Honor Your Parents: The fifth command is to honor your father and your mother. Parents are supposed to help their kids grow in their faith and in wisdom for life. But what does it look like to honor your parents when they fail to do these things? How do we honor them if we have a broken or even abusive relationship with them? Recorded on Feb 26, 2023, on Exodus 20:12 by Pastor David Parks.
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Ten Commandments: Learning the Law of Love is a sermon series on the most influential legal code in human history. Why should we learn about the Ten Commandments today? Because they reveal God’s will for how human beings ought to live: to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. Ultimately, the law of love points us directly to Jesus.
Sermon Transcript
All year, the theme of our preaching ministry is Learning the way of Jesus. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, as part of God’s moral law, reveal how God wants us to live. And ultimately, this new way of life can be summed up as learning to love the Lord our God, heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The Ten Commandments are really a law of love. So today, we are considering the fifth command to honor your father and your mother. Why should we do this, and what does it look like for us to obey this command? What if we have a broken or abusive relationship with our parents? There is much to unpack here. So if you have a Bible/app, please open to Exodus 20:12. We’ll read through the remaining commandments and then unpack the fifth together today.
Exodus 20:12-17 (NIV), “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
As we’ve said, the book of Exodus, written about 4,300 years ago by Moses, the prophet and leader of ancient Israel, describes a key turning point in history when God rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and entered into a covenant relationship with them, which included giving them the Law. The first four commands are focused vertically on what it means to love the Lord your God, heart, soul, mind, and strength. And we’ve seen that there is only one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, who is worthy of worship, deserving of respect, and we must rest in him. Those are commands 1-4. Here, with the fifth command, and for the rest of the Ten Commandments, we’ll turn from a vertical focus on God to a horizontal focus on what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. To love your neighbor starts with your closest neighbors, those living in your own home when you are young, and those in your family when you are older, including your father and your mother. Once again, v. 12 says, “Honor your father and your mother,” which, as the Apostle Paul says in Eph 6, “is the first commandment with a promise.” And here’s the promise: “that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Now, most commentators don’t believe this promise is meant to be taken individually but nationally. If Israel as a people honors their parents, as a society/nation, they will live for a long time in the Promised Land. But the language of this particular promise is interesting. It’s found again in Dt 25, although with a different command. Deuteronomy 25:15–16 (NIV), “You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.” So in Dt 25, it refers to the corrupt practice of using different weights for trading or payment, allowing you to cheat people you don’t like (or maybe everyone!). The Lord detests anyone who does these things. Whoa. That’s really strong language! But this means that there is a range of practices that God will not tolerate. And being disrespectful, disobedient, or in some other way dishonoring to your parents is something that God will not tolerate. I’ll make one more observation about this command, and then we’ll move toward why we should obey this and what it looks like to obey this command. But I find it interesting that the fifth command requires honor for your father and your mother. In a patriarchal time, it would be easy to imagine that this command could have been to honor your father alone, but it doesn’t say that, does it? I suspect that this has to do with the Biblical vision for marriage, that two become one flesh. To honor your father but to dishonor your mother (or vice versa) is to dishonor both, for they are one flesh. By contrast, the ancient legal code of Hammurabi from the Babylonian empire has a command that says, “If a son strike[s] his father, his hands shall be hewn off.” (source) Also, pretty intense, right? But, I wouldn’t say this Babylonian law exactly requires honor from child to father. You just can’t hit your dad, but that’s it, and the mother isn’t even mentioned! As we’ve said, the law of God given to Israel at Mount Sinai is similar to other legal codes of their day but is different in key areas because it is based on the unique character/nature/will of Yahweh God and the people/society that he desires. And God wants his people to honor their father and mother.
Ok! But why should we obey this command? What is wise/helpful/good about honoring your father and your mother? Why is this in the top ten of God’s law? There are probably many reasons, but I’ll give you two. Now, it doesn’t explicitly give the why here. So we have to step back and consider what the broader scope of the word of God says about parents and children. From Genesis 1, we see that part of the mandate for human beings from creation was a blessing to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. So having children was a major part of God’s intention for human beings from the beginning. In Genesis 2, we see that the covenant of marriage between a husband and wife was the context where this multiplication/procreation was to take place. Now, ever since the fall to sin, our family relationships are far from perfect. And sometimes they are sadly the context for great harm, abuse, violence, and the destruction of life. I’ll come back to this later, but for now, God didn’t give up on the family. He promised in Ge 3:15 that there would be one who would eventually come through the family line of humanity who would crush the head of evil and would finally deal with the problems of sin and death. Later, the Lord made a promise to a childless couple named Abraham and Sarah that he would give them a child, and their family would eventually become a great nation of blessing through whom the whole world would be blessed. So here, at Mount Sinai, the Lord was unfolding his plan of salvation, but the chosen one had not yet made his appearing. So the giving of the law was to provide instruction and protection for his people until that later time “when the set time [would] fully come, [when] God [would send] his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law” (Gal 4:4-5). But at this time, through the prophet Moses, the Lord makes it clear that he expects parents to be responsible for instructing their kids in the faith, in God’s will/way, in the regular rhythms of life in the home. This is the first reason why we should honor our parents. We see this in Deuteronomy 6:6–9 (NIV), “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” God didn’t expect the prophets or the priests to be primarily responsible for instructing the children in the faith, but the parents. Even today, as a church, we don’t consider our children’s ministry as the primary means of discipleship for kids. It’s still primarily the parents’ responsibility to instruct their kids in the faith. Our Sunday Childcare and our Gospel Kids Midweek, and our Youth Group are all programs designed to help parents in this task, but not take the task from them. The Apostle Paul makes this clear in Eph 6 saying, “Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” So why should children honor their parents? First, because parents are supposed to instruct/teach/show their kids who God is and what it looks like to follow his ways.
