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Changing the world for God can sound easier than loving the people close enough to frustrate us. But that’s precisely what God calls us to by calling us to honor the first “neighbors” we’ll ever know: our parents.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher uses the piano illustration to show that locating one key does not prepare someone for the symphony. How does this challenge the way many Christians approach discipleship—and what does it suggest about why God places the command to honor parents at the beginning of learning to love neighbors more broadly?
Jesus confronts the Pharisees for using religious dedication as an excuse not to care for aging parents. What modern equivalents of that loophole do we reach for today, and what does our instinct to find exceptions reveal about our hearts?
The sermon insists that honoring parents is commanded regardless of whether they have earned it, while also acknowledging that abuse is real and that obedience “in the Lord” has limits. How do you hold those two truths together in practice, and what does honoring someone look like when a relationship is genuinely broken?
The preacher argues that loving neighbors in the abstract is easy, but loving inconvenient family members is hard. Why do you think God places the command to honor parents before the commands about loving strangers, and what does that order teach us about how love is actually formed?
What would it look like for your congregation to genuinely live out this commandment—not only through pastoral visits but as a whole community—toward members who are aging, shut in, or no longer able to participate as they once did?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, speaking of serving the world, we’re going to think about a specific way we love our neighbors tonight, so let’s go ahead and prepare our hearts for God’s work.
We’re making a transition tonight. We’ve been looking at commandments specifically about how we relate to God. I would say tonight’s commandment, as we look at this last commandment for the first half of our series, is a pivot point. It’s more about, at least on the surface, how we serve people. But in that, it’s actually going to speak on how we honor God. That’s going to help us think about the second half of the Ten Commandments, which we’ll be looking at after the Christmas season.
What does it take to be ready to serve? What does it take to do what God has called us to do? We ask similar questions about all sorts of things in life. For example, what does it take to learn how to play music? Now, if you know me, I’m not a musician, but let’s say I walk over here and I could figure out where a key on this keyboard is located. I have no idea what—no, I’m even hitting here—but let’s say I did, and I figured out a couple of keys. Or, you know, if we got some of those labels and put them on it and it told me where the keys were, and so then I’d know where the keys were, and I started to play a couple of keys. Would I suddenly be ready? Would I suddenly be ready to join the St. Louis Symphony as a pianist? No.
Would I be ready to fill in on the keyboard when Melanie and Merlin, neither of them could be playing it—would I just fill in for us? No, I would not. It takes training, it takes practice.
And here’s a challenge, I think, when we think about how we live the Christian life: we need to learn how to love. A lot of times, we think of the big picture. Here is what I’m going to do. I’m going to transform the world. This is something that happens a lot, especially right when we become Christians: I am on fire for God, I’m going to tell everyone about God, I’m going to make an impact. Yes, 2000 years it seems like Christians can’t seem to get it right, but I finally have it right.
And it’s sort of like me walking up to this keyboard, and I find out where C is located on it, and wherever that is, I press it, and I think suddenly I’m ready for the symphony. It doesn’t work that way. And it doesn’t really work that way when we’re seeking to follow God either.
So if we want to honor Him, and we want to make that transition from, I’ve responded, I believe in Jesus, to, I now want to live like Jesus, I want to follow Jesus, that’s something that’s going to take time and practice. And this commandment’s going to call us to the starting point, call us to learn how to love, and in that, then to demonstrate what we’re trying to do even when we don’t get it perfect.
Let’s go ahead and pray and ask that God would help us to be people who can show His love.
Father, would You help us? Sometimes we know where a key or two is, and we think we have everything down, but that’s not the case. Would You help us to be people who learn how to love? Who act in love? And in that recognize that that is how we honor You in what we do. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Now, if you’re thinking through the commandments, you’re thinking, okay, he’s talking about love of neighbor, and I know that Jesus answered that the two greatest commandments are loving God and loving neighbor, but I thought it was a little more specific than that in the Ten Commandments. And you were right.
Exodus 20 verse 12 says: “Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
Say, well, you’ve been saying neighbors. My parents aren’t neighbors. Well, maybe they are. Maybe someone—you have a home next to your parents—but otherwise, you say, well, they’re not my neighbors. I live with them. I don’t live with them, but neighbors.
When we get back to that question, who is my neighbor? And if we understand the biblical principle, a neighbor is anyone we relate to. Now, think about that. We’re called to love everyone that we encounter in our lives. It starts to make sense that God would start it with the people we first generally relate to: our parents.
