A little bit of a change in direction here. Early in January we started this series on the Ten Commandments, and after the first four messages we are about to make an abrupt turn. The first four commandments dealt with our relationship with God. They were vertical commands, and now they have become horizontal commands in that they deal with our relationships with one another. You might remember the first commandment was to not replace God, the second command was to not reduce God, the third was to not belittle God, and the fourth was to honour God by celebrating the Sabbath. But now the commands take a different direction, it’s as if God is saying, “now that you’ve got our relationship straight let’s work on your relationship with others”. And so we go from the vertical to the horizontal. And so the fifth commandment reads
Exodus 20:12
12 Respect your father and your mother, and you will live a long time in the land I am giving you.
It’s interesting that the child parent relationship is the only relationship that makes it into the top ten here. We don’t see any reference on how to treat our spouse, other than the obvious do not commit adultery in the seventh command, or how to treat our children but we are told here that we must honour our parents. Now I realize that there are probably some of you here who are all knotted up inside, the stomach acid is boiling and you’re thinking, “Like that’s ever going to happen, after the way they treated me.” And unfortunately that is the reality of today that when ever you speak about parents there is someone in the group who was abused, physically, emotionally or sexually while they were growing up. Some of you may have grown up in the homes of alcoholics or workaholics, abusive or neglectful perhaps you had parents who were distant or cold and uncaring. And you want to cry out “how can I honour people who are un-honourable?” “How do I honour someone who never once honoured me?”
What is God asking of you this morning, is God asking you to put on a mask an pretend it never happened? Is God demanding that you push your feelings out of sight and go about the duty of honouring these people who have betrayed you and hurt you severely? Will God settle for pretend honouring? Nope he does not want make believe honouring and I don’t want to minimize the hurt that you’ve felt or negate it in any way and before I’m done this morning we are going to deal with that issue. So please bear with me.
Obviously the command to honour our parents means different things at different points in our lives. As children to honour your parents means to Obey Our Parents, just do what they say. That’s what’s behind the fifth commandment when we are young. That’s why Paul wrote Ephesians 6:1 Children, you belong to the Lord, and you do the right thing when you obey your parents. Regardless of what the pop psychology of today says obedience is still something that we need to expect of our children. God knows that there is a rebel streak inside the heart of every little kid, and God knows that parents are going to have to carefully and consistently confront that destructive force or they will eventually lose their children to spiritual shipwreck. Throughout the scriptures God gives guidelines for parents on how to establish boundaries for their children and how to discipline their children and how to nurture them and love them.
We have swung from the extremes of two or three generations ago when parents, (especially fathers) were unreasonable tyrants or the place today where parents, (especially fathers) have abdicated their place of authority in the home. The pattern of authority is all one peace and you cannot expect to break it in one spot, i.e. the home and then expect it to work in the rest of society. And so God says to the children, Children at this point in your life you honour your parents by obeying them.
As children become teens and Young Adults they begin to exercise more independence and make more and more decisions on their own. It’s at this point in our lives to honour our parents means that we need to Respect Our Parents and cooperate with them. During this phase in their lives young adults don’t need constant supervision and long lists of do’s and don’ts in their lives. Those teen years are the time when they begin to make some of their own decisions and well they should, it’s a part of growing up. In saying that let me add this warning to the teens out there, some of the decisions that you make now, that seem right for today will have ramifications on your entire life. And as much as we as parents wish we could make those choices for you we can’t. And in this period of your life the carrying out of the fifth commandment would be “Stay respectful, stay cooperative with your parents.”
Adolescence is the only time in your life when a person believes that they know it all. It’s at that point that they become convinced that all adults have suffered irreparable brain damage, and that particular point in life nobody knows as much as a teenager, and if you don’t believe that just ask one of them. They know all the answers. When I was a teen I had answers to questions that weren’t even being asked.
By the way, that isn’t anything new, listen to what Mark Twain wrote well over a hundred years ago When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I go to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned.
