As you know, this evening we are contemplating God’s fifth commandment, which is to honor our parents. Let’s look at Exodus 20:12 to see how God wanted us to understand it.
“Honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” NIV
Here are some other interpretations of this passage:
Amplified Bible: Regard (treat with honor, due obedience, and courtesy) your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God gives you.
Contemporary English Version: Respect your father and your mother, and you will live a long time in the land I am giving you.
New International Reader’s Version: "Honor your father and mother. Then you will live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
If we use the New International Reader’s Version as a guide it there are two parts to the commandment:
Part 1. The imperative to Honor (or regard, or respect) your parents, and
Part 2. The promise that if you do that, then you’ll live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
We will consider this second, “promise” part of the commandment (that they will live long in the land) before we look at the first “imperative” part (to honor their father and mother). When we say that the 5th commandment includes a promise, we need to realize that all the commandments contain a promise; the 5th commandment is just the first one that contains another promise within the commandment itself. Each commandment is also a promise by God: “I will help you to have no other Gods before me, I will enable you to keep my Sabbath day holy, and I will empower you to honor your parents.” So why does God include a promise with the fifth commandment? In other words,
Why should I honor my parents?
Now, back when the commandment was first given, God was telling them that for them to be able to live in peace for generations in the Promised Land, the Israelites would need to respect authority and build strong families. But this part of the commandment doesn’t just have relevance for the Israelites of the Old Testament. In Deut. 5:16 Moses, in a parallel passage that repeats the commandments, says God gives the reason that “it may go well with you.” Paul, in Ephesians 6:1 says you should honor them because “this is right” and in
Colossians 3:20 he says children obeying their parents “pleases the Lord.” So, why honor your parents:
It enables you to live long in the land.
It will be well with you.
It is the right thing to do.
It pleases the Lord.
The first 2 involve self-interest, the last two involve moral obligation and devotion to God. It is as though God is saying “Come let us reason together about why I have given you this commandment, and the accompanying promise that I will help you keep it. It is important to me, and I want it to be important to you.”
Reasons 1&2: Self-Interest
In every society, all members are affected by the relationship between parents and their
children. A society’s strengths are built upon those values inherent in its institutions, and the family is the basic unit of a society where values are taught and trained. At some point in the history of all societies, and it is still true in many societies, keeping the family unit together was essential for survival.
There is no Hebrew or Greek term for “nuclear family.” The idea of a family consisting only of parents with children, and the children move out of the home when they are old enough to start their own family, is foreign to Biblical writers. The two Hebrew words for family mean either
- “a wide-ranging network of blood relationships” (what we would call a clan); or
- a household of people.
The biblical writers had this concept in mind when they talk about honoring our parents – they mean that you are expected to honor the existence of the family because you won’t be able to survive without the support of that economic, social unit. The family unit was also essential for emotional stability – to have a sense of belonging, a sense of identity. Another interpretation of the phrase: “Then you will live a long time in the land the Lord your God is giving you” might be an expression of “you will reap what you sow.” In other words, by honoring your parents the Lord will lengthen your days so that your children will in turn honor you. Honoring your parents is a way of passing down God’s ordained relationship between parent and child from generation to generation. God wants us to be both the giver and the recipient of the blessing he has in store for those who keep his commandments.
Joy Davidman in her book Smoke on the Mountain recites one of Grimm’s fairy tales, which provides a graphic example of this reason for honoring your parents:
“ONCE UPON A TIME there was a little old man. His eyes blinked and his hands trembled; when he ate he clattered the silverware distressingly, missed his mouth with the spoon as often as not, and dribbled a bit of his food on the tablecloth. Now he lived with his married son, having nowhere else to live, and his son's wife was a modern young woman who knew that in-laws should not be tolerated in a woman's home.
"I can't have this," she said. "It interferes with a woman's right to happiness."So she and her husband took the little old man gently but firmly by the arm and led him to the corner of the kitchen. There they set him on a stool and gave him his food, what there was of it, in an earthenware bowl. From then on he always ate in the corner, blinking at the table with wistful eyes. “
One day his hands trembled rather more than usual, and the earthenware bowl fell and broke."If you are a pig," said the daughter-in-law, "you must eat out of a trough." So they made him a little wooden trough, and he got his meals in that.
