The Fifth Commandment, Deuteronomy 5:16, 21:18-21

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The Fifth Commandment Deuteronomy 5:16, 21:18-21

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Deuteronomy chapter 5, verse 16, hear the word of the Lord. Honor your father and your mother as the
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Lord your God commanded you, that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the
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Lord your God is giving you. If you turn over to chapter 21, verses 18 to 21.
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If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of the city at the gate of the place where he lives.
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And they shall say to the elders of his city, this our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice.
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He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.
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And all Israel shall hear in fear. May the Lord add his blessings to the reading of his holy word.
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Candice Newmaker, sort of an interesting name, Newmaker, given what happened.
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Candice Newmaker was taken away from her biological parents at age five because they abused and neglected her.
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She was soon adopted but was diagnosed with a psychological disorder, what they called a reactive detachment disorder, an inability to form a loving, intimate relationship with a guardian.
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So when she was ten, her adoptive mother sent her to two therapists in Colorado who claimed they had just the technique to help her overcome that disorder.
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It is called, what they call, rebirthing therapy. It's supposed to recreate the experience of birth so she could start over from the beginning.
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In other words, in their opinion, if the person re -experienced birth, the mind,
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I guess, would just reset. So the damage done by her biological mother could be undone.
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So she, Candice Newmaker, could be made new. Then she could bond with her adoptive parent.
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So the therapist, with this therapy they made up, wrapped her in tight blankets and squeezed her to simulate what they thought it was like for a baby to be born.
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The problem, though, was that the therapist squeezed too hard. In fact, they ended up crushing
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Candice to death. Such are human attempts to make us born again.
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Those therapists who were actually quacks, who deserved to spend some time in jail for their stupidity, did have something right.
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They were right that we need to be born again, especially if we are to obey the fifth commandment.
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We need a new birth in which all things become new. And then we see all the good things that our parents have done for us as gracious gifts from God, that we can see our parents in light of God rather than making a god in the image of our parents.
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The revolutionary psychologist Sigmund Freud taught that we are in constant struggle with our parents.
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In what he called the Oedipus Complex, he said that we either wrongly love or even lust after our parents, or we secretly hate them, that we wish to kill them.
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He implied that we ought to resent the ones, at least it's an implication, we ought to resent the ones who produced us because all our problems basically are a result of them.
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Anything they did wrong to us resulted in the problems we have. If they were too affectionate and excessively physical, they made us weak and sentimental.
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If they rarely hugged us and were cold and distant, they made us stern and starved for love.
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Worst of all, Freud taught that the very idea of God, the idea that there is a God, was something that people made up as an expression of their ideal father, that people were so desperate for their ideal father, because their earthly fathers were disappointing them so often, that they made up this imaginary father in heaven up there.
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God was a collection, so Freud believed, of what we want our father to be like.
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So if we are ever to be healthy, he taught, we need to overcome this infantile dependence on a father who doesn't exist and render ourselves as our own creators through therapy.
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That is, of course, if the therapy doesn't kill us. There are a lot of problems with Freud's ideas.
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At least one study has shown that patients treated using Freudian psychotherapy are, on average, worse off than patients who receive no therapy at all.
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A medicine that makes you sicker than no medicine is a poison. But we do have to admit that there are some tidbits of truth in what
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Freud taught. The truth is that our parents do affect us enormously, even our view of God.
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We probably all have habits and ways of thinking, of feeling, ways of speaking, relating, just basic assumptions about life, the lenses through which we see the world, that we picked up from our parents.
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And we even have to admit that for many people, their experience of their parents affects how they feel toward God.
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If someone had selfish, manipulative, abusive parents, it may be difficult for them to believe, at first, that our
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Father in Heaven is a God of love. Or maybe more precisely, it's difficult for them to believe that, quote, love, what's called love, is really that good a thing.
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After all, the people who claim they love them are the ones who actually hurt them the most. On the other hand, someone raised by indulgent parents who rarely, if ever, disciplined or challenged them, but gave them everything they wanted, always told them how good they were, all the time, flattery and indulgence is what passed for love, such people may have a difficult time seeing that God is holy, that He has wrath toward sin, that He disciplines every child
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He receives. They may find it hard to understand that love, true love, disciplines, that it does what is best for the one love, not necessarily what they want.
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Children of indulgent parents don't understand discipline, and so don't understand discipleship, disciplineship, and so don't understand
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God, the Father, who disciplines, and so don't understand His church that is called to make disciples.
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Our experience of our parents does indeed affect how we see God, but vice versa can be true too.
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In other words, our experience of God can affect how we see our parents, and this is where the fifth commandment comes in.
