The Power Of Honor

Romans 12 verse 10, the second part, giving preference to one another in honor. Now please turn to Ephesians chapter six. Ephesians chapter six verse one. We're continuing our series on the doctrine of honor in the Bible and so we're following that word throughout the scriptures. Ephesians chapter 6 verse 1 children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right.

Honor your father and mother which is the first commandment with promise that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth and you fathers do not provoke your children to wrath but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God stands forever. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for teaching us your ways, for giving us the very best paths through this world, often a wilderness wasteland, and yet you have taken us to higher ground by your word. We're so thankful for you to lift us into such good things.

Amen. Please be seated. As we work our way through this this term honor in the New Testament and the Old Testament as well we're really today we're talking about authority. We're talking about authority in the home and honor, honor toward parents as we spoke of last week is really founded in honor toward God and we're focusing in on this promise that God gives his children. You know people people today are desperately seeking success.

This is why you have so many influencers all over the place who will tell you how to do everything right. But unfortunately, it's almost impossible to find obedience to the fifth commandment as part of the success formula. Just go try to find one. If you want to be successful, honor your father and mother, that's not the raging tune on the internet. You know, years ago, I was invited to NC State campus to address a few hundred graduating seniors there.

The campus ministry there wanted me to speak to the seniors about their future and I began my talk by saying that They should go no further in their careers without making peace with their parents. That if it was necessary, that they ought to first of all, before they take one more step, to repent of any dishonor that they had and to turn their hearts toward their children. And I told them this was one of the premier principles of success for every person and and it's and then I of course read this this first commandment with promise that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. But this morning, I'd really like to focus in on the necessity of authority in the home and also the necessity of honor Toward that authority now we began last week to detail sort of in an overview fashion The doctrine of honor in the Bible and of course all honor flows from honor toward God. This is the beginning of it.

It's very difficult to honor anybody in an honorable way without first honoring God and having it flow from your love toward God. You do everything for God And then the second is honor toward parents, which we will begin to cover today. Thirdly, you have honor toward elders in Hebrews 13 and 1st Thessalonians chapter 5. Fourth, you have honor toward civil governors. Fifth, you have honor of husbands and wives toward one another.

You have honor toward the aged. Sixth you have seventh honor toward one another. That's where we are today. And then eighth, honor toward the Lord's Day. It's the day to honor.

Ninth, honoring employers and then finally honoring those who are not honorable. I'm hoping to cover some matter of these subjects in this study on honor. Ephesians 6, 1 through 4, it brings us to the apostolic teaching on child raising And this makes it very clear that churches should teach parents how to raise children. I think that particularly elders have a distinctive responsibility to teach the younger generation about how to raise their children and that's really what we're doing. So many of you are raising children here and I'm just extremely grateful for that and I'm delighted with so much of what I see.

But elders actually have a duty to teach the church the fifth commandment So many people in our culture have no clue about the fifth commandment and its importance even people who've grown up in churches But the New Testament makes it clear that the Apostles desired a very specific child raising culture in the Church of Jesus Christ. You don't make up your own culture in the Church. You go to the word of God. And so the apostles taught the churches how to love one another, how to sing, how to choose elders and deacons, how to function as elders and deacons, how to understand and preach the gospel, how to be workers in the marketplace. The apostles taught the early churches to do all those things, and he also, the apostles also taught churches how to raise kids.

Isn't that great? What a blessing that is. And you find it in many places, in Ephesians and Colossians, and Timothy and Titus, and other places, where you find the apostles instructing local churches on what kind of child-raising culture should exist in the church. We should not be doing our own thing. We should be calibrating to the Word of God alone.

The Apostles, it's very clear, taught churches and parents how to raise, how to not raise little tyrants because that's the natural disposition of every child. You know it was occurring to me just coming to church this morning the harmony that God so designs for a family. How what the commands, it's the same in the church too, the commands of one another in the church, they drive one another together and the child raising commands and the commands to parents, they drive fathers and mothers together. They bring them together in actually a common union and that they might be unified and that they work together on it. And again, you have these commands here, but both parents and children are implied in it you have on the one hand the responsibility of children to honor and obey their parents.

Parents need to help little children do that. On the other hand, you have fathers need to be very careful that they do not exasperate their children. So you have this harmonious picture that is being painted here in this text. Of course the Old Testament addressed parents many many times which over time I'm sure will cover some of them. Now one thing this means for you if you're a Christian is that raising your children actually make you a cultural revolutionary.