These people had a four-year-old son of whom they were, very fond. One suppertime the young man noticed his boy playing intently with some bits of wood and asked what he was doing. "I'm making a trough," he said, smiling up for approval, "to feed you and Mamma out of when I get big."
The man and his wife looked at each other for a while and didn't say anything. Then they cried a little. Then they went to the corner and took the little old man by the arm and led him back to the table. They sat him in a comfortable chair and gave him his food on a plate, and from then on nobody ever scolded when he clattered or spilled or broke things.”
Excerpt From: Joy Davidman. “Smoke on the Mountain.” Apple Books. https://books.apple.com/us/book/smoke-on-the-mountain/id1541380456
The interpretation being – when it comes to how you treat your parents, “what goes around comes around.” Some people call this Karma. We call it the Golden Rule, one generation removed: “Do unto your parents what you would have your children do unto you.”
The commandments are not ethical abstractions, but as Davidman states they are “a set of quite practical rules for getting along in a very rough world.” But beyond that, they are Divinely mandated moral law that loving children want to keep out of love for the lawgiver.
Reasons 3&4: Doing the Right Thing
God is saying in the first two self-interest reasons for honoring your parents that keeping this commandment is important to your own well-being. But he is saying more than this. He is saying in the last two reasons that honoring your father and mother pleases him because you are doing what he has said is the right thing to do. Whenever we do what God wants us to do, even when it’s hard, or goes against what we want to do, it pleases God that we made the choice to trust him above our own desires or our analysis of the situation. Sometimes doing what God wants us to do is easy because we can see the self-interest involved, sometimes it seems illogical (such as when Jesus said to put their net back in the water even though they had fished all night without catching anything), and sometimes it is extremely hard, such as loving your enemies. Honoring our parents is easy for some people, goes against logic for others, and is particularly challenging for still others. For the last category of people, the 5th commandment may be the most difficult of all to keep. They must trust that God is able to keep his promise that he will help us keep his commandments.
Now, let us turn our attention to the first part of the commandment: “Honor your father and mother”
“Honor Your Father and Mother...”
Not everyone is a parent, or brother or sister, or cousin: but everyone is a child--a son, or a daughter. John Calvin, in his Sermons on the 10 Commandments, point out that: “...the one who has commanded you to honor your father and mother has given you the parents you have.” The parents you have, was not the result of random biological happenstance. Just as surely as God knew you before you were born, he chose your parents.
This same God who was with us before we were born does not abandon us to keep his commandments to honor the parents he gave us. He will enable us to keep his commandment in the same way he enables us to live lives pleasing to him: by the indwelling of his Holy Spirit. But what if parents have acted dishonorably in raising their children – physically, emotionally, or sexually abusing them? What if they tried to dissuade their children from becoming Christians? How are we to honor dishonorable behavior? We are told that we are to help bear one another’s burdens, so if this hasn’t happened to us, but we know people who have suffered at the hands of their parents, we should help them as they struggle to come to terms with their feelings toward their parents. Lend an understanding ear, pray for and with them, help them to keep their eyes on Christ – the author and finisher of our faith. Remind them of Psalm 27:10 “My father and mother may abandon me, but the Lord will take care of me.” Encourage them to seek Christian counseling. We are talking about one of the most potentially devastating traumas someone can experience, and the professional help of trained Christian therapists may be needed to help these friends deal with this. If this has happened to you, don’t try to deal with this alone – reach out to those who can help. What exactly are my responsibilities when it comes to honoring my parents? How do I convey honor to them? I would like to suggest 5 ways that we can honor our parents:
1. Honor them by: Making sure we express appreciation for their sacrifices on their behalf
We honor our parents when we thank them for making the sacrifice they did on our behalf. My parents made tremendous financial sacrifices to send me to college and when I say I can’t thank them enough, it means exactly that. It is also honoring them when we use the talents they sacrificed for us to develop in service to God and our fellow men. I want to make certain the years of college I received from their sacrifice are, by God’s grace, productively used in honor of that sacrifice.
2. Honor them by: Rearing your own children well
Honor them by passing on to your children the good that they passed on to you. Values to live by, a picture of God’s character that draws people to him, family history of answered prayer, how God honored the devotion of faithful ancestors.
