LAW HOMILY: The Redemption of Honor

Worship in All of Life

Every week we look at the law of God because we wanna understand what God has to say to his people. We wanna know what it means to obey him, to love him, to worship him. One of the great indicators of our worship is our obedience.

We can say many things with our mouth, but what do our feet do? Where do our hands go? Where our body is inclined to? That says much about worship. You remember Paul is the one who said, whether we eat or whether we drink, do it all to the glory of God, that's worship.

He doesn't just say whether you sing hymns in church and whether you listen to preaching, do that to the glory of God. He says, whether you eat or whether you drink, which means all areas of life are worship.

The Fifth Commandment Establishes a Culture of Honor

So we wanna know what that means to obey him so that we may worship him rightly. Today we're on the fifth commandment, which is Exodus 20, verse 12. I'll read it and then we will go through some reflections upon it.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you. Israel knew what authority could become when it was left unchecked, when it was unrestrained, when it was answerable to no one.

They had just lived under Pharaoh's oppressive thumb for generations, hundreds of years even. Remember this, the Pharaoh who ordered their sons to be thrown into the Nile River as babies. He's the ones who ordered that they would be beaten under taskmasters and drove mercilessly to build them monuments and cities to honor his pity glory.

And yet in God's grace and mercy and kindness, the Lord brought Israel out of Egyptian slavery and he began to establish a brand new civilization, not on slavery, not on tyranny, but on honor. And he began to establish that new civilization in the restoration of what honor is.

You see, in the first four commandments, God is teaching his people how to honor him. That's what the first four commandments are about, how do we honor God? And then in the second table of the law, which is commandments five through 10, he's teaching them how to honor and care for one another.

The first table is how we worship God, the second table is how we care for man. And he begins this second table with the first and the most basic human relationship of them all, which is father, mother, son, daughter.

God was founding a brand new and a free society, a culture of honor that reaches down into the most basic human relationship, the family, because he didn't free his people from Pharaoh so that everybody could live without authority or so that they could exchange their taskmasters for libertarian lawlessness.

He freed them from sinful authority that crushes them and brought them under a good authority structure, which blesses them. He ordered human relationships into places of honor and responsibility, not to suggest that some people are worth more than others, but to teach all of us that authority is a gift that must be exercised under God.

So parents, your authority is given to you by God. You are not domestic pharaohs and angry taskmasters. You are called to bring life to your home through righteous authority and to show children something of the care of God with which he's given you.

Not because your children are perfect, neither are you when it comes to your standing with God, but because God established you as the officers of your home to showcase his love to them. That honor reflects the honor and submission that we owe to God.

And though no human parent is God's equal, every human parent is answerable to him to do what he's told them to do. So what is honor? Well, honor is more than affection or docility in the midst of power.

Honor means giving a person what is owed to them by reason of the office God has given them. Luther recognized that honor includes respect and deference. The reformed catechisms also insist that parents owe their children instruction and protection and care.

We often read honor your father and mother and we think that's for the children, but we forget that all of reformed confessions have said, no, no, no, there's a duty for the parents as well to create a culture of honor for their children.

The command actually binds both generation, children and parents to honor. So children, obey your parents in the Lord, not because they're perfect, but because your perfect heavenly father has placed them over you.

And he knows what is good for you and he knows better for you than what you even know for yourself. Fathers, or sorry, their failure, the parents' failures, do not justify contempt or malice, whether you are a young child or an adult who has parents.

Their failure, your parents' failures, do not justify our mockery, our despising of their counsel, our judgmentalism or our thinking that we are now the highest authority. And yet honor also does not require us to obey sinful commands from our parents or to pretend that real wounds haven't occurred.

God forbids also false witness, you will remember, so we can't lie about our parents' virtue, but neither should we also embellish their badness. Honoring is not lying and lying is not honoring. And parents, none of us in this room have been flawless in this calling.

We've lost our patience, we failed to listen, we've spoken in anger, we've said words that still ring in our children's ears to this very day. We've had ugly moments that they may remember for the rest of their lives.

And our children, because of us, will have things to work through. They will have to wrestle with what we did, what we failed to do, and by God's grace, some of them will have to learn how to forgive us for what we've done.

The commandment is not a non-disclosure agreement that shields us parents from accountability or silences our children when they speak of our brokenness. We must repent, we must be humble. The Lord promises long life in the land, and to a people who are honoring people.

Dishonor, Judgment, and the Redemption of Christ

It's not a guarantee that every obedient child and every faithful parent is gonna outlive every pagan, that's not what Paul is saying. What we're saying is that cultures that honor have longevity. And in that, we have to realize that we've all fallen short.