You're involved in a counter-revolutionary movement when you're raising your children because you're not raising your children in the ways of the world. You're raising your children according to the explicit direct commands of God and we raise our children with the Word of God implanted in our hearts to conform ourselves to that word. Now it's difficult in many ways because of the sort of the most recent history of child raising, you know, in the last 75 years particularly, there was really a parenting revolution in the 1950s. Psychologists and parenting experts, they actually smash biblical wisdom for raising children. Actually the principles that parents always relied on, I mean your great-great-grandmother, you know, probably raised her children with a lot more wisdom than modern parents do because they were still tethered to divine revelation.

But you had the the parenting experts became you know psychologists like Sigmund Freud who really was just making things up about human nature. And he foisted them upon the following generations. Then you had Dr. Spock come along. I have his books in my library.

His great book, the common sense book of baby and child care published in 1946. This permissive, psychologized, you know, radical flexibility that really taught that what you should have your hands off of your children. You should endorse all your children's feelings, by the way, Which is like so contrary to scripture. I mean the Bible the Bible makes it clear that there are there are sinful emotions You know, it's sinful to fear. It's it's sinful to be anxious Even David he's commanding his emotions to be in order You know emotions should be commanded but emotions became the god of this world, and particularly in the psychological movement, promoting this, I'm just going to call it an empathetic child raising approach.

It's a child centered approach. And the ideas, you know, that really have fomented modern child-raising practices is that children are fundamentally good. This is the foundational proposition of what's called now the gentle parenting movement. It's actually very old. It's Dr.

Spock revisited, But the gentle parenting movement is really just based on an unbiblical understanding of human nature. That all you need to do is reason with them, they'll be fine. Let them find their own way, ask them questions, don't make them obey if they flop on the floor in a tantrum. Well you just need to understand their emotions rather than commanding out commanding them out of their emotions commanding them out of their pity party and their actual sinful emotions. This is the parenting environment.

When I was you know when I was in high school I remember people talking about this in our church, parent effectiveness training, PET, in the 1970s, a guy named Thomas Gordon. Here's what he said, the only happy family is a child-centered family. That's what he said. Okay? The only happy family is the democratic family, where everybody gets their vote.

And, you know, these were just radical departures from Scripture. You know this, my parents were school teachers in the California public school system in elementary education for you know three decades, over three decades. But by the time the 70s and 80s rolled around, they found it almost impossible to teach for different reasons. You had broken homes, You didn't have fathers in the home. And you also had these raging, ridiculous child raising practices.

And they lost the ability to teach because there was no emotional control in the classroom. And you face a culture that will would like to teach you to embrace the emotions of your children rather than to actually lead them in the ways of God. So now we have the gentle parenting movement, empathy, respect, honoring children's autonomy. It's based on permissiveness and inclusivity. A rejection of the rod, which is actually something that the Bible is very clear about.

So Instead of any kind of spanking, you just redirect the child. So I know you recognize these things as departures from what the Bible says about raising children. I think there's a very serious warning for all of us in Colossians 2 8 Beware lest anyone cheat you Cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit according to the tradition of men according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ. So it's an important subject really for all of us even if you don't have a family yet. I hope you're learning how to raise your children even this morning by some of the things that are in in Scripture.

You know why is this so important? The family is the fountain of civilization. Every institution is populated by people that come out of families. Every marriage comes out of somebody that came out of a family. And from the family flows either the goodness of God or the works of the devil for generations.

And the streams are flowing out of your family and so you should take it very very seriously. It's really a sacred trust that you have. So yes this is child training on Sunday morning at our church. Why are we doing this? Well the scripture leads us to do such a thing but We are training right now.

Child raising is actually a skill. It is a skill to train for. You train for it, first of all, by looking into the scriptures and seeing how your skill should be developed. And my advice for you who are in your child raising years, train like an athlete this skill. Train like an athlete would train in order to win.

You should aim to win. And in order to aim to win, you must be diligent. Your mind must be sharpened and you should have the Word of God running in your heart and in your mouth as you communicate it to your children. We know that child raising is a skill And one reason we know it's a skill is that in 1st Timothy 3.5 one of the qualifications for an elder is that he has a skill. It says that he knows how.

He knows how to raise his children. It is something that must be learned. It's something that must be known how to do. And if the Bible makes it clear if he's if he's good at shepherding his family then he knows how he has this skill in raising children. And so train, train hard, train hard with your Bible and and be diligent, you know, to work with your children to secure honor and obedience.

You'll always continue to learn as well. I think, you know, we finished raising our children a long time ago, but I'll tell you this, many, many times we had to get back to the basics. We'd lose, sort of lose the formula, and we had to get back to the basics. We'd lose sort of lose the formula and we had to get back to the Word of God and restore even some practices that maybe we had forgotten about or we got too loose on. You know isn't it interesting?

