The Big Ten: Parents

Exodus 20:12 Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. 

Recently in Lusaka, RTSA unveiled a new plan for raising revenues; they installed speed cameras in various places around Lusaka, and they sent out speeding tickets via SMS. They apparently have raised K13.5 million already. One of the problems is that often, where the speed cameras are, nobody knows the speed limit! People are being punished for offenses they do not know about. 

As God’s people, we have been given the Ten Commandments. They are the rules that God expects his people to live by. But they are not just arbitrary or random rules. They are rules that help us live in right relationship with God and with one another. 

The commandment we are looking at today deals with families. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Honor your parents. This seems pretty straightforward. Treat your parents with respect. But Paul takes it to a higher level in Ephesians 6:1, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Young people, honor your parents. The Hebrew word that we translate “honor” means to give weight or importance to. One thing that Zambian culture has gotten right is the honor that young people have been raised to give older adults, but as TV has grown in influence and power, we are being taught something else.

TV is teaching us that our parents are just old. They don’t know anything about today’s young people. They don’t know the same troubles that young people face today. They are out of touch. They always complain. Parents are always complaining about the music that young people are listening to. They are always complaining about the fashions that young people wear. 

But God tells us to honor our parents and obey them in the Lord. There is a reason that God set up the family as He did. He did not set young people to raise yourselves. Yes, you build friendships with one another and learn from one another, but your parents have learned and grown, physically and spiritually. They don’t want you to make the same mistakes they did. They do not want you to go through the same heartache and pain that they had to endure. But even more, God set up the family to mirror our relationship with Himself. He has put us in protective units where we can learn from authority figures who love us and care for our well-being. It is not by accident that Jesus characterizes his relationship with God as Son to Father. He said, in John 6:38, For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me. Jesus was obedient to his Father.

But Jesus lived out this commandment even here on earth. Listen to Luke 2:41-51.  Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover. When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them.

If Jesus was even obedient to his earthly parents, he gives us the example to follow. 

Maybe some of you are parents and you’re ready to use this scripture to beat your children into shape. You know that culturally and biblically, children are supposed to honor and obey their parents. Unfortunately that can lead to some serious unintended consequences. We can make terrible and unreasonable demands on our children or we ignore them completely. When Paul tells children to obey their parents in the Lord, he continues with a message to parents. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

Instead of starting this sermon series on the first of the Ten Commandments, we devoted the entire first sermon to explore who God is. It is important that God’s commandments come to us in the context of God being all-powerful and all-loving.  We can follow God’s commands because of who he is. 

Did you catch the lyric in the song that the children sang earlier? I know it was a little fast, but here goes: 

Grown ups if you are mean

Don’t think it goes unseen

We act the way you do 

So be kind every day.

“A father who is always threatening does not receive much reverence,” and “One should correct a child not by hurting him but by persuading him.”

If you want to bring up your children to know and love the Lord, if you want your children to obey the Lord, if you want children and youth to continue in the church, know that children will more readily learn these lessons if the parents themselves show the way — by following Christ’s example and obeying what he commanded.

There is nothing that will help your children more than to demonstrate Christ-likeness in everything you do. 

This is the only commandment that comes with a promise. Long days in the land God gives you. God will give success and blessing to those who follow his commands. And parents, the best you can do to assure your children’s success is to bring them up in the Lord. That means at home and in the church. This asks the question: what are you doing today to insure that the children in your family and in our church are growing up in the Lord?