And the fact that God has something in mind other than merely enforcing an authoritative structure in society—which I think sometimes people think, oh, God is for some kind of hierarchy in society—that’s what’s going on here. Is the way that it’s worded.
Because it’s not the only ancient text that calls for honor of a parent. But I use that phrase advisedly because, for example, in the Code of Hammurabi, it calls for children to honor their fathers; God calls for children to honor their fathers and their mothers. And at least on one occasion throughout the Old Testament law, He starts—He leads off with mother rather than father.
God wants us, as we are growing up, to start to think about what it means to be a human being and how we relate to people, to immediately be thinking about the two people that were, if we’re blessed with a mother and father in our lives. Realize we can’t always assume that works out, that something happens, but generally speaking, the people that are going to be closest to us initially, God wants us to start there.
Now, for those of you that have grown up, I do want to say, don’t tune out and say, oh, good, I don’t have to listen to this. This is like an extended children’s sermon today. Well, only in the sense that we’re all children of God. This is for all of us. But this is the starting point.
The starting point is that God wants us to understand that relationship we have with our parents—as children, as age-wise children—and then build on that. It’s a very broad target. It’s the beginning. It’s the first ripple and a broad target of whom it is that we’re supposed to love. But who it is that’s supposed to do the loving to the world is also broad. But the starting point is children.
Now, why is it important that honor and respect happen as we’re growing up? Why is that important? Well, it’s a point for us to start practicing what it means to be focused on others instead of ourselves. Because why is it that we struggle to honor? Well, it’s because maybe our parents don’t want us to do something that we want to do. Maybe they don’t want us to do it when we want to do it. Maybe we like the way we’re thinking about something and we don’t want to be corrected.
But scripture assumes the blessing of growing up under godly parents. If we are growing up under parents who love God and are teaching the ways of God, we may at times think that we have things down, but we still aren’t there yet. The assumption is the starting point of how we grow in the life of following the Lord: we first start to learn from our parents. And those parents are tasked with conveying the truth of God to us.
It’s a mutual strength there because as we’re practicing a particular discipline of the Christian life—loving other people by honoring—we’re also learning all kinds of other things because the honoring process opens us up to hear lessons from God’s word and to grow.
And the funny thing is, a lot of times in the moment when we’re struggling to do the honoring, we don’t think we need to grow, and that’s not something you necessarily grow out of. There are a lot of times I don’t think I need to learn something, and yet God smacks me on the head and says, yes, you do.
The point is starting to be humble enough to be willing to receive, hopefully at an early age, that we learn this lesson; that we start to be humble enough to receive the fact that I need to learn things. I need to love other people, I need to learn things from other people. That’s a starting point.
Another starting point on this, though: when we’re commanded to love, it’s not about earning it. Because if you’re frustrated with your parents, for those of you that are growing up, you might think back and remember when, and you think, oh, easy enough—until my microphone pulled out—oh, you know, sometimes I’m just, it was just so frustrating.
And maybe over time we think back and think, okay, I shouldn’t have been frustrated. Sometimes we’re still frustrated years later, we think about that and we think, oh, I’m so frustrated. But that’s the opportunity to practice loving and to start loving people, not because they’ve somehow earned it and they deserve it, but because simply that’s what we’re to do.
Notice what God says in Leviticus 19:3, “Everyone of you shall revere his mother and his father, and you shall keep my Sabbath, I am the Lord your God.”
He doesn’t offer a reason. We’re going to explore some reasons that this pours out into how God wants us to be the people of God tonight, but He doesn’t need to give a reason why we should do it. It’s because He is the Lord and He said we should do it.
If that’s the case, then we shouldn’t say, well, you know, I’d like to honor my parents, but I’m frustrated right now, I don’t think they’ve understood my frustration enough, I don’t think they really get it, they’re too out of the loop, they’re this, or they’re that, and find some reason not to.
We love to find loopholes. We talked about that last week with the Sabbath. We talked about it with idolatry. We’ll keep talking about it as we go into the other commandments. We love to find loopholes. This is the reason I’m off the hook here.
But the basic principle is that God has commanded it. He wants us to do it. Why does He want us to do it? Because He wants us to be people who love. And if we can’t start to get that right right at the core, if we can’t love our very parents, then how are we expecting to be a people known to love the world?
So if we want to learn how to love our neighbors, we start by honoring our parents. And this doesn’t stop when we grow up. There are several things that come out of this passage for those of you who are no longer age-wise children. Because we are all children of God, and we all still have things to learn.
Paul speaks of this in Ephesians 6:1: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord.”