God Almighty in all of his wisdom, he takes eternal souls and puts them in the hands of inexperienced parents. What is that all about? And he does that to train them, to train everybody all together. Because really when you're training your children, you're also being trained at the same time. This is God's sanctifying way.

So, there are three commands in this passage of scripture. The first is a positive command, children to obey. The second is another positive command to children honor your father and mother. The third however is negative fathers do not exasperate your children. So that's the balance that we find here.

The first command children obey your parents in the Lord. The terminology here is to hear under, hupakuo, to listen, to listen to your parents. And this establishes parental authority in the home. There's a voice that you children should be listening to. It's the voice of your parents.

And you should get your ears tuned to the voice of your father and mother and your eyes, you know, focused upon them at the same time. So this establishes, and here's what I want us to really understand. It's really the theme of what I want to say. This establishes explicit parental authority in the home. And the question is, is this true in your home?

The bent of children is not toward your authority. They were they were born in sin and they were not born with such a hankering desire to submit to your authority Children most children think that they are the center of the universe and they will act like it. They will act like it unless you help them change that. You need to convince them that they are not the center of the universe. The job of a parent is to shift who the child honors.

The job of a parent is to shift who the child honors toward God and then toward Parents and then toward one another which is very very broad Now there's a there's a there's a real problem and some of you may be experiencing this If you've never established that principle in your family, first of all, you must get it back. But in getting it back, if you have not established it or if you lose it, it's hard to get it back and it'll cause a war and you should wage the war and you should wage the war until that war is over. And often parents give up in the middle of the way right in the middle of the war when they when they don't fulfill they don't fulfill the mission of securing honor in their children. They rather just bark at them. They'd rather just give them commands.

They'd rather be like Eli who told his kids don't do that, but he didn't restrain them. He didn't bring them full circle. That's one of the great mistakes that parents make. They give up too easy because the battle is often so hard and you wonder how many times am I gonna spank this child. It's very difficult.

But what you're dealing with, and you always need to know what you're dealing with, you're dealing with a person who's immature. Your child does not know what's best for him. Your child does not understand what his emotions and what he is doing is going to lead to. He doesn't understand that but you have to help him understand that. Let me just say it this way, A parent's chief job is to disrupt the idolatry of the self.

You are in the business of shifting your children's thinking about himself and about authority. That's why the Apostle says, children obey your parents in the Lord. This establishes parental authority. We know from scripture that all children are egocentric. And you want to make them God-centric, which would also at the very same time make them parent-centric.

Many years ago, I heard a term called the child-centered home. The child-centered home. And a child-centered home is developed when the child's will and wishes become the center of a family life. And children need to be brought to what a God-centered home is. And as it turns out a God-centered home is going to be a parent-centered home because God Almighty, God alone, has established parents as authority in their children's lives.

A God-centered home is where God's ways determine the family activity. What the family does, what they watch, what they listen to, where they go, the people they're with, it all flows from honor and authority toward God. A child-centered home or a child-run home is where parents share authority with their children. I would just ask you, are you sharing authority with your children? It was never meant to be that way.

Parents often crave their children's approval. They want to be their children's best friends. By the way, a parent, particularly in the younger years, cannot be a child's best friend. It isn't going to happen. When they're older it can happen, but only if they understood authority at the beginning.

A child run home is where the decisions of the family are inordinately influenced by the children. You know, you always want to do things that your children like to do. That's a good thing. That is actually a very good thing. A child-centered home is where children put parents under obligation to their desires.

There's a book, a child-raising book, written by Reb Bradley, which I've recommended hundreds of times called Child Training Tips. He gives some illustrations of what it means to have a child-centered home. I can't make that dinner at our house, the kids just won't eat it. That's a manifestation of a child-run home. I prepare meals in two batches, one for my husband and I, and one cooked special for the kids.

We can't have that family over to the house. Their children are so much younger than ours, ours would not enjoy them. We can't go there, the kids will be bored. We won't be able to attend, our little princess just doesn't do well in those situations. We'll have to find a new church.

Junior just doesn't get along with one of the boys in his class. A child-run home is a home where children are given veto power over the wise directions of parents. A child-run home is where the children speak to their parents as if they are peers, and they are not peers. A child-centered home is where children interrupt the adults when they're talking. And by the way, when children are trained to interrupt their parents by not changing that scenario, then they will interrupt other people as well.