3. Honor them by: Honoring their memory after they are gone.
Every time someone says to us that we “turned out well,” we are reflecting honor on the memory of our parents. Every time we express appreciation for what our parents did for us – the sacrifices they made, the values that govern our lives that they passed on to us – we honor them. Even if they are not able to hear it when we express those thanks. And I want to say right now, even though my deceased father is not here to hear it, that anytime someone tells me that “you are just like your dbe ad” they have paid me one of the highest compliments possible.
4. Honor them by: Honoring your heavenly father
Jeremiah 9:24 says: “but let him who boasts boast about this: that he understands and knows me...”
Your parents may or may not have thought that they would be prouder of you if you pursued some particular profession, or attained some achievement, or gave them lots of grandchildren, or something else. But in their heart of hearts what made them proudest of you, what made them feel the most honored, is that like Paul, you know Christ personally (Philippians 1:21 “For to me, to live is Christ...”) They want your greatest desire to be like Christ inside and out, to have the heart and mind of Christ and walk where Jesus walks. That is true even if your parents were not Christians, and even worked against the spread of Christianity. This is because God puts in the heart of every person the seed of faith that causes us all to recognize Him as the source of all that is good. When at the end of time, every knee bows and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, everyone will be experiencing what was imbedded in us before we were born.
It is deep in the heart and mind of every parent—either consciously or sub-consciously—to want their child to be like Jesus. When you honor God by being like his son, you honor your parents in the most profound way possible. So even if following Christ goes against the expressed wishes of your parents, you can be reassured that you are faithfully keeping God’s 5th commandment. You honor your father and mother best when Jesus, not your parents or your spouse or your job or your lifestyle, is Lord of your life. In Matt 10:34-37 Jesus is saying “make sure I occupy first place in your devotion. You should make sure I am Lord over everything in your life, including your relationship with your parents.” We want our own children to think that way, and we should be that way too. Honoring your heavenly father is honoring His ideal for parenthood—what he wants each parent to be. By putting Him first in your life you are honoring what he wants each parent to instill in every child—to love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength. That is how your children can best honor you as a parent, and how you best honor your parents or the memory of your parents if they are asleep in Jesus.
And Finally:
5. Honor them by: Bringing them to Christ
Maybe the most profound way you can honor anyone is to point him or her to Christ. For almost everyone here that is what your parents did for you. For me it was different. My parents are good people: kind, loving, self-sacrificing, and generous to a fault, but they were not what you would call spiritual.
We were members of the Methodist church in the small southern town where I grew up, but our membership was to ensure social respectability rather than out of a conviction that Methodism offered God’s truth as we could best understand it.
Failure to belong to some church would brand you as a social pariah in southern Alabama, and if you weren’t Southern Baptist, you were among the lost but at least you were respectably lost if you belonged to the Methodist Church. But my parents stopped attending the Methodist church after all the children got married and left home because there was no incentive to keep up the pretense.
After I joined the Adventist church, I began to carry on my heart a yearning for my parents to know Jesus as Lord of their lives as he was of mine, but I would only gingerly mention spiritual matters in conversation when we visited them. I don’t know why I wasn’t more direct about witnessing to my own parents. I guess I thought that over time the opportunity would present itself to have more serious discussions. But my father died in 1992 with me still waiting for the right moment to arise to have that serious discussion.
I am sure I do not need to tell you how I felt. God, however, showed his infinite mercy and love for my father by sending the Baptist minister who lived across the street to my father as he lay dying, and my father accepted Christ as his Savior before he passed away. Dr. Cox told me this at my father’s funeral. God bless him for his faithfulness to the God he loved and served.
I began praying that God would forgive me for dishonoring my father by failing to share the gospel with him, and to please open the door and use me to reach my mother with the Good News. My mother was quickly slipping into dementia, so in my prayer I also had to ask for a window of lucidity to open for me to have that long overdue conversation. I praise God that he answered those prayers and 3 years ago my mother gave her heart to Christ. God’s grace and mercy are beyond all comprehension to me, but this I know—God honors his promise to enable us to keep his commandments. And he enabled me to honor my mother in the most profound way possible by honoring him. My mother is still alive, but that window of lucidity has closed and when I pray with her now, only God remembers the prayer.
In closing, we all want to live honorable lives. We want to be model parents ourselves and we want to be model children honoring our parents or the memory of our parents. May God, the Father and Jesus, the Son be our model to show us how to keep the 5th commandment as we strive to live lives worthy of our calling.
