us. Honoring our parents means:
Submission to their authority
Obedience in the Lord
Taking care of them as they age
As you probably have recognized, the Apostle Paul is not issuing a new command in these verses but reminding the church of one of the oldest commandments in the Bible, which is to honor our parents. And obviously on mother’s day, we celebrate everything that our mom’s have done for us but it’s also a day to honor them. I realize that depending on your relationship with your own mom that may be easy for you to do or it might be difficult but this command is more than about keeping harmony between parents and their children. In fact, John Calvin saw the honoring of our parents as a training device to break the natural human desire to rebel and ignore proper structures of authority.
We know that the command to honor our parents originally comes from the Ten Commandents and if you have ever done a study of these ten, you know that they are divided into two parts: the first four commandments deal with our relationship with God beginning with the command: “You shall have no other Gods before me”. In other words, God must occupy the highest place of honor otherwise, it is impossible to obey the commandments that follow after it. Having no idols, not taking God’s name in vain, and keeping the Sabbath holy naturally flows from our desire to honor God. In a similar way, the last six commandments deal with our relationship with others and it begins with the command to honor our parents and as the most important relationship in our lives, if we do not know how to honor God and our parents, there is no chance you will honor anyone or anything else in your life. This is why in the overall flow of the book of Ephesians, this section that describes relationships between family members falls under the broader command for Christians to humbly submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
But the idea of submission is something that is offensive to the human mind. Because of our fallen nature, we are unable to naturally submit ourselves to authority without being trained from an early age. By nature, people have a tendency towards rebellion and a rejection of authority even when it is good. This is something that I clearly saw as we raised our two children. I can go down a whole list of their rebellion but let me just tell you some of them. I’m glad that I have an archive of sermons that remind me of things that my kids have said and done in the past. When Jeremiah was around three or four years, we were eating at a restaurant and he began to act up and so my wife had a few strong words of correction. After Mira was finished, he walked away from her and under his breath, I heard him say “You’re so stupid”. I couldn’t believe what I heard, here was this little four year old and he’s calling his mother “stupid”. And so I did what every good father would do, I just started laughing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Eventually I got what was coming to me because it turned out little Jeremiah was an equal opportunity offender. Not long after that incident, I was playing with him and roughhousing a bit, and unfortunately he fell and started to cry. Of course, I felt bad and asked him what could I do to make it up and I thought he might want some ice cream, a new toy but he told me that he wanted to punch me in my face really hard. These things may seem funny but as parents, we have to realize that these are the behaviors that need to be corrected early so that it sets them up for future success or at least keep them from becoming criminals. Eventually, as children learn to submit to the authority of their parents, they learn how to submit to all forms of proper authority, whether it be their teachers in school, the laws of government, supervising managers at work, and even spiritual leaders in the church. This is the reason why Calvin states that parents serve as the most tolerable and least invasive way to soften and bend our minds to correct habits of submission. And in the end, the ultimate purpose of godly parenting is to guide our children so that one day they will learn how to submit to the highest authority, how to submit their lives to God himself.
How do we properly exercise parental authority over our children? Whether you realize it or not, you have been given great authority over your children. We feel that through an overwhelming sense of responsiblity. I know that there are all of these different books on parenting, a host of podcasts and blogs giving you the latest and greatest on child psychology but sometimes we forget the main and plain things of Scripture. I’ve come to realize that a few short verses of the Bible carry more weight than a thousand pages of the latest theories on raising children.
Turn with me to Deuteronomy 6.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.
One of the great joys of life is teaching our children about this God who loves them and showing our children what it means to love Him. If you can live out these verses in your home and model what it looks like to love the love the Lord, if would fix many of our problems. Over the years, my wife has always taken the greater responsiblity in terms of teaching our children about God. When they were young, I would overhear conversations as she was tucking them in for bed. I remember one particular conversation where she told the kids that God loved them and one of them asked, “Does God even know my name?” and that led to a whole discussion about how God knows everything about us. To this day, she still asks Carissa what she got out of her morning devotions. In large part, my children are who are they today because of Mira’s godly influence but that isn’t to say it has been an easy journey.
In our family we joke about the best mother’s day gift. (I wanted Mira to share this story but since it’s her day, she told me to share instead.) All of us as parents, have blind spots, areas of sin in our lives that cloud our judgment. I tend to be too gracious with our children, even more so than God largely as a over-reaction to my own childhood experience. Mira, on the other hand, can be overly assertive in her control of the kids. We are kind of at the opposite spectrums in our parenting style, which has led to some disagreements over the years.
Too make a long story short, during his freshmen year, we were coming home from church on Mother’s Day and Jeremiah refused to acknowledge that it was Mother’s Day. The tension had been building up over the first year of high school. We found out that he was secretly dating someone, he was getting into some pretty bad music, and hanging out with kids that seemed a little sus but we just thought these were regular teenage problems. Nothing prepared us for what we experienced that day. He told Mira that he hated her and wanted to cut us out of his life. There was so much hatred and anger in him that I could not recognize our child. (Those of you who know him now, it doesn’t seem possible). But we did have one ace in the whole, the last resort of parenting. Kick them out of the house.
