Honoring Mom
TCF Sermon
Mother’s Day
May 11, 2008
We’re here this morning, of course, to celebrate moms, and grandmas, and great grandmothers. Sometimes, even grandmas who fill the role of mothers. And of course, any mother loves to remember those days when her children were so incredibly cute. We love to remember the things they said, the things they did.
There’s the story of:
A four-year-old and a six-year-old (who) presented their Mom with a house plant. They had used their own money and she was thrilled. The older of the two said with a sad face, "There was a bouquet that we wanted to give you at the flower shop. It was real pretty, but it was too expensive. It had a ribbon on it that said, ’Rest In Peace,’ and we thought it would be just perfect since you are always asking for a little peace so that you can rest."
You Know You’re a Mom When...
• Popsicles become a food staple.
• Spit is your number one cleaning agent.
• You count the sprinkles on each kid’s cupcake to make sure they’re equal.
• You hear your mother’s voice coming out of your mouth when you say, "NOT in your good clothes!"
• You hide in the bathroom to be alone.
• You hope ketchup is a vegetable, since it’s the only one your child eats.
• You stop criticizing the way your mother raised you.
• Your favorite television show is a cartoon.
• Your feet stick to the kitchen floor...and you don’t care.
• Your idea of a good day is making it through without a child leaking bodily fluids on you.
Of course, we learn things from our mothers, don’t we? Here are some:
Lessons from Mother
My mother taught me RELIGION: "You better pray that it will come out of the carpet."
My mother taught me TIME TRAVEL: "If you don’t straighten up, I’m going to knock you into the middle of next week!" (actually – that sounds more like a dad kind of lesson)
My mother taught me REASON: "Because I said so, that’s why."
My mother taught me LOGIC: "If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you’re not going to the store with me."
My mother taught me FORESIGHT: "Make sure you wear clean underwear, in case you’re in an accident."
My mother taught me IRONY: "Keep crying and I’ll give you something to cry about."
My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS: "Shut your mouth and eat your supper!"
My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM: "Will you ’look’ at the dirt on the back of your neck!"
My mother taught me about STAMINA: "You’ll sit there ’till all that spinach is gone."
My mother taught me about WEATHER: "It looks like a tornado swept through your room."
My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY: "If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a million times - Don’t exaggerate!!!"
My mother taught me about BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION: "Stop acting like your father!"
My Mother taught me about ANTICIPATION: "Just wait until we get home."
My Mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE: "If you don’t stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way."
My Mother taught me ESP: "Put your sweater on; don’t you think I know when you’re cold?"
My Mother taught me HUMOR: "When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don’t come running to me."
My Mother taught me how to BECOME AN ADULT: "If you don’t eat your vegetables, you’ll never grow up."
My Mother taught me about GENETICS: "You’re just like your father."
My Mother taught me about WISDOM OF AGE: "When you get to be my age, you will understand."
And...
My Mother taught me about JUSTICE: "One day you’ll have kids... and I hope they turn out just like you!"
Let’s look at an important passage of scripture which speaks of mothers:
Ephes. 6:1-3 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2"Honor your father and mother"--which is the first commandment with a promise-- 3"that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth."
Now, on Mother’s Day - we’re all children. So, to the youth among us here this morning, don’t worry. When you hear this passage about obeying your parents, you might think that this particular Mother’s Day sermon is going to be aimed squarely at you. Relax.
It’s only aimed partly at you, and for the most part, it applies to all of us, because we’re going to focus on verse 2. “Honor your father and mother”
Of course, since it’s Mother’s Day, we’ll focus on mom, but most of what we’ll say applies to both parents – and this might even mean anyone who fills the role of a parent in your life. Children must obey their parents, as it says in verse 1, if they want to be obedient to scripture. Now, that’s not necessarily true of adult children.
However, what is true for both adult and young children is found in verse 2 here, in which Paul quotes the fifth commandment. Obedience is required when we’re younger, but honor is required for life. After the humor of this morning’s introduction, I could have started this morning’s sermon a bit more negatively, with a different passage of scripture, which addresses the consequences of not honoring our parents:
Proverbs 30:17 "The eye that mocks a father, that scorns obedience to a mother, will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley, will be eaten by the vultures.”
Kind of severe, don’t you think? A great Mother’s Day or Father’s day verse. Parents, you may want to quote that to your kids next time they act up.