Second, beyond instruction in who God is and how to follow his ways, what we might call a religious education, parents were also supposed to help their children mature in every other way. I often say that to do the work of parenting means to help your kids grow up (reach maturity) in every way — physically, emotionally, spiritually, financially, and in every other way. The biblical category for this is often described as wisdom. The book of Proverbs starts this way: “The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel: for gaining wisdom and instruction; for understanding words of insight; for receiving instruction in prudent behavior, doing what is right and just and fair; for giving prudence to those who are simple, knowledge and discretion to the young— let the wise listen and add to their learning, and let the discerning get guidance— for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. They are a garland to grace your head and a chain to adorn your neck.” (Pro 1:1-9). A great definition of wisdom is knowing how to do what is right in any given circumstance. But growing in wisdom was supposed to come, as Solomon writes, from the instruction of your father and the teaching of your mother. Wisdom doesn’t automatically come with age. There are many old fools. Wisdom comes from instruction when you are young and from deep reflection on experience when you are older. But when parents fail to understand their responsibility to help their children grow in wisdom, or if they understand but still fail to pass on their wisdom, their children are doomed to learn the hard way. The old saying is true, those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. So why should we honor our parents? First, because they are supposed to show us who God is and how to follow him. And second, because they are supposed to pass on their wisdom, which sometimes doesn’t make any sense to us when we’re young, but can save us from many struggles and strife.
So that answers the why. But how do we do this? How do we honor our parents today? And what if our parents aren’t very honorable? What if they haven’t done what God intended for parents to do? What if they haven’t passed on the faith or any wisdom? What if they hurt us when they were supposed to help us? What if we received abuse instead of love? What does honor look like in that context? These are hard questions. Let’s start with honoring parents in general and move toward the more difficult situation of strained or broken relationships with our parents. I’ll give you three thoughts here. First, in general, to honor your father and your mother means to be careful to respect them both in your heart and attitude toward them, in your conversations with them, and in your conversations about them with others. To be respectful to their face but then bash them behind their backs is not honoring. Now, honoring them doesn’t mean you have to agree on everything. You might have disagreements over issues in your relationships, family, work, politics, and more. But in your disagreements, even in a sharp conflict, you can still honor your parents by refusing to be disrespectful to or dismissive of them. Some of us have a special talent for using sarcasm like a knife. But even in the midst of a fight, we must obey the Lord and give proper honor to our parents. Second, honoring your parents also means being patient in listening to them. They are not perfect, of course, so they will not perfectly pass on their faith or wisdom to us. And some parents are just better teachers than others. But that doesn’t mean that a parent who isn’t a great teacher has nothing of value to pass on to their children. So we must be patient when we listen to our parents. They have seen more of the world than we have. They have experienced things we haven’t, and there is a lot we can learn from that. We must give them grace, understanding that they need the grace of God, too. The phrase I like to use is to eat the meat and spit out the bones. Whatever is true, helpful, and good that you receive from them receive it with gratitude; whatever isn’t, graciously move on and don’t make a big deal out of it. Third, and finally, honoring your parents means taking care of them as they age. When you are a child, your parents take care of you; they might feed you and clothe you and pay for your needs. But when you are older, you must return the favor and take care of your parents. To abandon them in their time of need is the height of dishonor and selfishness. Will care for them intrude on your time and your resources, and your agenda? Sure. But this is what love looks like. It looks like humbly putting the needs of others ahead of our own. A society marked by this type of sacrificial love will indeed live long in the land.
Finally, as we close, how do we love and honor parents who have not been very loving or honorable to us? How do we honor our father and our mother when they might have done us great harm? First, I already mentioned that our parents need the grace of God, just as we do. This helps us understand that in a broken world, sometimes those who are supposed to love us the most are the ones who hurt us the most. This is just one of the many reasons that Jesus had to come into the world to die on the cross for the sins of the world. Some of those sins took place in the sanctity of the home to children who were helpless to avoid their trauma. What a tragedy. And again, to honor your parents doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything they did or said. But it does mean we must forgive. It does mean that we can give up our right to make them pay for their sins and trust that the Lord, the perfect Judge, will see that justice is done and every wrong will be set to right. And I understand that this is costly. And this takes great faith. This takes sacrificial love. But forgiveness is necessary for healing. Even if full reconciliation doesn’t happen or isn’t possible, you can still find healing and redemption in this life from a broken/abusive relationship with your parents. You can break that chain with your relationship with your kids. You can write a new story for your future with God’s help. In fact, there is no one better to help us as parents to look to and learn from in how to do this great task of parenting than our Father in heaven. In him, we see one who has always been faithful to us. He is patient with us. He lavishes his grace on us. He is steadfast in his loving-kindness. He is the way and the truth, and the life. He guides us along the right paths for his name’s sake. He rescues/forgives/cleanses us in our sin and shame. He gives us his wisdom to all who ask for it. He has made us his children by faith in Jesus and will give us the inheritance of his kingdom. He has poured out his Spirit on us and so much more. So today, may we be people who love as he loves us. And may we be a people who are committed to honoring our parents so that it might go well for us and that we might live long in the life that the Lord has given us, as well.