It’s interesting there. Paul calls the commandment. He knows everyone knows that, but he goes on then and says to you fathers out there, don’t let this go to your head in such a way that you think that you don’t have a responsibility. It’s not about giving away totalitarian authority. It’s not about saying there are dictators in the world and they’re called parents.
No. Every time God gives some sort of authority in this world, what does He do? He calls us to do it in a way that’s godly and pleasing to Him. That’s exactly what we see here.
Note in verse one, He says, do this in the Lord. Well, if we’re called to follow someone in the Lord, that means one, if they ask us to do something that’s clearly against what the Lord calls us to do, if it violates scripture, well, that’s not in the Lord. And He calls those who are parents not to create those situations.
Yes, God wants children to honor their parents. That means parents, you need to act in such a way that doesn’t needlessly provoke your children.
Now let’s just be brutally open with each other for a moment. If we’re alive, we’ve all been children. And there have been times we haven’t honored our parents. And if you’ve been a parent, if you are a parent, there have been times you have provoked your children. We’re not perfect. We’re sinners. But what are we called to do? That’s what we’re looking at here.
I say that, I think we need to note that because a lot of times this passage we run into an immediate, important note, but a note that then causes us to find reasons to ignore it. And that point is, well, what happens if a parent is abusive?
And that, I wish I didn’t have to say that, but I do need to say that. Maybe you tune in tonight online and the reason you decide to watch services is because you’ve gone through absolutely horrible things in your life and you’re at the end of your rope and now you’re hearing this and you’re thinking, this is the last thing I needed to hear.
Maybe you’re here tonight and you’ve experienced that. How do I honor a parent that isn’t godly?
Well, we’re called to honor in the Lord. So in those places where that parent has acted in ungodly fashion, God does not call us to obey the commands of human beings in ways that will violate what He calls us to. And we need to understand clearly this is not what God wants.
He wants a relationship where the reason that people can honor their parents is because the parents are pouring into the children that this is a good thing, that this is a loving thing.
And we need to understand very, very clearly and say this very, very clearly that when that isn’t the case, this is a deep, really deeply evil and wicked thing.
And anyone who tries to cover that up and say, well, okay, you have an abusive parent, but just suffer under it because God called you to honor your parents, we need to say that that is wickedness.
It’s not talking about that. There are certainly times where parents act in deeply ungodly fashion, and something is terribly broken. We live in a broken world, and we see that over and over again as we look at God’s law. There are going to be times that it’s just not working outright, and there is no clear, easy path forward to do what should be done in a world where things are functioning. But I say that and I want to caution us because, on the other hand, those cases happen.
And if you’re in that situation, I’m broken-hearted for you. And if you haven’t connected with us yet, I hope you’ll reach out, and we’d love to walk through that with you. And we will weep with you, and we will call that evil as it is.
But for those of us who just are looking for a reason not to follow a commandment, and we just say, well, we can’t really ask this because there are evil parents out there. There are wicked parents out there. Therefore, we can’t require anyone to honor their parents. And if a parent ever says anything unkind, if a parent ever acts in an ungodly fashion, well then it’s over.
We need to understand that’s a problem speaking to our hearts, not the hearts of our parents. There’s a distinction there. And so we need to acknowledge that really horrible, awful, and uncomfortable situation. Well, also saying, let’s not jump there in our own situations if we’re not there. There’s a balance here, and I think we can do both of those.
And for the rest of what I’m going to say, I want us to be thinking about, in the ordinary course of things, where we’re not in that situation.
If you are in that situation, don’t feel like I’m heaping guilt upon you. There are places where we need to explore deeply how this works out in a particular life situation. But in the ordinary course of life, that’s what we’re talking about.
Sort of like you go to a restaurant. I remember years ago, I think it was one of the national chains that has a local steakhouse here, and I remember asking about something on the menu and then asking about something else, and the waitress couldn’t answer the questions, at least with very much commitment. And finally came out, “This is a steakhouse,” said, “Yeah, well, you know, I really like the size. I’m a vegetarian. I don’t like eating steaks. I really, I’m told, this is pretty good.”
And it was sort of, well, you know, I didn’t wish her ill, I certainly wasn’t going to say anything about it, but it did strike me as kind of odd. How is it that you’re at a steakhouse and you’re supposed to be the person that’s going to help me navigate this menu and you don’t eat steak?
I mean, well, but it’s very hard to help lead someone down the path of that menu if you’re not part of the experience of it. And that’s, I think, where God is challenging us as whether we’re kids or we’re adults, how can we be calling people to the menu of God’s love and living as a people who love this world if we aren’t willing to start at the core?
