Honoring Our Parents for Life

God’s love for families is seen in His dedicating one of the Ten Commandments to the relationship between children and parents. Today, Sinclair Ferguson reflects on our lifelong calling to honor our father and mother.

It’s Wednesday on Things Unseen and, this week, we’ve been thinking about family life. It’s a tremendous amount of work, isn’t it, if you’re a parent? But then, God willing, you have these moments when it seems the sun breaks through and you realize what an amazing thing it is to have a family. What a blessing that God has set the solitary in a home. It wasn’t good for Adam to be alone, and it’s not usually very good for us either. One of the things that strikes me as a wonderful expression of God’s love for our families is that He devoted one of the Ten Commandments to family life.

The fifth commandment is a unique commandment really, isn’t it, in the sense that it’s addressed to a particular human relationship, a family relationship: “Honor your father and your mother.” That’s a great key to happiness in the home, and it’s a beautiful thing to see when children honor their parents. But there are several intriguing things about this commandment. Let me mention one or two.

The first is that it’s the only commandment that doesn’t have a negative element in it somewhere. The second is that although it’s the fifth commandment, it’s the first commandment about our relations with others. Commandments one through four have got to do with our honoring of the Lord. And that’s true even of the fourth commandment, the Sabbath day, although it too has implications for others—they need to rest as well.

But the third thing to notice is it’s a lifelong commandment. But notice, it doesn’t say, “Children honor your father and mother”; it says, “Everybody honor your father and mother.” It doesn’t just apply to years one through eighteen or whatever. But here is an important point to notice both for parents and for their children: the way in which we honor our parents develops.

When we’re children and youngsters in our parents’ home, honoring them takes the form of learning to be obedient to them in the Lord. You remember how Luke tells us that Jesus did just that. Even after His parents had misunderstood Him, He was submissive to them because, apart from anything else, He knew that was His heavenly Father’s commandment.

But then when we grow up—and especially when we’ve established our own home and family—the nature of our honoring our parents changes. I think this is why the commandment doesn’t say, “Obey your parents,” but, “Honor your father and mother.” You’re no longer under their authority in later life, and they should no longer issue commands for us to obey, but we still need to find ways of honoring them.

I know sometimes that subtle difference can be a challenge to negotiate. And alas, even some Christian parents have never noticed that the commandment calls children to honor, not simpliciter, to obey. In some of our lives, we may have to find ways of honoring our parents when they wrongly overstep the mark or tell us that we are to obey them. That’s going beyond Scripture and can produce difficult situations. But if we understand this difference between lifelong honoring and childhood obedience, then we will find ways to express appreciation and love to bring blessing and care to our parents. And it will help us, by and large, through all the challenges. And here’s a fact: at the end of the day, you will never, ever regret keeping this commandment.

But there’s a fourth thing that we can draw from this commandment, and I think it’s as wonderful as it is helpful. When Christian parents teach this commandment to their children while they’re still very young, then by keeping this one commandment, in a sense, they naturally keep all the others. They’ll honor and imitate their parents and their parents’ love for the Lord in their worship of His name, in living lives that please Him. As I sometimes say, they will breathe in the atmosphere of love for Christ that their parents breathe out.

Yes, we want to help our children memorize the Ten Commandments. The amazing thing is that there are only ten, so it’s not beyond their powers to do that. But right from the very beginning, if they honor their parents, the other commandments will, in a sense, fall into place. So it’s wonderful, really, for our family life, isn’t it, that embedded in the Ten Commandments is this one simple command that helps our children focus on loving their parents and, in doing that, learning to love the One whom their parents love. And that, after all, is just “Family Life 101.”