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Our experience of God changes our view of our parents. If we have truly tasted that the
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Lord is good, you know, He invites us, taste and see that the Lord is good.
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If we've had that experience, a life -changing encounter with a true living God, that makes it possible for us to thank
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God for every good thing that our parents did for us, and to see that every bad thing, every disappointment, every failure on their part, everything they did was just, they meant well, but it was just wrong and ignorant, is a reminder of our need to repent of our sins, that God was being merciful so that we can taste that the
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Lord is good. When we see that our parents are, when we see our parents like that, as gifts from God who gave us good things that we didn't deserve, and even in their weaknesses, gave us reminders of our need to turn and be born again.
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In other words, why have these bad things come into my life? Maybe some of them came through our parents, and we admit that.
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Why did God allow our parents to bring bad things into our life? Well, to prod us to repentance.
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When we see it like that, then we can truly honor them. When I first went to Singapore, I was reminded first,
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I mean really first went, like the first week or two, I was reminded that I was really in a very different culture, with radically different expectations.
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When I was interviewing for a position in this big church there, and the pastor of this large church said to me, I was 25 years old, not even quite out of seminary yet, and he told me, if you're leaving your parents behind to take care of themselves, we don't want you here.
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You don't find an American boss somewhere interviewing a candidate to say that to a prospective employee.
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I immediately thought of trying to explain that if I actually move back in with my mother in Alabama, to supposedly take care of her, she might welcome me for a few days, but after a few weeks, she might call the sheriff to have me evicted.
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What's going on? Get out of here and live your own life, she'd say. Those kinds of expectations about taking care of our parents, they don't exist in our culture in the
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U .S. Oh yeah, we're supposed to make phone calls on Mother's Day and send cards and visit Thanksgiving and all that, but we're not supposed to take care of them through our life.
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We don't see it that way. But I just decided to stay quiet. You can't explain that.
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Explain that to a Chinese person in a Chinese culture. No, it's not going to work. We're just too different. And looking at this commandment, we,
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Americans here, white Americans, we're not only very different from the Chinese, we're very different from what
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Scripture expects, too. Remember I said a few months ago, with different cultures, we can compare.
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Different cultures can get us to see, hey, maybe our whole culture is wrong. Maybe our whole culture is unbiblical.
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Ever thought of that? Sometimes we think of what is good is what our culture tells us is good. Maybe our whole culture is wrong.
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And when you encounter another culture, sometimes they can challenge us for that. And in American culture, this commandment isn't so much dismissed, it's not denounced, like the previous commandment is.
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You know, you get people really on their high horse. You don't have to keep the Sabbath, like the previous.
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This commandment, though, you should realize, in our culture, this commandment is...
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Think about it. We're just two weeks off after Father's Day. This was treated as...
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This is trivial. It's almost like, what's this doing? It's a nice idea, but why is it in the
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Ten Commandments, of all things? This should be about major things. Sure, we all agree it's a nice thing to care about our parents, send them cards, and give them a call occasionally.
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But it's not an accident, though, that Mother's and Father's Day are on Sundays, so there will be no interruption in the work week.
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And it's actually holidays concocted to promote greeting cards and maybe help the phone company.
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While President's Day and Martin Luther King Day and Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, are all on Mondays with the government employees in most schools and bank employees.
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They all get the day off. So caring about your parents is indeed... It's a nice thing.
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It's the way our culture sees it. It's nice, but it's not significant. It's something light.
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It's not important. But treating parents lightly is the opposite of what this commandment says.
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Once again, we come across that Hebrew word in Deuteronomy 5, the very first word, it's in a verb form here, kabod, meaning literally heavy, at least in a noun, it means heavy.
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Last November, we saw it in Isaiah 6. You remember? Holy, the seraphim, holy, holy, holy, the
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Lord God of hosts, the whole earth is filled with his glory, his kabod, his heaviness.
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That's the same word in the fifth commandment here in a verb form. Treat heavily. Treat with gravity.
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You could almost say glorify your father and mother. Treat your parents as though they're significant.
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They're honorable. This is why we read those instructions on executing people who are disrespectful and disobedient to their parents.
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Now some today, skeptics today, that's one of those passages I just read. That passage is one of these parts of the
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Bible that skeptics today just love to point to and say, see how absurd, how primitive the
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Bible is. Well, that's what they think. But keep in mind that we who believe in the full inspiration of Scripture, that we believe that those instructions, they did not just come from an ancient culture that we've evolved past.
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They didn't even just come from Moses, who maybe you say was ahead of his time, but we're more enlightened than he is now.
