Morning Service, 10th May 2009
Mother’s Day is a great day for many yet a difficult one for many others, as a result I don’t really want to talk about Motherhood or extol its virtues.
Instead I take this opportunity to speak about commitment – the commitment we should have to our family.
This commitment, whether as child or parent, may take different shapes but it should always involve commitment, and I want to urge you today to renew our commitment to your family, even as every Lord’s day we renew our commitment to God and His church family. Let us see that this includes renewing our commitment to our own family, whatever shape that might be presently taking.
How can I say that it is included in our commitment to God? For in the fifth commandment God calls each one of us, saying: be committed to your family. If you are renewing your commitment to God this is a key place where you will show it, in renewing your commitment to your family.
Today then we look at the fifth commandment this morning, noting:
1. Our Relationship
Essentially this command is for children. Hands up all the children here this morning? … folks, that means all of us! Of each and every one of us it can be said that we have parents, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. Therefore we need to understand this is not just a command for those under a certain age still living at home, and only indirectly a command relating only to those amongst the rest of us here who are parents. No this is a command for us all, each and every one. We may not have a wife or husband or children, but we all have parents, whether they are now dead or alive, present or absent. ‘However bad or brief the relationship it is a universal condition. For good or ill we all have parents.’ (B Edwards)
Can I take it a step further and point out to you that in Hebrew there is no word for grandparents, the same word is used of any person in the direct family line. In 2 Chronicles 29:2 we are told that Hezekiah “did what was right in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his father David had done” – though he was 14 generations down the family line. So though “father and mother” refers primarily to those who brought you into this world but to our forefathers, our whole family, especially including the living generations such as our grandparents or great grandparents.
This commandment tells us that we are not individuals on our own, but that we were born into a relationship, a relationship where love, support and nurture are meant to be experienced and also reciprocated or given back, a relationship we call family.
Everything in the world these days seems to be calling us to think of ourselves only as individuals where we can do our own thing and that we won’t know real joy and freedom apart from it. But God calls us to see ourselves as part of a family that is present and possibly growing, and that has roots back in time. And to understand therefore that what you do and how you do it impacts upon other people.
The family unit, and yours especially, may not be all it should or you would hope it to be, a thing we can all say to more or less degree. In this world corrupted by sin it would be wrong and naive of us to think that the ‘family’ could escape the ravages of sin.
But here, and especially by putting it first in those commandments dealing with human relationships, we see that God indicates that this is of primary importance. It is the basic unit of society, where people, governments or society in general fail to recognise this most basic of relationships and work for its stability and rightful expression, then society will suffer. Which is what we are increasingly seeing in our own society.
We should have a high view of the family. We should do we can to protect and promote the family unit as God’s special gift to us and us to it.
2. Our Obligation
Our obligation which God has set before each of us here is to “honour”. What does this mean? Well we’ve just looked at how we relate to God, and certainly a single word that relates to our relationship with God would be to honour Him – by not having Him to compete for our love with any others, not having wrong views of Him, by not speaking thoughtlessly about Him, and by not treating our special time with him with contempt, as being something less important than other things. It speaks of the high value we set upon God firstly for who He is and only then secondly for how He relates to us. It speaks of submitting to His authority, for He is the one that tells us that this is how we are to relate to Him, to honour Him. Therefore it also means obedience to Him , bearing in mind these are commands, and especially love for Him.
In the same way honouring our parents means:
1. to value them for who they are, they are our parents. Notice God doesn’t make any distinctions here. It is not only if they deserve it. Those words are not here. God intends us to honour our parents because they are our parents. End of story. Even if their life cannot be copied they are to be honoured. Yes we realise that parents sometimes, maybe often, get things wrong, and we are certainly not to regard them as infallible, but to honour means that we invest them with importance and value to us. The one does not need to exclude the other. How do you speak to and of your parents both within and outside the family. This of course has implications throughout life, for it is here in the family, from earliest days of life that we learn the value of human life, in a context of love and support. This understanding when applied is a powerful argument against euthanasia for people will see that the value of human life lies in something far greater than the ability to directly contribute to others. They won’t be seen as burdens, but as people. But this outlook will also humanise society in that children who learn to care within the family will also carry this outlook of compassion beyond the family and thus be a blessing to society.