I wasn’t necessarily expecting that waitress to know some, if they had some kind of exotic seafood, know every single detail in the menu. I was asking about the house special, right? And that should be the sort of thing yes, everyone who’s serving a table should probably have, as part of the training, been given some of that and hopefully can appreciate it. Because that’s the sort of thing that you’re generally going to guide people to.
We don’t have to get love right completely all the time, but here’s something that I can say pretty profoundly, pretty confidently: If people are watching us and they don’t see us caring well for our families, do you think they’re going to listen very much when we talk about how much we care about them?
Here’s a transition, I believe that we’re being, as we move to the third category here, but as we think about the second group, which is how parents of children love well in response, how do they make it so that the children are encouraged in honor? Here’s something I think that sometimes gets overlooked. You want your kids to respect you; respect your parents.
That brings us to the third category. Adults are still called to honor their parents. And this is something that’s really kind of funny about this commandment, which is why I’m walking through it this way. I normally wouldn’t break it down by age group, but here is the funny thing on this commandment that I don’t hear anyone doing on any of the other commandments.
We put a little footnote on it and it says, as long as you are under 13, you know, you haven’t, you aren’t ready to become a member of the congregation yet, right? Okay, we’ll put that down or until you are 18. Once you can serve in the draft. Okay, now you know, up until that point or something. I mean, we come up with these arbitrary numbers and we say this commandment applies like that, and then after that well, you kind of escaped it. And that’s, I don’t think that really is understanding what this commandment’s talking about.
If we look again at Matthew 15:1-7, we looked at this during our time of confession.
“Then the Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.”
Listen to where Jesus decides to challenge them. He doesn’t read that footnote we like to put in here. He says, he answered them, “And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God commanded, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. But you say, if anyone tells his father or his mother, what you would have gained from me is given to God, he need not honor his father. So for the sake of your tradition, you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites!
Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said…” and then we go on to that verse that I accidentally cut out in the slide.
I think it’s interesting and telling that Jesus picks this commandment because He could pick any commandment. We do this with every commandment. That’s why I wanted us to meditate on that during the confession time. Because we do this with every commandment. We find some tradition that gives us reason we don’t need to follow the Sabbath. We find some tradition that gives us a reason we don’t need to obey the forbidding of making images of God. We find a tradition that gives us a reason why we can covet what other people have. Skip a little ahead because it isn’t really coveting, or it’s what everyone does in this situation, or whatever. We come up with some reason, some way out.
And so Jesus could have picked any of the commandments, not just the Ten Commandments, could have picked any commandment. Jesus picks this one. Why? Because it’s really tempting to set it aside. It’s really tempting to add that footnote. And some of that can be because we misunderstand the commandment and think well, honoring parents means doing whatever they say anytime during our lives, and that’s not what it’s saying.
You know, the only one that is ever said about is God. God never tells us that we absolutely unquestioningly obey anyone else ever. Because we’re sinful, fallen human beings, none of us are infallible. What we’re being called to do is to show a great and abiding love, great and abiding care. It overlaps actually with what we’re talking about on Monday nights, which is how we honor those in our leadership.
And so I love how this meshed. It wasn’t intentional other than as much as God has made this overlap, I love when He does that. But we’ve been talking about, well, how do we respond to the results of the election? And if you listen on Monday night, you heard I wrote down exactly what I was going to say about the main points of it before the results became clear, because I wanted to be very, very, very clear on that.
It didn’t matter who won in our election. God’s call is to honor our leaders. And so whether you love the result, whether you hate the result, whether you’re ambivalent towards the result, God calls us to honor our leaders. He doesn’t call us to do anything they say anytime no matter how awful and wicked it is. We should stand for moral righteousness. And if a leader calls us to do something that’s unpleasing, displeasing to God and it violates His law, then no, we shouldn’t do it. And scripture is very clear on that.
But our default mode, our starting point should be: we are our leaders, we pray for them, we give them respect. We don’t call them names and take the cheap shots that the rest of the world does. And it goes right there with what we do with the first authorities we ever encounter in life, our parents.
And this commandment doesn’t say that it goes away at some point in life. It may change how exactly it looks and rightly so, but it doesn’t go away. And that’s a really, really important thing.
And like it is with politicians—I don’t mean parents to compare you to politicians, I apologize unless you’re both a parent and a politician—but that is to say, God ordains authority in our lives. He’s placed our governmental leaders, He’s also placed our parents in our lives. And we show honor.
And even in those places where we need to stand—and it doesn’t necessarily feel like, well, I can’t do what my parents think right now, it would actually be sinful for me to—even in those cases we disagree and we take stands with honor and integrity.