And God says to adolescents even during this troublesome turbulent time obey the fifth commandment. Yes children during this time are supposed to begin to differ and disagree with their parents, that’s a part of separation process but all through this agonizing era teens are called to be respectful and cooperative toward their parents so these changes can be negotiated within the context of the family community and not isolation.
But most of us aren’t children anymore, nor are we teens or even young adults. We have moved on in life to being adults ourselves and with that come a whole new series of challenges. It’s at this point in our lives that we’ve established our own families and households and careers but our parents are still alive and a part of our lives. For most Boomers their parents are at least in their mid fifties and most are older then that, what is our responsibilities to our parents in this stage of our lives?
The fifth commandment does not stop when we leave the home, the fifth commandment is binding on all us until both of our parents have passed away . And for adults the way we honour our aging parents is very simply to Treasure Our Parents. How do we as Treasure our parents
Once we have come through that turbulent period of our lives called adolescents, once we have got out on our own and had a family of our, we start to realize that our parents brain death was only temporary if it happened at all and then we start raising kids of our own and we begin to realize how much service and sacrifice went into raising you. How much love time and energy went into raising you as a child. And your heart begins to soften toward your parents, and you have those golden years to treasure your parents and to be there for them.
If I was to ask you to name the most important things in your life what would your list look like? Children, Parents, Spouse, Friends, Job, Home, Hobbies, Sports. So what would happen if say you no longer had your job? If your friends were dying, your parents were gone, you were unable to play your sports or enjoy your hobbies and had to move out of your home. It would sure shorten the list up, wouldn’t it? That’s why as parents get older Children become more important to them.
Because the older our parents get the less love and respect and esteem they receive from the world they live in, for many of our parents the brightest spot the flame that burns closest to their heart is their children, for many of them that is the most important part of their lives. But we, I’m thinking about my generation we are in the busy years of our lives, having children and raising them, climbing ladders and you know what I mean
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And sometimes we need to just slow down and say thank you to our folks and give back to them some of what they’ve given to us. And if we don’t show that we appreciated what they did for us how will they know, and that cuts, that’s why in King Lear that the Bard wrote How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.
~William Shakespeare.
Many of you people have taken time to send cards, share holidays and include your parents in the special times in your life, call them and send gifts letting them know that they are treasured. And every time you do that type of thing you are honouring your parents.
And all of this goes beyond the bumper sticker that said “Honour your parents: they haven’t written their will yet”. As our parents become older we may find them more and more reliant on us. And society tells us to shuffle them off somewhere were they won’t be an inconvenience, where they won’t cause us undue hardship. And there are times and circumstances where that is the only viable option, but not always. And that is no excuse for children to ignore their parents during their time of need.
I don’t think we need to return to the concept of the extended family home with three or four generations living under one roof but I do believe that we are adults that we need to make sure that our parent do not lack for the necessities of life and that they aren’t left in need or loneliness.
And as the demands on us becomes greater we need to realize that if we are to honour the fifth commandment it will necessitate some sacrifices on our behalf. And many of those sacrifices are the same ones that our parents made for us when we were growing up. How many times did they put their plans on hold to drive us somewhere. How often did they clean up after us, or run errands for us. How often did their lives their wants and their needs take second place to ours. You say sure but they are our parents. . .exactly. Christ himself gives the example. When he hung on the cross, and those of you who know Christ personally can imagine what was on his mind as he hung on that cross between heaven and earth, he’s there paying the price for your sins and mine. He’s taken on the totality of sin and he’s in agony, dying an excruciating death on the cross and there are only seven things recorded that Christ said on the cross and one of them was when he looked down and saw his mother and used a little bit of the strength he had left to ask His friend John to take care of his mother. Is it any wonder the command to honour our parents ended up in the top five.
Giving up precious time to visit or serve or minister to our elderly, or ill or dying parents needs to be seen as a potential blessing and not an imposition.