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No. We believe that every Scripture is inspired by God. Remember Peter says the prophet, here be
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Moses, did not write by his own inclination or his own impulse, but was moved along by the
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Holy Spirit. They came from God himself, including that passage in Deuteronomy 21. The eternal Lord of the universe who is always perfect can never evolve or grow since there's nothing better for him to evolve into, contrary to what the
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Mormons say that we talk about in Sunday school. He actually spoke those words. Now that doesn't necessarily mean we need to, again, write our congressmen and see if we can enact them into laws today, but it doesn't mean that the commandment here is that important to God.
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The Lord Jesus himself showed us that. Contrary to this idea that those kind of primitive law, oh, that's way, that's
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Old Testament. We evolved past with Jesus as the pinnacle. Well, the Lord Jesus himself repeated this commandment and even the instructions about the punishing.
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In Matthew chapter 15, and when he wanted to prove that the Pharisees had traditions that violated the word of God, he chose as his example this commandment.
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When you think about that, the Pharisees had all kinds of traditions that Jesus could have fastened on and criticized them for, but it's this one.
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It's that they violated this commandment that Jesus pointed to.
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The loving Lord Jesus even repeated the law about executing those who revile their parents. He says, you're not doing it.
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So he takes the command that seriously. It's that important. The point, of course, as we said about the third commandment, is not that we implement laws like that today.
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No, the point is that we see how much weight God himself puts on this command.
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We might not have that as a law in our courts today, but even today, you know, it's sort of out there, built into the universe.
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There's still death for the child who will not be restrained. Proverbs chapter 15, verse 10 tells us, he who hates correction will die.
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It's now this commandment. It's something in our culture we kind of agree with. Yeah, it's a good idea on your father and mother most of the time, if you feel like it.
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Send them a card. But we take very lightly. But the Lord takes a very heavy thing.
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So heavy, he's built it into the universe that the one who disobeys this command suffers for it.
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It has gravity to it. Now, why? There are four reasons for this command.
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Four things this teaches us. And once again, they each start with the letter R. Four reasons we need this command.
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Restraint, relationships, reliance, and reward.
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Remember what sin is in its essence? Remember when we looked at the
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Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane last March? He was tempted with sin, but he triumphed over that temptation when he resolved, not my will, but yours be done.
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Sin is the opposite of that. It is what Adam did in the garden, saying to God, not your will, but mine be done.
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Sin is willfulness. It is the insistence that I will do what I will do. I'll eat the fruit that I want to eat, and no one, not even
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God, is going to tell me I can't. No one will restrain me. My appetite, my ego will rule.
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Remember that in Deuteronomy 21? We saw that in the disobedient son. Remember? The parents tried to discipline him, but he will not listen.
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He's willful. That's the heart we sinners chose to have when our first parents reached out their hands and grasped that fruit that God told them not to have.
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And ever since then, we have been self -centered in rebellion against God and at war with each other, each trying to satisfy our own desires.
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That's why conflicts and self -assertion come so naturally, and meekness and submission are so difficult.
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Here in the fifth commandment is a restraint on that self -centeredness. We're told to honor, treat with gravity, someone else.
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And not just anyone else. We just get to pick the one we want to honor.
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Or we get to say we honor someone that we know will never require anything from us.
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Honor in our lips, and then we go about and do our own thing. You know, kind of like the Queen of England. She gets a lot of honor. You know, her face is on the money there.
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She gets to call herself a ruler. She gets to have palaces and cars and yachts and titles. But she doesn't actually get to rule.
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I mean, if she put down her scepter and declared some law, Parliament would just go, she's a ruler?
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That's not what the Lord means here. And it's not just something we carefully or someone, honor someone, we can carefully examine if we really want to honor them.
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You know, if they meet our standards of someone who won't abuse that honor that we want to listen to.
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We think probably won't take advantage of us if we honor them. Not like a spouse. You get to pick and choose, right?
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You often find out you're wrong, but whatever. That's the way it goes. God tells us to honor someone who is altogether out of our control, who will require a sacrifice from us, perhaps of a personality and a temperament we would not have chosen to be with.
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That's Mom. The command thus restrains our natural tendency to only honor people of our own choosing for our own purposes.
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This is really just selfishness anyway. When the Lord Jesus quoted this command in Matthew 15, rebuking the
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Pharisees for not honoring their parents with their property, you think about that. He showed that honor takes a concrete form.
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It's not just an attitude. I respect them. Well, no. It shows itself in behavior.
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The Pharisees said they could, quote, honor their parents, but then declare their money dedicated to God, Korban.