If you think about if a governmental leader does something that’s deeply ungodly, there are different choices we can make. Are we going to simply refuse to do it because we can’t, but still be respectful, or are we going to respond by being crass or actually committing crimes that are unrelated or whatever to show our protest?
Well, standing and refusing to do what is wrong, yes, God is behind us on that. But on the other hand, choosing to do what is wrong ourselves in response, God is not behind that.
And so what we’re really talking about here—and notice, I said this is about loving our neighbors, notice how it’s rippling out—these same principles apply whether we’re talking about people we know or don’t know. The difference is, and I think this is where God is confronting us with this: We can talk a good game, but when we actually have to deal with people that are closest to us, are we going to live that good game or not?
You know, it’s in some sense, as much as we struggle to do this, and sometimes it’s really easy for me to say honor the president, whoever it is, because you know what? I’ve never met a president, and I don’t think I probably ever will meet the president. I’ll never have to put up with if the president is just as annoying as can be if you’re sitting down with him or her. I don’t have to deal with that because I’m not around the president.
But if you’re talking about your family, in ordinary life you are going to have to deal with your family. And so God wants us to deal with the places where we actually have to live it, so that we don’t just talk a good game—we actually live it.
And the temptation is to look for a way out. That’s what the Pharisees did. They wanted everyone to think they were righteous. They wanted everyone to say, look at these mighty men of God who know all the laws and they obey them. But there was this uncomfortable little thing: their parents would get older and they’d need help. Their parents would get older, they couldn’t work any longer, and the Pharisees, well, they’re pulling in a nice income at the synagogue and they’re doing okay. They’re doing more than okay. People are respecting them in the community. They get places of honor. They have access to any resource they need.
And yet their parents are starting to become needier because they can no longer provide for themselves. And the Pharisees have a difficult situation to confront if they contemplate the intricacies of who is my neighbor, are they actually going to live it with her parents or not?
Because as long as the neighbor is an abstract hypothesis, it’s really easy to love your neighbor. When you actually have to say, okay, I can’t afford this thing I want because my parent needs help, and I either have to give up some work so I can do that help or I need to actually take the money I have and help my parent—that’s a whole lot harder.
And so the Pharisees came up with a really, really clever way to get out of that. They said, “Well, we’re workers for God. And so whatever we buy, whether it’s really nice clothes because we have to look respectable in the community or really nice food because we have to be well nourished or a nice place to live because we have to look like the part of being leaders in the community—whatever it might be—we’ll just say all of our money is set apart for God because our lives are basically set apart for God.
And if I’ve set everything off, way for God, then when dear old dad shows up and says, ‘I’m going to be kicked out of my house. I’m going to be a homeless beggar. Can you help me?’ Pops, I’d love to help you. I’ve set everything off. Way for God. I can’t do that. Don’t you see? If I were just some bum working some normal secular job, yeah, I could help you, but I’m a man of God. I have priorities here, and yeah, you know, I know you’re really high, but God’s higher, so sorry.”
And then wander down the store to the local department store in order for a new suit.
Jesus says, “You see the insanity of what you’re doing? I told you what I wanted you to do. I told you I wanted you to love and honor your parents. I wanted you to respect them, I wanted you to take care of them. And what are you doing? You’re finding a way to say you’re honoring me by doing the exact opposite. And you need to understand that when I ask you to do something, the way that you honor me is by doing what I ask you to do.”
That means business. If we were to look through the Old Testament further, for example, in Ezekiel 22 (maybe look at it later), verses 7 to 15: What do you see? Ezekiel actually links the coming exile from the land to the fact that the people have not been taking care of their parents. And if you’re looking for—is there that footnote that gives you a way out on this because you’ve reached a certain age you’re no longer under the honor of your parents requirement—note the fact that Ezekiel wouldn’t be addressing the children. He’s not saying the people are going to be exiled from the land because the kids, they’re just out of control. You know, they get suspended from school all the time and they’re not getting in the good grades. Ezekiel isn’t talking about that.
Ezekiel is talking about the adult children who aren’t taking care of their parents who need help. And what does he say? You know that covenant promise that we have from the Lord and his people about this land, which represented God’s love in that time? I want you to understand, he says, that this is so important to me. You can do all the religious ceremonies, you can have the beautiful temple, you can act all important, but if you won’t do this, and here’s what I’m going to do: I am going to exile you from the land.
It’s the inverse of what we see in the commandment itself, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord gives you. Now God says your days are going to be short in that land. I’m going to take it away from you because you’re not willing to honor.
