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Our New Testament reading this morning is from Ephesians chapter 6 verses 1 through 3. This is God's word. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with the 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 instruction of the Lord. Here is the reading of God's holy word. Let's pray. Fathers we come to consider this commandment. We pray that you would open our hearts and minds and change us. In Jesus name. Amen. The command to honor your parents is repeated throughout the scripture. In the Old Testament, those who did not honor their parents, those who disobeyed their parents egregiously were often punished by death. Those very serious commands. Jesus includes it in a list of commands. In Luke 18 when the rich young ruler comes to him and says, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And he says, you know the commands. And then he lists some that we would all include is very important. And lastly, he says, honor your father and mother. In the passage that Reed read from Mark seven, we see that Jesus chides the Pharisees for setting aside this command to honor your parents. And Paul here in this passage in Ephesians repeats the command along with the promise that it may go well with you. Now Paul in this section of Ephesians is dealing with what would have been referred to as the Roman household codes. And we're going to back up a little and look at the some of them previous about husbands and wives in a culture that women didn't have much standing. The head of the house was given almost absolute authority to rule his house in the Roman culture. But Paul gives the wives he is speaking to a different motivation because the Christ, Christ is the head of the church and the church is the bride of Christ. Wives therefore are to imitate the church and their willing submission to their husbands. He spends three verses explaining the role of his wives in the Christian household. One is what they already knew and the two verses give a new motivation. But then the next seven verses he gives instructions they are likely have never heard. Husbands love your wives in a self-sacrificing way just as Christ did for the church. How did Christ love the church? Romans 5 tells us God's love is important to our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. He gave himself up for us. Verse 6 of Romans 5 while we were still weak at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person though perhaps for a good person. One might dare even to die but God chose his love for us and that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. He cleanses us by the washing of water with the word. It's very intimate. It's a picture of a husband gently bathing his wife to remove any dirt or stain from her body. That's what Christ does through his word and spirit for us as believers in order to present us as holy. Now if you were a husband in Ephesus at the time of the reading of this letter you would have been reeling at the thought of treating your wife with such honor. They would have been humbled at the realization that they were put in the role of Christ to nourish and cherish their wives. Then at the end of Ephesians 5 Paul says something incredible. He says the two shall become one flesh. But then he says I'm speaking with reference to Christ and the church. So he even redefines the physical relationship between a husband and wife sanctifying it and making it a sacred act which is an illustration of the holy passion between Christ and us, his bride, the church. As we look at these now elevated and sacred instructions there is a tendency to either take false pride in believing I can measure up or despair in the reality that will never measure up. After all no wife has ever perfectly emulated how the church is to respect her husband. No husband has ever loved his wife with the same love that Christ loved the church. No child has ever perfectly obeyed their parents. No father has ever perfectly instructed his children and not at some point provoked them or exasperated them. This might sound like bad news but we are sinners saved by grace. And that's different than the religion that we're born with. The religion that we're born with says I can measure up. I will earn my way. I will gain approval from my wife or my husband or my parents by performing in a way that will please them. Or if we are narcissistic we think mostly that way about how our wives or husbands or children or parents can please us and gain our approval. The religion that we're born with is not the gospel but that's what the devil wants us to believe. The gospel says we're saved by grace alone through Christ alone and you cannot earn it. The religion that I'm born with says I obey so that I can have approval. The gospel says you have God's approval in Christ therefore you're free to obey. My obedience is not approval seeking. If you think about it you can't really serve somebody if the goal of your service is to gain the approval of the one you're serving or of God. See because if that is your goal then it's self-serving not other serving. It's a desire to please the one who saved me out of gratitude. It's a realization that I have God as my father. He's adopted me into his family. I'm eternally secure in his love for me. Now let's get to Paul's quote of the commandment to honor our parents. I'm going to quote a large section of a paper by Kim Riddlebarger where he explains the nature of the father-family relationship at the time that Paul was writing to the Ephesians. He says it's vital to keep the cultural context in mind because Paul's placing the entire household under the example of Christ's humility and submission radically undercuts the first century Greco-Roman legal code which assigned absolute authority over wives and children to the father. If you think wives had it bad in the first century and they did, children had it worse. One document describes that the father had virtually full power over his son whether he thought it was proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, to keep him at work in the fields or even to put him to death. Right after his son was engaged in legal affairs, in other words after he was grown, he still had full authority over him. This means that a dad had absolute authority over his children as long as he lived. Although in some portions of the Roman Empire when the father reached 60 years of age, he often handed over the authority to his oldest married son. Unwanted daughters did not have the same prestige as sons and could be sold as slaves or killed. And the mother had no legal rights whatsoever. In other words, if the father wanted to dispose of a child, the mother had no right to stop him. Husbands could divorce their wives. All of the children from the various mothers could live in his home along with children of the household slaves and under Roman law you could only sell a slave once but you could sell a child multiple times. So when we see that and then we look at what Paul says, not only about husbands and wives in chapter 5 but about children and fathers and mothers in chapter 6, we see that he's flipped the entire household code on its head. He completely renounces it. Paul repeats the law of Moses which unlike the Greco-Roman world had a very high view of life and children. Children were in the covenant family. Honor your father and mother as the Lord your God