Honor your Parents

Intro

I didn't plan it this way, but today is Father’s day and we are going to learn about honoring your father and mother. What if I told you the relationship between a parent and their children is to reflect the relationship between us and our heavenly father. Not perfectly mind you because as we have learned we are all lost in sin and mess it up sometimes. After all God is our Heavenly Father.

I have a great earthly father. Now we didn't always get along, He was not perfect and neither was I. I was a little scared of my dad’s discipline growing up. My dad was a big guy. Although my mom was nearly as tough. She grow up on a farm milking cows by hand. He worked hard to make sure we had enough to live. We didn't always get to go out and do fun stuff like other kids, but he taught us how to drive tractors on our own on the farm, and we loved doing that. Like most kids I looked up to my dad and followed His example. But as a young adult I became a little disillusioned, like we sometimes do, and thought that when I became a father I would do things differently. But then I started to have kids and realized how hard being a parent really is and realized my dad actually did a pretty good job raising us.

One thing I have been thinking of as I was typing this is how does my relationship with my kids reflect my relationship with God? Do I love and treat my kids the same way my heavenly father loves and treats me? No, I fail; at this. when we here that our kids are to honor our parents, we look to our kids and maybe elbow them to see is they are listening when we begin to realize that this has just as much meaning for us as parents.

What about for those that aren't parents? The meaning still remains the same. How is your life reflecting the character of God to those around you.

HBI - We are to honor and respect our parents as a reflection of our obedience to God and How we honor and respect Him

God’s Character

By honoring our parents, we are, in fact, honoring God’s authority and the order He has established.

Exodus 20:12 CSB

12 Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

Leviticus 19:3 CSB

3 “Each of you is to respect his mother and father. You are to keep my Sabbaths; I am the Lord your God.

The OT is filled with passages that speak of the relationship between The parents and their children.

We are told we are to respect them, to honor them and treat them with honor, to listen to them, to treat them with reverence for God has placed them in charge over us as their children.

Leviticus 19:3 uses a word for fear instead of honor in the mention of the commandment. and places it on the same level as the honoring of the Sabbath. As God is to be honored and feared His representatives, our parents are to be as well, for our relatrionship with our parents are to echo our relationship to God.

We love our children because God loved us. We love our parents because God loved us. So we go to the beginning to see when man was created.

We go back to the image of God to see that the love God has is to be reflected in the familial relationship. If God loves, then so do we love because we are made in His image. But sin has marred and distorted this.

Parenthood itself takes it’s pattern from God in this same way. As we are created in the image of God. We where told to create new life which comes from the intimate love a husband has for the wife. And new life began because the love God had within Himself. Not because He was deficient or something, He was not lacking something but all of creation, is in a sense because the Love within God.

If the relationship between the parent and the child echoes the relationship between God and us, albeit imperfectly, then what does that tell us about the love of God.

God’s love for us is a bit different then what You might think. The love God has for us is a perfect love. Humans mess up, fathers are sometimes absent. This is one of the reasons that people struggle to accept God as a loving father because they have never had one.

God’s love is his doing whatever needs to be done, at whatever cost, so that we will see and be satisfied with the glory of God in Jesus Christ. - John Piper

So God’s love for us is so that we may glorify Him. He loved us enough to give us a way to be with Him and glorify Him.

Therefore our Love that we show our parents, the way that we relate to them and treat them, and the same the other direction, the way the parents honor and treat their kids is meant to be a reflection of God relationship with us and our relationship to Him. The way we are taught to relate to eachother in our family relationships is the same way that we are told that we are to relate to God.

Malachi 1:6 CSB

6 “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. But if I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is your fear of me? says the Lord of Armies to you priests, who despise my name.” Yet you ask, “How have we despised your name?”

Psalm 68:5 CSB

5 God in his holy dwelling is a father of the fatherless and a champion of widows.

Isaiah 64:8 CSB

8 Yet Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we all are the work of your hands.

Insight from the New Testament

We gain some insight into our own character from this and moving to the NT. As usual we learn that we fail at honoring our parents the way that we should. As parents we fail at doing what we are supposed to do as well. We fail at modelling God relationship to us. The NT and what Jesus taught the apostles echoes this as well.

Ephesians 6:1 CSB

1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, because this is right.

Ephesians 6:2–3 CSB

2 Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, 3 so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land.

Ephesians 6:4 CSB

4 Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

When Paul reminds the Ephesians about the fifth commandment, he purposefully leaves out the reference to the land given to Israel (Eph. 6:2-3). This is because Christians today do not have the promise of a specific land which the Lord gives them on this earth, but rather look forward to the promise of the new heavens and the new earth

Not only are children to honor their parents, but parents are to train their children without. We are to lead by example as we teach our kids how to live godly lives.

The Heidelberg Catechism is helpful in understanding what this means.

Question“What does God require in the fifth commandment?”