I remember Mira being in so much emotional pain as she wept and told me that “I feel like we are losing our son.” There is nothing like a mother’s anguish and I think the greatest source of pain was Jeremiah rejecting his faith in God not based on some philosophical reason but almost exlusively based on his relationship with his mother. When Jeremiah came back home, Mira drew up a very simple game plan for getting through to him. We were going to focus on Jeremiah’s relationship with God but not so much directly. She was going to pray like crazy and be like Jesus towards Jeremiah. For a good few months, she just let Jeremiah play his games and she would even bring meals to him while he was playing. (It seems most moms hate watching their husbands and children play video games for hours at a time.) And then she relied on me to be the voice of truth. In essence, we traded roles. In one of our conversations, I told him “you will continue to go to church as long as you are under our roof. You can do whatever you want with your faith when you go to college but while we are paying for everything, you’ll at least do that”. After talking some nonsense about youth emancipation, he agreed to at least that. That bought us enough time so that we could plan a family mission trip to Romania and that is where Jeremiah encountered the love of God for himself. As he witnessed children who loved God even though it seemed they had nothing, God really softened and changed his heart. He saw first hand what means to love God and the key part in his transformation was that throughout the entire time Mira used her spiritual authority as a mother to pray and to show him the gospel through her actions. She became someone that Jeremiah had no choice but to honor!
The second application of the command to honor our parents is to obey them in the Lord. There is a nuanced difference between submission and obedience but a very important distinction. Submission is an attitude of the heart and mind, obedience is a physical action. I can be submitted to someone and not necessarily obey everything they tell me to do. Jesus is our primary example of this principle. Throughout his life, Christ exemplified a life of submission to the proper authorities. When it came down to the question of paying taxes to Caesar, without hesitation he said, “Give to Caesar what is Casesar’s and give to God what is God’s. At his arrest, Jesus allowed himself to be taken without a fight even though he acknowledged that all the forces of heaven were at his disposable. But even though he was submitted, we see that he disobeyed many of the traditions of men when it came down to a matter of sin. Christ broke the Jewish rules regarding the Sabbath because they held to a sinful view of it. He also went into the temple and in disobedience to the authorities he drove out all the merchants, again because it was a matter of sin. The temple was not to be a place for thieves but a house of prayer. Christians in the early church had a clear understanding of this principle. During times of persecution, they didn’t bear arms against the Roman Empire but submitted themselves under their authority while at the same disobeying the laws against worshipping Christ.
Every person is called to have an attitude of submission to their parents whether your parents are Christian or not, but not all of us can obey our parents fully, especially if they are not Christian or if their faith is weak. This is the reason why Paul adds a stipulation in his quotation of the fifth command. He says obey your parents in the Lord. In other words obey your parents as long as it does not conflict with your obedience to God. Calvin writes very strongly about this and he writes these words: “It ought to be observed, by the way, that we are ordered to obey parents only in the Lord … if they instigate us to transgress the Law, they deserve not be regarded as parents but as strangers attempting to seduce us from our obedience to our true Father.” These are harsh words but they present a clear solution to a difficult problem. Sometimes our parents ask us to do things that are contrary to the will of God, in that case you have the liberty to disobey them and you are not in danger of breaking the command to honor them.
However, when there requests are reasonable, it is our duty to obey what our parents ask of us.
Hear, my son, your father’s instruction,
and forsake not your mother’s teaching,
for they are a graceful garland for your head
and pendants for your neck.
The final application to the command to honor our parents is to take care of them. As most of us grow into adulthood, the command to honor our parents moves away from matters of obedience to the matter of taking care of them in their old age. If there is one aspect of the command to honor our parents that is neglected in American society, it is the duty of children to take care of their parents. We should be our parent’s retirement plan, not social security. We should be their caretakers, not a retirement home. The book of Proverbs has the best list of ways that we ought to honor our parents and in Proverbs 19:26, God reminds us that “He who robs his father and drives out his mother, is a son who brings shame and disgrace”. One of the most heart breaking things I experienced in my life was seeing my uncles place their mother into a retirement home. Here is a woman who brought them into this world, who took care of them as children, and who nurtured and loved them, and they were unwilling to sacrifice their own comfort and take care of her in their home. To this day, I am still angry about what happened because I saw the quality of my grandmother’s life diminish greatly. At a time when she should have been surrounded by her grandchildren, she lived in isolation. When she passed away, she essentially died alone.
Most cultures outside of the West, traditionally put the burden of taking care of aging parents on their children. This is a tradition that is worth keeping because it’s aligned with the words of Scripture. Jesus affirms this aspect of honoring our parents in the gospels, turn with me to Mark 7.
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and, ‘Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.’ But you say, ‘If a man tells his father or his mother, “Whatever you would have gained from me is Corban” ’ (that is, given to God)— then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And many such things you do.”
Corban was a tradition that was instituted by the Pharisees so that people could circumvent their obligation to take care of their parents. It allowed to say to their parents, the money I should have given to you, I have given it to the temple. The worst part of this tradition was the fact that they used “their devotion to God” as an excuse to nullify the word of God itself. For those of you who are going into the ministry, you have to realize that your call into pastoral or missions work does not free you from your obligation to take care of your parents. Some of you might be saying, I can’t envision a day when I’m going to take care of my parents. Most people in their old age, lose their ability to think. It is during the last season their life, that you must make sure that they are taken care of.
Jesus at the end of his life understood his obligation to his mother. Even on the cross at the point of death, he still had the welfare of his mother in my mind. Turn with me to John19:26. In the middle of saving all of humanity from their sin, Christ takes a moment to honor his mother and to make sure that she is taken care of. In doing so, he left us an example to follow, honor your mothers just as the Lord Jesus honored his.
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