Self
Esteem? Honor Your Parents
“For he that will love life,
and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and his lips that they
speak no guile….” --I Peter
3:10
Life is a precious gift from God. Unbelief cheapens life and complains, “I
didn’t ask to be born.” Those who turn
from God turn from life and think that those who gave them life owe them an
immense debt. Sometimes parents act
like they have done their children a great disservice by bringing them into the
world, and spend their lives trying to make it up to their children.
The Bible has a different point of view. “Honor thy father and thy mother,” is the
first commandment with promise. Hatred
of parents, for whatever reason, is hatred against yourself and against God.
This writer’s father, who died in 1988, was an ex-convict and an immoral man. It was very difficult to see how the Fifth Commandment could possibly apply. I never hated my father, but it was difficult for me to think of honoring him, especially after he abandoned my mother and openly flaunted his anti-Christian lifestyle. As my Christian thinking matured, however, a new perspective grew. I came to see that God had a plan for me, a ministry and service which He had prepared for me according to that plan. My mother and father were central in God’s plan for me. My father had a great sense of humor. He had a keen wit and a penetrating way of looking at things, an ability to pierce hypocrisy of all kinds [except his own]. He loved music. He loved to discuss ideas, did not enjoy conversations about people or things. These were good things and became part of my own makeup.
I came to see that to be thankful to God for what
He had done for me meant that I could be thankful to God for what I had
inherited from my father. My own
self-esteem as a Christian was inextricably intertwined with my view of my
father. I could not dishonor him
without dishonoring myself, for I am always his son.
This did not mean that I must follow in my
father’s footsteps. It did mean that I
could dedicate and sanctify my father’s memory by using what I had received
from him in the service of Christ. This
would be honoring my father and serving Christ at the same time. It also brought peace to my soul. Instead of a heart fretful against God,
wishing things to be different from what they were, it meant acceptance of
God’s will for me and joyful thanksgiving for God’s wonderful grace.
A
revolutionary age despises mother and father, but ends in suicide. Hatred for past generations and heritage
results in death. The promise of the
Fifth Commandment is “that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.” Failure to thank
God for who you are assures that God will take away even the blessings that He
has given. If we have been faithless in
small things, we will never receive the greater things. Loving life means at least loving the human
instruments of that life, our fathers and our mothers.
Dishonoring the past brings many evils into the
present. Those who hate life turn
against society, against the old, and against the unborn. Death proliferates, for thankless men are
dead in more ways than can be imagined.
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The measure of a man’s character is what he would
do if he knew he would never be found out.