Answer: That I show all honor, love and fidelity, to my father and mother, and all in authority over me, and submit myself to their good instruction and correction, with due obedience; and also patiently bear with their weaknesses and infirmities, since it pleases God to govern us by their hand.

These verses do not mean we should obey our parents even when they command us to do something sinful. Our obedience is first and foremost to God. However, if the parents are doing their job correctly, they are raising children in the instruction of the Lord and this is what we need to listen carefully to.

This highlights God’s emphasis on family, respect, and the importance of relationships. demonstrates God’s love for family and His desire for us to prioritize our relationships with our parents.

This commandment shows that God values the bond between children and their parents, and He wants us to maintain a healthy and respectful relationship with them. By honoring our parents, we are acknowledging God’s role in providing for us and guiding us through our parents. This commandment reminds us that God is the ultimate source of guidance and provision, and our parents are merely instruments of His care.

Jesus echoed this as well when He desired to do His fathers will even though He did not really want to.

When Jesus was in the Garden praying about His upcoming death, He asked that this cup pass from Him. But in the end He prayed that God’s will be done, not His own. Obedience to the father is what we are called to do.

If by living as parents and children in this world are meant to be a reflection of our relationship to our heavenly father, to do this “in the Lord” is to realize that we are to copy the example Jesus gave to us, Not only that but to realize that both both the children and the parents are under the authority of the Lord. It is our duty to live our lives for the glory of the Lord as we strive to model to others what it means to be a family under God.

To Honor our parents as it says in Eph 6:2-3 is a high calling. It is more then to obey but to respect and esteem as we have learned.

Ephesians 6:2–3 CSB

2 Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, 3 so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land.

And as we have also learned it gives responsibility back onto the parent. We are told as parents that we have the responsibility to take our child's feelings into account.

In a culture where the fathers rule was absolute, this was a paradigm shift. The old adage that children are to be seen and not heard, that they are to obey like little slaves doesn't mesh with this. Yes they are to obey but we are told to do it in a loving way that thinks of their feelings and considerations as well.

but rather parents are to bring their children up none the less with training and instruction. The meaning behind this is

The whole training and education of children (both the cultivation and the morals); includes commands, admonitions, reproofs, and punishment

Training in righteousness is what we are called to do as parents. There is a line between being overbearing as a parent and training as we are supposed to.

So What?

I can’t imagine it was easy for my parents, me and my brother did not listen to well all the time. My dad was a fairly strict disciplinarian, but he trained us as well as he could. We couldn't get much past Him. I remember when we started to drive we would take the old farm truck out to visit friends on the weekend. We would come back and things in the box of the truck would have shifted (we did not drive safely most of the time). My dad would look in the back of the truck and ask “what where you doing” knowing we had driven like idiots. He would say “I can drive all through the pasture and not move anything in the box”. He knew we disobeyed.

The law of God tells us that we disobey as children of God, we disobey our parents we fail as being parents God wants us to be. We are lost in sin. But God reaches down and lets us know we can turn to Him. He loved us enough to send Jesus as a way to give access to Him. God made the way now we have to turn to Him and come to Him. He freely offers forgiveness to all who give there all to Him.

The relationship between parents and children should reflect the relationship between God and Us.

We start out with the relationship between the parents and the child. This part does not apply to all of you but we will get to that soon. Children, Honor your parents with all that comes with that. Parents we are told in the NT need to not be so unreasonable in our demands that we anger our children. But at the same time as parents it is our job to make sure we train and discipline our children so they know how to live their lives for the Lord.

Sometimes what we see though is that too many people, Christians included, have a public image and then the one that they show at home when no one else is looking.

On one hand in the public they are friendly and congenial and at home they are the opposite. This is common among st those that do not follow Jesus as well.

We are our worst selves with the people closest to us. Christians should have only one persona, or we are no longer living in truth. We need to live tirelessly the humility, tolerant love, and mutual submission of the gospel both in private and in public. The most important witness we have is at stake—the witness within our families.

Life is painful when children turn their back on the Christian faith of their parents, but it is tragic when the misconduct and hypocrisy of their parents has caused them to do so. Integrity of faith starts in the family.

Our life on this earth should be a reflection of our relationship with God

Though we are not all parents here what we can all learn from this is that our relationships with others should be a reflection of our relationship with God. Our faith should come out in the way that we relate to others. What the bible teaches should influence the rest of our lives.

so then what is more important to us? do we care more about looking good to the people around us or reflecting the character of the Lord God to the world around us.

Ephesians Contemporary Significance

We act in direct response to the audience we think is watching. The more we care about the audience, the more diligent we are. We work hard if the boss is watching. We dress carefully if certain people will see us. We guard our tongue in certain groups. But if the audience is not present, neither is the effort. This is why we demean some people but go overboard to impress others. With the first we do not care about the audience; with the second we do.