Every child in this room has fallen short, every parent in this room has fallen short. We have not produced a culture of honor, we have not produced a culture worth longevity. We've created cultures in our homes that allow for backbiting, frustration, name-calling, yelling, malice.

Children, we've dishonored our mother and father in ways that have made us guilty before our God. So when we look at the command and we see that long life is promised to those who honor, to those who create and make a culture of honor, what is it then that we deserve if we've not done that?

Short life, maybe even no life. When you start heaping and heaping and heaping the amount of dishonor that we've done, you then go from a place of, if you have honor, you deserve a long life. Well, if you have heaping pounds of dishonor, what are you owed?

And if you've sinned against an infinite God, then your sin carries infinite consequences because we've not only dishonored our human parents, we've also dishonored our heavenly father, God. That's why Thomas Brooks could say there is no small sin because there is no small God with which to sin against.

So what are we owed? Nothing, nothing. If we were in our sin right now to all fall over dead, we would have gotten more than we deserved, better than we deserved, which is why the gospel is so sweet. Because when Jesus comes and he says that if you believe in me and trust in me, you'll have eternal life, what's longer than eternal life?

What's longer than living forever in his presence? What's longer than being in the father's presence through the son forever, infinitely so? Nothing. So not only have we deserved nothing, we've gained everything because Christ forgave our dishonor, he forgave our brokenness, he died as the honorable one for the dishonorable, he died as the cursed one for the cursed so that we could have his blessings.

We are owed nothing and we've been given everything because of Jesus. And because of that, we have no more fear. We can face the most ugly things we've ever done with grace and with joy. Because why? The gun's not pointed at us.

We can say, God, I really messed up. God, I really didn't do this well. God, I really have not been a perfect father. I really have not been a perfect mother. I really have not been a perfect child. I really have not done things that we're honoring.

But God, in your grace, you've forgiven me. You've sanctified me, you've washed me, you've cleansed me. Help me, forgive me for my dishonor. Heal me and make me like you. That's what repentance is. Acknowledging what Christ has done, asking him to heal us through his spirit and then transformed to live like him moving forward.

So together, brothers and sisters, let us confess the ways that we've fallen short. Every one of us have dishonored someone. Every one of us have left someone in our life with brokenness. Every one of us have done something that someone else one day will have to forgive you of and wrestle through the hurt that you caused.

Let's pray. Let's ask God to forgive us. Let's receive that forgiveness in Christ so that we may live differently. Lord, at the heart of the human condition is rebellion. Rebellion of every authority that you've placed over us.

In the garden, the very first sin was rebellion of authority children, Adam and Eve, rebelling against their father, God. And the long story of man is nothing more than a story of dishonor after dishonor after dishonor.

Dishonor in the ways that we've dishonored our parents, how we've dishonored our children, how we've dishonored our families, our friends, our neighbors, acquaintances, strangers. Dishonor even in the way that we've dishonored ourself, treated ourself as though we have no value being created after your own image and likeness.

Dishonored ourself in the way that we've thrown ourself into the mud of every sin and stain. Lord, would you forgive us for the rebellious tendency of our heart? Lord, would you open up our eyes to the beauty and the glory of the gospel?

Would you allow us to look to that hill called Calvary and see our Savior bleed and die for us, for our sin, for our transgression, for our rebellion? And Lord, would you cause us to hate the things that put you there, to hate the sins that we commit so frivolously that hung you there?

And Lord, would you cause a love, a deeper love, a more passionate love, a love to grow up in us that now loves the things of God, loves righteousness, hates sin. Lord, would you cause both those things to occur in us that we would begin to hate the things that you hate, to love the things that you love?

And in your grace, Lord, would you heal us and make us into an honoring people? Lord, whatever relationships in this room that are broken, would you cause them to be healed? Whatever apologies that need to be offered, would you cause them to be made?

Whatever forgiveness that needs to be extended, Lord, would you cause that to occur? Whether it be parents apologizing to children, whether it be children apologizing to parents, whether it be any other relationship that's broken, Lord, by your spirit, would you convict?

Would you strengthen? Would you equip? And would you cause those relationships to be mended for the glory of God and as a demonstration of the hope that we have now in the gospel? It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Thank you for listening to this homily on the law of God from our covenant renewal worship this past Lord's day. We publish these messages each week because we believe that God loves his law and far from throwing it away, we believe that the death and resurrection of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will actually help us learn to love and obey God's law.

And that's our prayer for you, that as you chew on these expositions each week, that you would both learn to love and come into alignment with the law of God. And we pray that you would do that by the spirit's power through the finished work of Christ and to the glory of God.

And with that, God bless you.