They'll interrupt their siblings, they'll interrupt whoever's in the room. A child-centered home is where there's very little respect for siblings. Now every parent has to work on this. Every parent has siblings that are gonna bonk one another on the head, and they have to be taught not to bonk one another on the head and they have to be taught not to bonk one another on the head. You don't treat your sister that way.

You know from the ground up you know Siblings need to be taught to honor one another and you should not let your children fight. You should stop them. It's sinful to fight. It's sinful to dishonor a sibling and parents need to understand that and they need to and they need to come they need to draw near to their children and help them. Not just bark at them, not just command them, not just tell them what for, not just haul off and spank them, but actually to work with them, to get with them and lead them like a shepherd leads his flock.

A child-centered home is where you have a resistance to authority. A child-centered home is often marked by giving rewards for obedience. If you're giving rewards for obedience to your children, I'm just gonna say, I think I'm gonna throw a big caution. Obedience is something that you just should do. You shouldn't be paid for it.

And often children are given these big carrots out there if they just obey. No, they should obey because it's right. Obey your children, obey your parents in the Lord for this is right, okay? And it's really harmful to hang out carrots of reward for children just to do something that's right. They should clean their rooms, they should do their chores, they should be nice.

You do not pay children to be nice. You lead them to be nice. A child centered home often is driven by fear. Fear that if you deal with this, there'll be a bad result. In other words, if you do a good thing, a bad thing will happen.

That's really deceiving. A child-centered home often creates a peer-centered child, other children outside your home inordinately influencing and engaging with your children. You know this it's a really interesting moment that we live in today with social media. My guess is some of your children are very very poor peer very very peer focused and very very peer driven and they're texting with people and they're just constantly in conversation with people not near them, maybe even in other cities and that's where their focus is and all day long they're constantly texting and focusing other people. Are they peer driven?

They may be. You should ask, if that's what's happening in your home, you should ask them, do I have a peer driven child? That all they care about are those other little kids out there all those other young people and by the way it is it is nice when children have friends their own age but you should be very very careful with that. The companion of fool suffers harm and children are fools. They really are actually.

I mean and children need to actually understand that. You need to help them to understand. They don't know everything yet and they need to be led and they need to be taught but you can but you can you can have a peer centered child in your home and they engage they engage more and care more about the the relationship and instruction with their peers than they do with their parents. And I'm just here to say if that's happening you should try to shift that. You can shift it.

One of the most glaring warnings is the narrative around Rehoboam. He really cared more about his peers than his elders. So hey, and here's what happens. When foolish children seek counsel, guess who they don't go to. They don't go to the older people.

They go to the younger people and they get their counsel from younger people or people who really are not very Who really don't have an understanding of biblical authority? That's who they go to and they get their counsel from them And you know you you who are you're younger that will be your tendency Because you're yeah, yeah the young people in your life will tell you what you want to hear. The old people in your life will not tell you what you want to hear generally. You know that's it's the great thing you know if somebody says well I sought counsel. I don't know how many times I've heard that because here's the deal you can find whatever counsel you want to get.

Don't tell me you got sought counsel on it, I'd just like to know who you got it from. The disposition of the obedience is in the Lord. Children obey your parents in the Lord. Now again this just brings up the centrality of honor toward God. In other words The way you obey your parents is a reflection of your obedience to the Lord.

When you obey your parents, it's the same kind of obedience as it is to the Lord. It's unqualified. In some senses, it's non-negotiable. In some senses it's non-negotiable. But in another sense, it is okay if children ask their parents questions and negotiate with them in an honorable way.

That's not such a bad thing. And it depends upon their attitude. Are they negotiating with a spirit of humility? And are they negotiating with a spirit of submission? In other words, let's just say the parent doesn't capitulate, then what is going to be their disposition after that?

That matters a lot. And the reason is for it is right. It's right. Now the truth about families is that families have different rules about all kinds of things, about how you keep your house, about all kinds of things like that and so children will often say well everybody else is doing it how come I don't get to do it Oh my children heard that all the time. And what we said was, you should obey your parents because you're a Brown.

And this is how the Browns are going to live. We're not going to live like everybody else. We don't really care that much how other people live. We're trying to hack this out on our own before the word of God. And of course, you know, we, Deborah and Scott Brown made errors in the raising of their children.

Hey, we were just trying to hack it out the best way we knew how just like you other young parents are. But just because everybody's doing it doesn't mean that it's right. It's right to follow the instructions of your father and your mother. So parents, take your place as authority figures. You are the governors of your children.

But it's more than just obedience because it says honor your father and mother. Here we get to that word honor. Obedience is a subset of honor. I thought it was very interesting the way the Apostle ordered this. He begins with obedience and then honor and I've tried to think about that and of course I don't know exactly why.