Or I could tell you about a particular Mother’s Day in the Central African Republic in 1971. The president of that nation marked the day by rounding up all the men who were in jail for committing any kind of crime against their mothers. Then he executed them. Happy Mother’s Day!
But rather than focusing solely on the disincentives for not honoring our mothers, we need to look at how this command applies to all of us, why it’s important, why it’s such a significant thing in our lives. A key reason this is a vital thing to grasp is this: The family is the crucible of life.
Do you know what a crucible is? It’s a melting pot, with a very hot fire under it, into which chemicals, or more often, metals, are placed. They’re placed in a crucible to burn away the waste matter, the useless stuff, the impurities - the things that keep the metals from being all metal, and nothing but metal, so that only the pure metal remains. This is done especially with precious metals, such as gold or silver. So, the family is the crucible of life. It’s the place God uses to refine us - to purify us - to burn away the waste, the useless stuff.
Families are the crucible God uses to make us into usable tools for His Kingdom - and also to teach us how to relate to people outside the family. That’s one reason this message applies in some ways to everybody, whether your mother is still alive or not, whether your mother was a good mother or a bad mother.
What’s does that have to do with Mother’s Day, and honoring your mother? Mom’s at the center, the focal point, the nexus, of this crucible called the family, and when scripture commands us to honor our mothers, there’s a purifying that extends far beyond the relationships we have with our mothers. There’s shaping and molding of us that can impact every other part of our lives - to the negative, or to the positive, as we learn, or don’t learn, to honor our mothers.
Learning to honor our mothers (and fathers) has an impact in how we learn to honor others, and how we learn to honor God. If our faith in Christ is real, it will usually prove itself first at home, in our relationships with those who know us best.
In our culture, parental honor seems archaic, very old-fashioned. Yet, scripture is clear that marriage and family, including the parent-child relationship, is the most basic foundation for society. This is true most clearly because, from the parent-child relationship, we learn how to relate to people.
Martin Luther said, "Out of the authority of parents, all other authority is derived and developed"
Both Jews and Christians through the centuries have recognized that the fifth commandment is about so much more than mothers and fathers. It’s a principle about our attitude toward authority in general. Honoring our mothers lays the foundation for our attitude toward all authority figures. If we learn well this lesson about honoring our parents, we can learn how to relate to our boss - to our teachers - to our church leaders, and to any other authority figure in our lives.
If we don’t learn to walk out the fifth commandment in our lives, then we’ll have no foundation for the rest of the authority relationships in our lives. Without authority, relationships in our society would fall apart. The way we relate to umpires, pastors, police officers, presidents, teachers and bosses, is a natural outgrowth of the way we relate to our parents.
A little boy forgot his lines in a S. S. presentation. His mother was in the front row to prompt him. She gestured and formed the words silently with her lips, but it didn’t help. Her sons’ memory went blank. Finally, she leaned forward and whispered the cue, “I am the light of the world.” The boy’s face lit up and with great feeling and a loud and clear voice he said, “My mother is the light of the world.”
Well, that may be beyond what we’re commanded to do in honoring our mothers.
Honor is kind of an old-fashioned word, isn’t it? And the valuing of motherhood seems to be old-fashioned and out of style, too.
One author says that his wife is a brilliant woman. She has a PHD & is capable of pursuing a very profitable career. But she elected to stay home with her children when they were young. Her decision didn’t bother her at all except when other women would ask, "What do you do?" She would answer, "I’m a homemaker. I stay home & take care of my children & my husband." They would usually respond with "Oh" & then ignore her from then on.
So this woman came up with another response when she was asked what she did: (you moms might want to memorize this response):# "I’m socializing two Homo-sapiens in Judeo-Christian values, so they’ll appropriate the eschatological values of utopia. What do you do?" They would often blurt out "I’m a doctor" or "I’m a lawyer" & then wander off with a dazed look in their eyes.
Now, it’s important to recognize that the Biblical understanding of honor is close to, but in at least one significant way, different from, how we might understand it in common usage today. When we hear honor today, often we think of some kind of award, or recognition for a thing accomplished. We might think of the Academy Awards. We may think of sports league MVPs. We think of business, social or academic achievement. We could, for example, honor our graduates, as we will in a few weeks here, for their academic achievements in high school or college. But, while these kinds of honors are important, too - they’re appproriate and they’re legitimate - they’re not the kind of honor that’s referred to most often in scripture, in one significant way.