2. recognising their authority. God has so instituted the family that the husband is the head of the home (Eph 5:22-28; 1 Peter 3:1-7), and given unto the parents jointly the responsibility to bring biblical spiritual and moral teaching to the children (Deut 6:4-9 and 2 Tim 3:14-15). This of course is not a blanket authority where the parent can expect to the child to do whatever they say. It is an authority under God. Notice that Paul calls upon fathers not to exasperate their children – which includes being inconsistent, irrational and having unrealistic expectations of their children’s abilities in the use of that authority. He also reminds them to train their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord – that is its use is to have a clear biblical focus and objection. Children remember that God has given to your parents authority for your good. There will be strong pressures within and without to reject and even despise it, but if we are to honour our parents we are to recognise and respond to it. Parents, remember childhood and youth rapidly passes, so there is only a limited window of opportunity to instil right principles and practices into the life of your children. And this window comes smaller with every generation because of society’s undermining of parental authority. A century ago a man in his 20’s or 30’s would still defer to his father’s opinion on major decisions like marriage and career. That is long since gone.
3. obedience. This is how Paul expounds it in Eph 6:1 “children obey your parents” . This means that we are to listen to what they say, listening is honouring, don’t right off your parents because they are ‘old’, thinking ‘what would they know!’ It is amazing what they have learnt from their parents and experience. You don’t have to accept, believe or follow everything they say, but to listen with respect is a significant way of honouring our parents. To honour means to appreciate the investment of your parents in your life by training and instruction. And where the exercise of authority is legitimate we must listen in the sense of doing what they say. Parents, this has implications for discipline: it should be exercised in a spirit of encouraging, comforting and exhorting (1 Thess 2:11-12); it should be both moderate and reasonable; it should be child focussed not self-relieving (of anger or frustration); it is about the child not you; it should be child-blessing not child-abusing. But I have said obedience to the legitimate or lawful authority. It certainly doesn’t mean buckling to various schemes to weaken a child’s commitment to Christ – the believer has to honour the Lord first and foremost, and honouring parents must not challenge this (Lk 9:60; 14:26). Likewise, if parents of adult children are possessive, over-bearing or domineering (it sometimes happens even with Christian parents), then as Peter Master’s rightly points out, these adult children are not obliged to invest undue time and energy pandering to them, fearing that to do otherwise would be a breach of Gods’ commandment.
4. loving and caring for them. Here we see that honouring continues even after we have left the nest. Indeed if you look at 2 Cor 12:14 and 1 Tim 5:4 we see that there is a shift that takes place in caring from the parents to the child to the child for the parents as the child grows up and the parents grow older and more frail. Our love takes on the special form of care, yet we don’t care for them just because we want to set a good example to our kids so that they will in due time treat us right, but because they are our parents, because they are people made in the image of God, and people that God has given us an extremely close connection to (whether we have always enjoyed that or not). Mother’s day is an opportunity to help children show that care, a care which they should see modelled in adult children as well.
3. Our Motivation
This, as Paul points out, is the only commandment that comes with a promise. That certainly draws attention to this commandment. But it also seems to be a gracious accommodation of God to the mind of children who respond to the promise of a reward. Certainly it can be argued that this general promise is implied in all the other commandments and of all of them as a whole, but God seems to be accommodating to a child’s need for encouragement, highlighting benefit and blessing.
Looking at that motivation or inducement it is important to notice that it refers not so much to long life, but to the stability and longevity of Israel’s occupation of the Promised Land, including its well being as a nation. Paul in Ephesians 6:3 extends it to “the earth” , clearly because the new covenant now has an international dimension, but the issue of stability and longevity to the home, church and society are involved. The personal application is clear: by relating to your parents in this way we will result in a well ordered family life, you will have a more stable, secure, happy and productive family environment – and the more families there are like this the more our society will be the same.
We are all children and if we desire family and spiritual blessing and usefulness throughout our lifetime we had better be sure that we are obeying and pleasing God at this point.