commanded you that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land the Lord your God is giving you. Many Hebrew scholars believe this is the second most important command after love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. This command was given to Israel and the specific application was taking the land that God had given them and honoring him in it but it's still his application today. In general children do well to obey their parents. There are exceptions but things go better if you listen to your parents' instructions. This instruction is given to not yet adult children and adult is someone who's on their own taking care of themselves. It's not age related so you could be an adult at 20 years old if you live away from home, have your own job, provide for your own living and you can still be a child at 25 if you're living with mom and dad and they're paying for everything. So I know I would have been much better off when I was growing up if I had listened to my father and done everything that he told me to do. He wasn't right about everything and he often gave instruction without explanation and I would ask him why and he would have no answer. I would want to go do something. This was my dad's standard answer. You can laugh if you want but let's say some friends were on their bikes and I'm 11, 12 years old and they're going to go someplace and it's a couple miles away and I want to go with them and I'll say dad they want to go and I want to go with them and he'd say no. I'd say why not? You don't have any business over there. That's what he would say. You don't have any business over there. Well of course not. I'm 11, I'm 12. I don't have any business anywhere but that was his answer. Kind of rankled me. Basically I heard a sermon maybe a couple months ago about this from Tim Keller and he was talking about his own children and how they always demanded an explanation for the instruction. He wanted them to do something. Why? And they wanted a reason and he finally decided that the best reason he could give them was because I said so. Now that doesn't sound very good does it? I mean a lot of people say well that's not a good reason. Here's the wisdom in that though. Because I said so is the command that God gave Adam and Eve in the garden. Because I said so. He told them what would happen if they didn't obey. That they would die. But he offered no other explanation. And the reason because I said so is such a good reason is because the children need to obey the parents because they said so. Not because they agree. If they agree they're not really obeying they're just agreeing. But that doesn't mean that a father is not supposed to instruct his children because we are. Jude 3 it says beloved I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation. I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. We can go back to Deuteronomy chapter 6 verses 4 through 9. Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I am commanding you shall be on your heart. Now this is the instruction to the parents. You shall teach them diligently to your children. When? When you sit in your house. When you walk by the way. When you lie down. When you rise. That pretty much means all the time. If you're sitting in your house you instruct them you talk to them about the word of God and what it means and when you walk by the way. Now there's a lot more walking back then together. When you lie down that's as you're going to bed you explain to them about God and his word and in the morning the first thing when they rise up. In other words the importance of instructing the kids in the word of God was pervasive. Then it says you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they should be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the door post of your house and on your gates. So God's word was to be everywhere. Everywhere spoken of all the time and it's failure on our part to not do it. If we don't teach our children or to use an old word catechize our children then the culture will. Romans 12 says don't be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind that by testing you may discern what is the will of God that which is good and acceptable and perfect. Do not be conformed to the world. Conforming to the world is what happens automatically. I've talked about this in preaching in Romans chapter 12 but some of the conforming to the world is fairly innocent. We all dress kind of alike. When I was first in college it was very popular to wear what were called bell bottom pants. Do you remember bell bottom pants? Not just flared, bell bottom. So the pants were so big that they would cover your shoes. Not only that, they were wild colors, wild patterns and the shoes were platform shoes like this. Rob shaking his head he must have worn them. Platform shoes. Now when I was 19 years old I was 6'2 and a half so I was wearing platform shoes that was nearly 6'5. Of course everybody else is wearing them too so it was sort of evened out. You look at that and you think oh and the shirts had four or five buttons here and they were puffy sleeves. Big collars. Long hair. Now as clothes and hair and all that stuff that's fairly harmless. But you look back at it, I've got pictures, look back at it and it looks ridiculous. That's conforming. But the danger is that we conform in things that are much more sinister. Like sexual relationships. Unfortunately in our culture young adults believe all sorts of things about sex that 30 or 40 years ago would have been considered horrible. Now they just, that's all fine because that's what the culture has taught them. I'm not going to name them in particular but that's what the culture has taught them. Even though the scripture clearly indicates what is sin and what is wrong and what is against God, this is what the culture has taught them and if we conform it's an easy thing to do. I've compared conforming to being on a down escalator. You don't have to do anything, you just end up at the bottom. But being transformed by the renewal of your mind and that's what Moses was talking about in his instruction from God when he said, teach them diligently to your children. Talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Don't be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Now you might be here and you might be thinking, well honoring your parents is all well and good but what if your parents aren't worthy of honor? I mean it's possible that some of you have had abusive parents. What does it mean to obey? Well adults do not have to obey their parents. We are not any longer in the Greco-Roman world of legal codes. But we should all honor our parents wherever possible. Honor what is honorable. My father died about a year ago, he was almost 95 years old and I loved him. But he wasn't perfect. And there were things that he did and thought that I wish were different. But there's plenty that I can honor him for. And the same with my mother. Almost everybody has something that you can honor them for. Even if most of what they did was not honorable. See we don't need the approval of our parents so we can honor what is honorable. What we have is the perfect Father in heaven. And the perfect brother Jesus. And the Holy Spirit in us. We can seek to honor him by honoring our parents. Father in heaven thank you for your word. We pray that you would bless the teaching and our worship. In Jesus name, Amen. Please stand.