We looked earlier at Leviticus chapter 19 verse 3: And God says, “I am the Lord, so you should do this!” And it’s really notable He adds the Sabbath keeping commandment to the honoring or respect. The word there is respect; could be fear, like we talk about fear of the Lord. So that kind of respect—in other words, giving appropriate deference to those that God has placed around us, both Himself, of course, but also our parents.
But the notable thing there is that God isn’t scolding the children of the people or isn’t commanding… I mean, yes, He wants children to honor the Sabbath, but why does He need to tell people to take a rest on the Sabbath and quit their worldly occupations? He’s not speaking to kids there. He’s speaking to adults.
Like what Alan Cole says in reflecting on this passage: “This is not a popular doctrine in our modern world, where youth is worshiped, and old age is dreaded or despised. The result is the folly by which men or women strive to remain eternally useful, only to find it an impossible task.”
I think he’s right on the mark there. You think about our obsession in this culture with youthfulness. I have to somehow stay young. I have to reach some fountain of youth. And part of that, I think, is because we’ve just simply lost the eternal perspective, but part of it also is because somehow we’ve lost the sense that ancient cultures had, that those who are older than us actually have wisdom to share with us.
You look at Scripture. What does it say? There’s a glory and an honor in having a head of gray hair. Why? Because you’ve lived through life. You’ve learned things and now you have things to pour into younger generations and enable them to go and to follow the Lord faithfully. That’s the picture.
That’s the picture that we were talking about earlier, that parents are challenged: live a God-honoring life so that your children grow up learning how to honor God.
Even outside of the biblical world, we see all over the world that it was often one of the worst things in the world to dishonor those who are older than us. And yet somehow, we’ve gotten to this point where we worship youth so much, it’s instead seen that we’re slowly fading into irrelevancy. And at some point, people are simply inconvenient and meant to be disposed of.
And I think how we as Christians deal with that speaks a great deal to where our hearts are. Because, again, it’s really easy to love our neighbors in the abstract. It’s also really easy to love lovable neighbors. Neighbors who are easy neighbors, who never ask anything. It’s really easy to love neighbors who get along with us and make us feel important.
Where the Pharisees ran into that trouble—and I don’t think they’re unique in this in any way—is when the neighbor actually needs us to pour into him or her, when the neighbor isn’t able to do everything he or she once did.
Then what are we going to do?
Sobering experience: if you haven’t been in a nursing home in a while, you really should walk into one. Sit down for a moment or stand in the corner for a moment and watch how many families come and see their loved ones, and how those people are treated in there.
And you notice two really sobering things. First, there are incredibly few visitors, because we see the more storage facilities, I think, than anything else. And the people are frequently treated with the complete lack of any kind of dignity.
I think that’s incredibly telling. Instead of honoring those who are elders, we give them the greatest dishonor.
Now, I want to be realistic. If you walked through someone, say with dementia, if you walked through someone with horrible terminal illness, there’s a point where it’s hard to provide dignity. And there’s a reason why institutions like nursing homes exist, where it’s sometimes physically too hard, too demanding for us to actually care for someone.
So I want to be realistic, and I don’t want to lay undue guilt, but I want to challenge us. I think there’s something bigger than that going on. There are a lot of times people are simply there because they’ve been deemed inconvenient and not because of any other reason. And there are a lot of times where they’re discarded completely when there’s still a lot of that person there.
When God calls us to honor our parents, or let’s expand it just a little bit to those who are elders to us in general—God isn’t saying only love them when they’re convenient. He’s not saying destroy yourself. He’s not saying give up every other commitment you have, but what He is saying is love them. And the fact that they no longer are exhibiting youthfulness, they’re no longer able to do everything, isn’t an excuse.
If you’re alive, you fall under the clause on your parents for as long as they’re alive. And that becomes the first ripple in a broader set of ripples that we are to be as the people of God.
As we’re in the church, there are going to be people who are older than us. And thankfully here at Little Hills so far, we’ve been blessed with incredibly good health amongst our congregation. We haven’t had to deal with a whole lot of health issues that would prevent people from participating fully in the body.
But it will come. If God blesses us, and I believe He will, to be a church here for a long time, unfortunately, it’s going to come. It’s part of the curse of this fallen world.
The question is, what are we going to be as a church? Are we going to remember this commandment? And I think that’s something that we should be facing now and not only when it happens.
When we’re talking about broadening it to the idea that we as a church, as individuals, we’re called to honor our parents; as a church, we’re called to honor the parents, as it were, in the church. And as we think about that, are we, as the people of God, ready for that?
