How to Honor Your Dad (6/18/17 Standalone)

ATTN: Happy Father’s Day. I will keep my message short because delicious food is waiting for us prepared by our women. And I want thank the children for joining us in our service. I’ll be preaching on one verse today and I had a choice to make. I could either preach to the fathers on how to treat their children or I can preach to the children on how to treat their fathers. Since today is a day to honor our fathers, I thought it would be more honoring to the father if I preach to the children on how they can honor their fathers. So, I will take just one sentence today and tell you 3 things I have discovered about how to treat our parents. I call them observations, but that’s hard word, so you can think “discoveries” I made reading the Bible. Okay?

 

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

This is a letter that Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus and his letters were read during church worship like just this one. And here, he’s speaking to the children, which means children were usually present with their parents in the worship service. So, it wasn’t the case where adults worshipped separately from the youth and the youth separate from the children and so on.

Discovery 1: Children are expected to worship together with parents.

Now, the word “children” could refer to people of any age who are still under the authority of their parents. So, this could be 5 year olds as well as 15 year old. But probably not 25 year olds… But Paul fully expected there to be whole families worshipping together in one place – that much is clear.  

Once a month, we want our children to join us in worship. They may not understand all that goes on, but they can see their parents worshipping and we believe at that age, more is caught than taught. ILL: I still remember when I was 10 or so, my mom participating at an all night prayer at church and just admiring how she could do that all night when I have never stayed up past 11 o’clock yet. (So, we love the fact that you children can join us for worship once a month!)

And then from the beginning, at our church, we decided not to separate the teens from adults. Some churches will separate the teens and young adults from the adults and let them worship in a separate place with their own pastors. I now think that’s a mistake. It’s true that if we separate them out by age group, our messages can be more relevant and helpful, but what that communicates unintentionally to them is that church is made up of people who are only like them with the same type of life experiences because they are all in the same life stage, perhaps differ by a few years. You can certainly grow your church more quickly that way. But then, when they graduate out of that youth ministry, they will look for a church just like that one where most people are just like them in age and interest. We believe Christ is shown to be more beautiful when people who otherwise have nothing in common come together because of HIm, and not because of common interest, common culture, or common ethnicity or similar age group, or  anything else. Diversity does not only refer to ethnic diversity, but generation diversity as well.

 

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Discovery 2: This is a command; not a suggestion.

Paul knew that this needed to be said because children’s natural tendency is to follow their own senses rather than their parents’ wishes. There comes a moment in our lives when we start thinking, “By now, I know some things more than my parents. I don’t agree always with what they are telling me to do. So, I’m going to only do things that I agree will be good for me and reject the rest.”    

Obedience, if done only in case of agreement is no obedience. Of course you will obey if you agree with the command. But true obedience happens when we disagree and we decide that our parents are probably right and we are wrong and therefore, we go with their wishes rather than ours.

Young people, teens, do you really want to be different in a good way? I never had a teenager tell me, “I disagree with my parents. But they are wiser and more godly than me and therefore, I’m probably wrong and they are probably right. So, I will listen to them and do it their way rather than mine…” Never. “My parents are just so old and boring. They won’t let me do anything fun! They don’t trust me!!!”

Let’s consider some facts here: 1. They have been your age, but you have never been their age. So, it’s reasonable to assume that they know more than you. 2. They’ve lived long enough to have experienced the consequences of the choices you are about to make, whereas you haven’t lived long enough for them. 3. If you came from your parents, chances are you are not that much smarter than your parents. So, if you think your parents are dumb….  “Yeah, but all my friends agree with me about how unreasonable they are…” But all your friends are 15, like you, with no life experience either. 0 + 0 is still 0 life experience-wise!

ILL: Things that annoyed me about my parents – “why do I need to tell you where I am and what time I’m coming back at night? I know where I am and I’m not doing anything stupid. I’m with my christian friends, Chill out. Don’t you trust me?” Well, your parents have lived a little longer and they’ve seen people get struck by drunk drivers and die, or get abducted and bad things happen to them… but you never have. They understand that this world is not that innocent. You don’t. So, God gave you parents for you to heed to so that you will live longer.

And that is literally what the Bible says, “Honor your father and mother that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Discovery 3: There is authority beyond our parents.

“…In the Lord.” You can interpret this “as to the Lord.” So, we obey our parents as we do to the Lord. In other words, this is recognizing that our parents are not the final authority but the Lord is. We obey our parents because as believing parents, they represent the fatherhood of God and when we obey them, we are really showing our willingness to obey God. This really is an extension to the command, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men,” Col 3:23.

This is not different from obeying our earthly masters or our bosses as to the Lord, because whatever we do, we are to do it as unto the Lord. But what if our parents are unbelievers and they are telling us to do things that are ungodly – like help them cheat on their taxes? Your first allegiance is to the Lord. So, if our unbelieving parents are commanding something that contradicts God, then we are to obey God. However, even so, caveat. It is so easy for young people to simply brush them off because they are unbelievers or because we think they are not as good Christians.

ILL: I just became a Christian as a teenager and I was on fire for god and I wanted to have an all night prayer with my friends at church. So, I asked the pastor if he can leave the church door open for us to do this and he said no. He said it’s not a good idea for us to be there on our own without any adult-supervision. I could not understand it. I mean, we wanted to have an all night prayer meeting with my friends and He is saying no? What is wrong with him? Is he even a Christian? Fast forward 15 years and I became a pastor and a youth asked me the same thing and i found myself saying, “Not without any supervision!” Why? Because my experience tells me that it’s unwise to leave teeangers all by themselves all night.

 

CONC: Children, teens, obey your parents in the Lord for this is proper and right. Not only when you agree with them but when you disagree with them, but of course in the Lord. Honor them as you want to be honored one day. Let your honoring your parents be so different from your friends that they will know that you are obeying someone greater than the cultural norm.