I think quite possibly because the first thing that parents need to secure is obedience when children are very young. And then they are taught what honor looks like along the way. That's possible. We're not told. It's my theory.

But this same word, very same word in Ephesians 5 is used in Romans 12 10. It's used of wives in 1 Peter 3 7. It's used of workers or slaves or bond servants in 1 Timothy 6 verse 1, and it's also used of honor toward elders in 1 Timothy 5. So this is an operative word that runs across various levels of authority. What is this honor?

What is he talking about when he says honor? By the way, the assumption here is that honor can be taught. Honor must be taught because honor is not natural. If it was natural, it wouldn't need to be taught. So you have to teach your children what honor looks like.

The language that he's using is reverence, respect. You're seeking the reverence of your children and you are working with them to give you reverence and respect. It's a disposition that you have towards someone. Here's some other words. It's esteem, it's recognition.

It's actually connected to worth. Like, it's connected to something that is valuable. If you look at the use of this word across ancient literature, it has to do with evaluation, appraisal of something that's valuable, okay. Price, assessment, that's that's sort of the the background of the thinking of the Apostle when he uses this word. And something that's very valuable, children honor your father or mother.

Children come to the place where you see how valuable your children or your parents are. It's very interesting. You know, parents do a lot for children. They do a lot. They work a lot.

And they actually do have a lot of value. But often children don't value their parents what they do for them. Particularly their mothers who gave birth to them and nursed them and stayed with them for a long time making sure they didn't die. So this is the whole idea of worth. You know I often think about if there's a fire in my house, what am I going to grab first?

You want to grab the most valuable things in your house. That's what you're going to do. Or you're not going to grab anything. You're just going to run. But here, the parents are of value.

Esteem, dignity, recognition. By the way, too, I was walking through the scriptures and it just struck me, it hit me like a ton of bricks, that this word is used for the honor of Jesus Christ, the heavy, weighty value assessment of Jesus Christ. He's the heaviest of all, heavy and highest of all value. In First Timothy 1, 17, now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, to God alone who is wise, be honor and glory forever and ever. It's the same word in Hebrews 2.9 and Psalm 8.5.

He was crowned with glory and honor, that he by the grace of God might taste death for everyone. This idea that Jesus Christ is the heaviest of heavyweight, he is the greatest of all value and worth and this same terminology is used for parents and of course it's very difficult for parents to think that for children to think that way but what God is doing is he's commanding children to learn how to think this way about their parents are you learn are you children Are you learning how to highly value your parents? When they're talking, are you looking at them in the eye? Are they guiding you by their eye? God says, I will guide you with my eye.

That's what parents should do too. Just, I just want to just pause for a minute and read some things about the significance of the fifth commandment. The fifth, this is Jeremiah Burroughs, The fifth commandment requires us to honor our parents in a way that reflects the authority God has given them. Got that? Honor your parents that reflects the authority that God has given your parents.

We must not only obey them but also love and respect and care for them in their old age for this is part of honoring them as the Lord has commanded. That's from Jeremiah Burroughs' book, Gospel Worship. Here's Matthew Henry. In the fifth commandment, God has ordered that children should honor their parents, and in doing so, they are honoring God himself. This commandment is not just for childhood, but it extends through all stages of life for children owe their parents respect and care in every single stage of their lives.

Here's Thomas Manton. To honor parents is to hold them in reverence, to esteem their wisdom and authority, and to be obedient to their guidance in all lawful things. This is the root of a godly life. For children who dishonor their parents, their lives will be marked by disorder and rebellion which are against God's nature. I'm recognizing that I am about one third of the way through what I wanted to share with you today to be continued next week.

But my objective today was to try to lay down a record of the authority of parents and how critical it is for parents and children to work together because this passage of Scripture makes it very clear that children and parents need to work together on this and I just urge you with all of my heart sit down with your children and talk about how you will work together to honor one another. The problem is that parents are also sinful and they fall short and often they fall short in the way that they instruct their children and so you have to have repentant parents, humble parents who will work with their children recognizing that both of you have a sinful nature but I just want to really encourage you if you have children sit down today and talk about how you can work together to secure the success that God Almighty has promised you. Would you pray with me? Lord, I thank you for your word and how clear it is, how oh how different it is. I thank you for all of your ways are pleasant ways, all of your paths are peace.

I pray that you would give this church a generation of obedient children that they would obey their parents and honor them in everything. I pray that you would give them the success that you promised. In Jesus' name, Amen.