Are we ready to visit shut-ins? Are we ready to do everything we can to provide them with continued dignity as a part of this church? Because that’s a really, really important way which we can testify whether or not we really want to live this.
It’s easy when we get together here on Sunday night and we’re all in relatively good health and we sing together, we study God’s word together, we have some snacks together, we study some more in Sunday school, it’s all really pretty good.
But what are we going to do when it’s not that way? A lot of times it seems like things like pastoral care to the shut-ins gets passed off in a larger church to some pastor that’s almost treated somehow lesser, somehow less important. It shouldn’t be the way it is.
And if you’re like me, you’re feeling a little uncomfortable right now because I can say all this, but I also realize exactly what I’m saying and how hard it is. And I have a confession to make: I hate going into nursing homes. I’ve had to do it as a pastor. I had to do it as a family member. I hate it. I don’t like making hospital visits, and it’s not because I don’t care. It’s because I just don’t like going in there.
I will. If you end up in the hospital, I’ll visit you. I’ll do it. It’s not something I enjoy doing. And so as I’m talking about this, it’s convicting because I know that I don’t want to do these things. And I think probably most of us don’t. Most of us don’t want to seek that. And yet God is challenging us here: Don’t just talk a good game. Live it.
And so if you’re a child and you have your parents, honor them. But if you’re an adult and you have your parents, honor them. And if your parents sadly are no longer in this world but you have other godly, older people around you, honor them and serve them. We’re called to serve. And if we want people to look at us as a people that say, yes, we’re going to serve the world, then we better start serving the family of God. And live it.
And I said this was a pivot point. Notice what God says in Deuteronomy 6:5—or verse 6: “And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they will be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
That’s how God speaks of passing down this law. And you notice there that God ties in loving Him with this functioning of the family of God that we’ve been talking about tonight. Because parents, your job is to make sure that your kids understand who it is that God is. Grandparents, you continue to have that opportunity to pass that along.
And we have an opportunity when we continue to then respond by living that truth from God’s word as we serve parents that are aging. And as we do that, we’re not just loving our neighbor, we’re honoring God. And that’s why I believe this is stuck right here in the middle. If we want to go into all the other commandments and how we’re going to love our neighbors, start with the ones that we need to deal with first.
And if we’re saying, but I just want to focus, okay, I can’t love neighbor and God, I’m not there yet, I just want to love God. Well, understand that this isn’t about just some other thing. This is about loving God. Because what happens when it’s functioning well? We pass along the truth of God. People see it outside of this place and generations continue to rise up who know the Lord.
When we don’t do this, when we don’t live this, it dies with us. So we want to love God, we do this.
Three ways, I believe this plays out and what I just referenced: First, it’s straightforward. God wants us to listen to Him. If you want to say, well, why should I do this? Why is this important? Just start with this: God wants us to listen to Him. And if we want to honor God, if we want to love God, listen to Him.
Then, what I just alluded to is a very practical commandment too. If we want people to see a church that functions well, that say, 200 years from now, has people still testifying faithfully to the word of the Lord, well, what we need to do is live this. Because if we’re not living this, this church, and any other church that doesn’t live it, it’s going to go away. The fact that the church in general is still here is a testament to God’s Holy Spirit and how God’s Holy Spirit has directed people throughout the ages to live this.
Because yes, we can go and we can evangelize and evangelize and evangelize it, and we should. We want new people to come into the family of God, but if we’re doing all that but we’re forgetting the fact that we need to love in the family, we’re going to lose the battle.
And finally, the third thing that I think comes out: This is that it’s a very evangelical act in itself. If we want to testify and we want to evangelize, people don’t want to hear from hypocrites. And we are, we’re going to be hypocrites, but we need to pass along the word of God and show that we actually care about living that with the people that we’re going to be observed around.
And if people see that we disregard our parents, we don’t care what happens to them, we’re busy being fulfilled, but we don’t care if they’re in nursing homes being mistreated because they’re too inconvenient, why are people going to listen to us when we say that God loves them and that we’re going to love them?
People need to see that the church actually lives this out, and when they do, it’s powerful.
It’s different than I talked earlier about that waitress and there are lots of stories probably all of us could talk about at times when we’ve had someone wait on us. And another thing that strikes me—I’m not trying to be up in the service industry at all. There are a lot of wonderful people making it standout. But you know, if you go someplace and someone’s helping you, whether it’s a restaurant or someplace else that involves a potential tip, and the person can be kind of rude and uncaring, and maybe just totally disregarding what you want, until it gets close to the time when you’re going to determine what the tip’s going to be. And suddenly that person, it’d always get me at a restaurant.