A very practical part of this is the entire concept of reaping what you sow. You realize of course that the example that you set in how you relate and deal with your parents will be the one followed by your children. We cut a groove in our children by the way we treat our parents. It was the philosopher John Locke who wrote “Parents wonder why the streams are bitter when they themselves poisoned the fountain.” Or what goes around comes around. The Greek philosopher Euripides (er-rip-e-dees) observed “Unblessed is the son who does not honour his parents; but if reverent and obedient to them, he will receive the same from his own children”
The story is told of an ancient grandmother who lived with her daughter and grandson. As she grew feeble and weak instead of being a help around the house she became a constant trial. She broke plates and cups, lost forks and knives spilt drinks and knocked things over. One day, exasperated because the old woman had broken another precious plate, the daughter sent her son out to buy his grandmother a wooden plate, one that she couldn’t break.
The boy knew that wasn’t right but his mother insisted and so he went, but when he came back instead of having one plate he had two. “I only asked you to get one plate” his mother berated him, “didn’t you hear me?”
“Yes” said the boy. “But I bought the second one for you when you get old.”
If you’re wondering about how confused your parents can get, well maybe ~Sam Levenson had the answer when he said, “Insanity is hereditary. You can get it from your children.” ~Sam Levenson
And so God is saying if you honour your parents I will honour you. How are you doing in honouring the fifth commandment. Is this something you need to pray silently about right now or make some amends.
Let me take a few moments right now to speak to those ones who are at a complete loss over how to honour parents who have dishonoured, abused and in some cases almost destroyed them as children. What does God expect you to do? And right off I want to assure you that God is not asking you to ignore the pain you feel, God is not asking anyone here to deny the pain their parents caused, and God is not asking anyone here to gloss it, to pass over it lightly or to forget it.
To one degree or another we have all been failed or hurt or disappointed by our parents, some very minimally, by God’s grace I fall in that category, very minimally disappointed by my parents, almost not at all. I have really great parents, and I don’t have bad memories of them nor am I disappointed in how they raised me. Others have been devastated by their parents and God is not asking you to block that out, he’s asking you to identify it and own it and grieve over it. And if you are going to come out of the other end you are going to have to deal with it and ultimately you are going to have to discuss it with your parents. And that isn’t going to be easy. But you do need to clear the air about your grief and your disappointments with them.
How long can we carry the anger and place the blame? How long can we define ourselves as an “Adult child of a . . .whatever” It probably was wrong, and you probably were hurt, but some people are as angry as if yesterday was today. We cannot continue to allow what they did determine who we are, and if they can make you stoop to your level then they win.
Nowhere in the Bible are we specifically commanded to love our parents, we are told to love our spouse, to love our God, to love our neighbours but nowhere are we told to love our parents. The interpersonal dynamics between children and parents are just too intense. Some of us come out of it intact and some just barely escape. Sometimes too much has transpired for the child to love the parent. God, strangers and neighbours don’t put the same demands on us that our parents do, and so we aren’t commanded to necessarily love them but we are commanded to honour them. And sometimes that means we need to forgive them and get on with making the life that God wants us to have. You say, “Denn, I’ll never be able to forgive them” then they win, because the New Testament teaches us that we will be forgiven in the same way that we forgive.
My mother grew up with a very abusive mother. How mom raised the kids she did is a credit to her not to her mother. Mom was married at 15 partly to escape from her mother. In the late eighties my grandmother began to suffer from Alzheimer’s and could no longer live alone. My mom moved her to Saint John, not to our home but to a seniors complex nearby. And for the last three years of my Grandmother’s life my mother honoured her by visiting, and taking her out to lunch and bring her home for special family times and attending to her personal needs. Dr. Laura Schlessinger made these comments “It is possible to maintain cordial contact, assist a bad parent with such basic needs as food or housing and medicine, and not spend a lot of time marinating in negativity in front of them or behind their back. It may not be ideal, and it may not salve your feeling, but that small something you do ennobles your soul anyway.”
So, where are you at?
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