You see, the honors we just spoke of were for something that required hard work - something that resulted in accomplishment, or achievement, or even more, for the accomplishment or achievement of excellence, and they are rightly honored. They were earned in some way.
But we’re to honor our mothers, we’re to honor each other, we’re to honor God, not primarily because of what they’ve accomplished, achieved, or excelled at. We’re to honor them because of the position they hold - we’re to honor our mothers just because they’re our mothers. Because of what and who they are.
This is where it can get difficult, because I realize that while many, maybe most of us, can find wonderful things to say about our mother’s character and achievements, as it relates directly to us...in other words, our mothers did this for us, they did that for us…the fact is, some of us didn’t have, or don’t have, very good mothers. But, when the Word of God says to honor our mothers, the command has little to do with anything other than position.
Whenever a child trusts in God and obeys His Word, he honors his parents. Even an unbelieving parent is honored by a believing and obedient child. But what if a person has parents who are hardly worthy of honor? We could probably all think of children whose parents seem to have done their absolute best to ruin their lives.
We can think of kids who have been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused. Or maybe abandoned, and have to deal with the effects of this for their entire life.
How can such children honor their parents?
When we honor our parents, we acknowledge that they have been ordained of God to be our parents and to receive our honor. Honoring parents who are not worthy of honor can only be done as we recognize that God has appointed them to be parents, thus they are honored for their God-given position of parent, not necessarily for their performance as a parent.
Biblical honor is, first of all, largely positional. The word for honor in the original Hebrew of the Old Testament passages, which Paul quotes in Ephesians 6, has a literal meaning of this: “to be heavy”
So, in a good sense, when you honor someone, you pile weight on them. In the common, everyday use of our language, “you lay it on them.”
Your revering of them, your honoring of them, lays on them expressions, attitudes and actions that show you give great weight, you give great seriousness, to the position they hold.
The New Testament understanding of honor means “to fix a value upon” - by implication, to revere.
So, when we honor someone in a Biblical way we give great weight to their position - we attach a high value not just to what they’ve done in a positive sense, but to their role, to their position. The word picture is weighing down someone with esteem and respect.
The opposite of "honor" is to take someone "lightly," by withholding honor and respect.
So, honor is positional. When people are honored in the Bible, they are honored largely because of the position they hold. Those we are commanded to honor in the Bible are most often those who hold a certain position of distinction. God is honored because He is the Sovereign God of the Universe. Kings, rulers, elders, masters, presidents are all to be given honor. Parents, too, are to be honored for their position, their role, in the family.
Thus honor has to do with the position, that a mother has above and beyond others, just because of who she is in our lives – the one who served God’s purpose in giving us life.
To honor, as understood in God’s Word, means to “weigh you down with respect and prestige.” It says, I place upon you great worth and value. In all the passages of scripture where it commands us to honor mothers, to honor parents, Old Testament or New Testament, it never says to only honor parents who are perfect parents. It doesn’t even say to only honor parents who are good parents, good Christians, spiritually mature, or to only honor parents who don’t make mistakes, or only honor parents who don’t let you down.
God clearly instructs us to honor regardless of performance - regardless of behavior.
One reason for this may be that it requires faith to believe that somehow, God can use imperfect people like our parents to help shape us into the people He wants us to be.
Now a disclaimer is in order here, too. Honor does not mean to excuse them of their sin, or trivialize pain they may have caused you. You can recognize reality, and still honor in some ways. Also, honor, or obedience for that matter, does not require us to honor or obey in things that are clearly against scripture. We are always to honor God first.
But it does challenge us to see the truth of the gospel that our faith rests on. The truth of the Gospel is that even when we did not deserve to be saved, even when we deserved damnation, we were paid the highest honor of God becoming like one of us, in the person of Jesus, who suffered and died on the cross, without honor, and He did all that to forgive us and save us and love us. He did this not because we were worthy of this honor - not because of any achievement, certainly not because we earned it.
Here’s an important point for us to consider, and it applies to all the children here - not just the youth still living at home with parents. How you honor your mother can be a good indication of how much you have grown, or are growing in your faith, how closely you walk with God.
When we follow God’s command to honor our mothers, and to appropriately honor others, those very acts, those very attitudes of honor, in fact honor God. The reverse is true. When we dishonor, when we fail to honor and respect our mothers or when we fail to honor and respect others, we do in fact dishonor God.
So, though we laugh at the verse from Proverbs we read earlier, about ravens pecking out our eyes, and vultures eating them, it does, I think, show how seriously God takes this idea of honoring our mothers, honoring others, and honoring Him.