I’d be there and if you put a glass of iced tea for me, I’m just going to drink it. It’s going to go. It’s not going to stay. I love iced tea. And if it’s there and it’s freshly brewed, it’s just going to be consumed.
And so I would notice I’d be sitting there waiting for my food, my drink would go run dry. It’s just empty, just ice. And then the food would come, and I’d say, could I have another tea? And maybe the waitress forgets or the waiter forgets, and halfway through the meal, finally, and it’s really salty. I’m the dessert over here. Finally get another drink. Get three-quarters of the way through the meal. I could really use a little topping off again. Nothing, right?
And then finally, you wait and you wait and you wait and then the check comes out. “Oh, would you like another drink? And how about I give you a to-go cup as well?”
And you think, I’ve just been dying of thirst this entire meal. I was one sip, I was one more bite of this salty food away from just withering away. I was just going to be skin and bones on this bench here in this restaurant. And now you’re offering me all these drinks. Why are you doing that?
Well, because you know that I’m about to sign that receipt. I’m going to either put down a really nice tip or I’m not, and you want me to be thinking about that.
And sometimes that’s how we appear as Christians. It looks like we’re waiting for people to sign the receipt, and they see all that stuff that we’re doing when we’re not trying to get the receipt signed, and it doesn’t look very loving. It doesn’t look very caring. We don’t want to be put out ourselves because it’s uncomfortable. And yet we come to people and say, hey, be a part of the family of God. We’ll take care of you. We’ll love you. We serve together. And suddenly, we’re just the most caring. But it’s only because we want the person to sign the check.
God wants us to honor our parents to begin loving, and then watch that expand to set aside self-interest from the time where children until the time that we die so people would see us act differently.
And as we do, the love of God to our neighbor speaks of our love of Him. And as people watch us with our families and other close friends and relatives, they continue to see an expanding circle of love that could only testify to the incredible love that God has for us and our desire to serve Him.
And may that be what we do this day and every day.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we do pray that You would help us to be a people of service and sacrifice, that we would be a people who seek to love those that You place in our lives from the earliest days, from our parents to the rest of our families and friends and neighbors, and on and on, that we would not be seeking the exceptions and the loopholes, but rather the places where we can serve boldly.
And Lord, we do pray for those who run into those exceptions, those places where horrible things like abuse crop up, that we would not forget that, that we would be merciful and loving and compassionate as a people, as the people of God.
But Lord, as we acknowledge those things, that we wouldn’t use them to go further than they need to, and let ourselves off the hook when we shouldn’t be.
But rather that we’d be people who desire to be a people of service and of love that people might see Your love in us.
We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Thank you, Rob.
There is some gluten-free communion right in the center. The others, regardless of the label, are all gluten-based communion.
As we think about this, where do we start? I say, well, I haven’t been very good at loving my parents. In fact, I just slammed down the phone when I talked to my mother today. She was just driving me nuts, and I just hung up and now I’m here, and I thought you were talking about the love of God, but you just made me feel awful. Where do I stand in all this?
Well, all of us stand in the same place on our own. We’re sinners, and we fall short. And if you haven’t yet trusted in Jesus, we ask you to let this pass you by, not because you haven’t always perfectly honored your parents, not because you haven’t perfectly loved your neighbor, because all of us are unworthy because of that and a million other things.
The reason we ask you to let it pass you by is because you need to know Jesus, because the only reason we can ever become worthy of coming before Him is because He loves us and we’ve accepted that love and He’s our Lord and our Savior who forgives us of our sins.
Because we struggle with these things. And I don’t want to convey in the least that we have this together as a church or as the church around the world. We struggle with these commandments and living them. But we struggle as forgiven sinners.
And so if you aren’t yet one, make tonight the night that you choose to follow Jesus. I know that He will forgive you for those places you’ve failed to honor your parents, for those places you’ve failed to rest as you should, for those places where you’ve worshiped things that aren’t God. He will offer forgiveness for all those and all the rest of the commandments we’re going to get to in the second half of the series. He offers forgiveness for every sin that we commit.
And then come back next week having confessed to Jesus your sin and asked Him to be your Lord and Savior, and take part in this not because now you have everything together, but because you belong to the one who has everything together.
And so it was on the night He was betrayed. Jesus took the bread, He broke it, and He gave it to them saying, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
Likewise, after supper, He took the cup and He said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for you for the remission of sins. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance.”
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