Obedience to parents isn’t just because the parents are bigger than kids, but because obedience to parents is part of a child’s devotion to Jesus.
Even so, honoring our parents is to respect the role that God has given them in our lives, and that doesn’t stop when we’ve left home, though it does change, and we’ll look at that in a minute.
One preacher, commenting on this idea, said this:
Every time we see our belly button in the mirror it should remind us of the fact that we didn’t just show up one day. Someone gave us the gift of life. Someone had to change our diapers, feed us, carry us around, and make sure we got naps.
Now our parents’ role in our lives is a changing role, so how we honor our parents depends on what stage of life we’re in. When we’re younger, we honor our parents by obeying their rules. That great theologian Bill Cosby once said:
A parent’s responsibility is not to his child’s happiness; it’s to his character, and discipline builds character.
I would add, that by building character in our children, we help equip them for a successful life - spiritually, socially, economically, educationally.
So, obedience when we’re young is to our benefit, and it’s the key way we can honor our mothers. As young adults, that changes at some point after you leave home. Then, we honor our parents by appreciating what they’ve contributed to our lives, and being open to their words of influence, which we need whether we recognize it or not.
Hopefully, at some point, we recognize what Mark Twain noted:
He says that when he was a teenager, he was amazed at how unintelligent his father was, but by the time he turned 21 he was amazed at how much his father had learned in such a short time.
One preacher said this: When we’re adults, we honor our parents by carefully weighing their advice, by listening attentively to their ideas, even if we end up deciding otherwise. Some of the key areas here are picking a college, choosing a career direction, and choosing a spouse. Every time we’re tempted to dismiss our parents we should take a long, hard look at our belly buttons.
As older adults, we honor our parents by caring for their needs. There are many of us in this position today. That may include everything from caring for their physical needs, because they’re growing more frail, to caring for their financial needs. So, honoring parents takes different forms for different people, and in different circumstances. Since the Fifth Commandment is very general, we see that the application of this command may not be the same for everybody, depending on where we are in life.
1. The young child will honor his parents as he obeys them – even as it notes in the passage from Ephesians we read.
2. The older child will honor his parents as he (or she) is obedient to God.
3. The older adult child whose parents are dependent upon him will honor his parents by providing for them.
1 Timothy 5:8 (NIV) 8 If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.
I found this story that relates to this idea – it’s a Grimm’s Fairy Tale, and it is indeed grim.
Once there was a little old man. His eyes blinked and his hands trembled; when he ate he clattered the silverware in sort of an annoying way, he 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 didn’t like the arrangement. “I can’t have this,” she said. “It interferes with my right to happiness.” So she and her husband took the 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 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 evening 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. They then went to the corner and took the 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.
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
While we’re to honor our parents because God commanded it, and that should be enough all by itself, this story shows a practical reason for this command. The moral of this story is that you’d better honor our father and mother, because one day you’ll want your children to do the same for you.
This brings up another point: If you’re a parent, how do you get your kids to live by the fifth commandment? Some of you parents may have noticed that just quoting this commandment doesn’t always result in instant compliance.
It’s clear from this story that at least one way our kids learn about honoring us is by seeing how we respond to the authority figures in our lives. How do we biblically and faithfully honor others? How do we treat our elders? And I’m not necessarily talking about church elders here. How do we treat our parents? How about other authorities?
- policemen
- sports officials (referees or umpires)
- bosses
- teachers
If we respond negatively or harshly, or complainingly, or dismissively, we’re not modeling honor, and we probably won’t see our children honoring us, or other authorities in their lives.
Giving honor is practical. Ultimately, much honor is not earned, it’s positional. It requires more than just saying something, and honoring our mothers is a significant step toward honoring all people.
Christian author Dennis Rainey gives us this list of ways we can honor our mothers, or indeed both of our parents:
1. choosing to place great value on your relationship with them
2. taking the initiative to improve your relationship
3. obeying them until you’ve established yourself as an adult
4. recognizing what they’ve done right in your life
5. recognizing the sacrifices they have made for you
6. praising them for the legacy they are passing on to you
7. seeing them through the eyes of Christ, with understanding and compassion
8. forgiving them as Christ has forgiven you
Let me close with reading Romans 12:10, which takes this clear command to honor our mothers, and applies most of what we learned today, to each and every one of us.
Romans 12:10 Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves.