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They even had a term for it. And so not support their parents with it. Oh, I honor you, Mom and Dad. Now, I'm sorry you're hungry, but my money's dedicated to God.
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Jesus said they were violating the command. As Brandon said Wednesday night, got to give him credit, you have to put your money where your mouth is.
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That's basically what Jesus was saying. Put your money where your mouth is. You can't honor your parents and let them starve and suffer need while you have the money to help them, and you just put a fancy sanctified title over it, but you still use it for yourself.
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All the talk about honor is empty if it doesn't result in practically caring for parents and providing, if necessary, actual cash.
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So the Chinese custom of children providing for their parents, yeah, that's right. Did you hear that,
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Angel? We want to make sure Angel hears that. Okay, okay. I think so. She's writing it down right now.
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As children, we're basically selfish. We want everything to go our way. That's the way we're born. You never have to teach a little kid.
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I've never seen anyone have to teach a kid, you know, little Tommy, take that toy from the other little kid, yank it out of his hand, and say mine.
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No one has to teach a kid that, right, in play school. Parents are there to restrain that, to discipline their child.
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Teach him or her that there are things, maybe like taking out the trash or mowing the grass or feeding the dog or picking up the toys, that he or she has to do.
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As teenagers, we think that our parents are hopelessly out of touch. Oh, they just don't get it. We've evolved past them now.
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But as one popular wall sign says, why don't you go out and earn a living for yourself now while you still think you have all the answers?
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As young adults, we become consumed with our responsibilities of work, marriage, so forth, and parents remind us, usually by their polite presence, that yeah,
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I've been through that too. Then as middle -aged adults, we are tempted to view our aged parents as wearisome burdens that infringe on our hard -earned freedom.
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Do I really have to drive all the way to Alabama to see her again? Maybe drain away our precious cash earned through years of labor.
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Do I really have to send money to them? Haven't I paid my debt already? I've paid them back already, haven't
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I? Parents then come by their dependence on us, remind us, you know, you'll come this way too.
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It's then that they restrain our illusions of immortality, our selfish longing to build a life for ourselves right now with no thought for tomorrow.
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Our egotism must be restrained, our pride, so that this commandment is really the centerpiece of the
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Ten Commandments, the commandment that straddles the first four about God and the last five about our dealings with other people.
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This commandment reaches right into the nitty -gritty of our daily lives and points us to people who were as close to us as people could possibly be, people who may have been great blessings to us but from whom now we want some freedom, or people against whom we may have a lifetime of bitter grievances, real or imagined.
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God reaches right into the heart of that and stands right before the tank of our illusions of individualism, and he says stop.
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Honor. Second, relationships.
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There must be restraints on us if we are to relate well with others. Someone who's just, he's got to have his way all the time, doesn't have good relationships.
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And we have this command as the bedrock of all our relationships. If we cannot relate peacefully, honorably with those who brought us into this world and cared for us when we were helpless and could do nothing in return, how could we relate well with others who haven't given us so much?
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We can't. Now we might think we can as we superficially get to know other people.
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We have acquaintances that we seem to get along with nicely, and we think, I can get along with all these other people so well, why can't
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I get along this well with mom and dad? Well, because those other people hardly know you, that's why. But then, you know, if you want an example, well then prove it, marry one of them.
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Marry one of those acquaintances. And soon we'll find the same resentments and the same suspicions, the same lack of honor we have toward our parents.
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We'll soon attach and even multiply toward our spouse or our children or others close to us. If we can't get this relationship right, at least as far as it's up to us, then we'll probably have a hard time getting any relationship right.
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Now I know that there were some parents who were cruel to them. I don't know all your stories. Maybe that's true for some of you here.
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Maybe who failed you in thousands of ways. Honoring them doesn't mean pretending that didn't happen.
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It doesn't deny the real problems that existed and maybe fabricating illusionary good parents in your imagination.
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It certainly doesn't mean that silly rebirthing therapy that killed Candace Newmaker. Honoring them means being thankful for everything you can be thankful for.
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And I can tell just by looking at you here that every one of you have parents who gave you something you can be thankful for.
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I'm about to amaze the doctor here with my amazing medical perceptivity. What's the word? Perceptivity?
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Because I can tell from every one of you here that your parents loved you enough to at least not starve you to death.
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Is that right? A good medical perception? I can tell that every one of you here appears to be alive. You know what it takes to kill a baby?
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You do nothing to a baby. The thing dies by itself. I mean, you have to actively keep the thing alive. And so each of you were like that at one point.
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You had to be kept alive, and your parents did that for you. So at least you had that. Everyone here had someone who, when you were totally dependent and you couldn't do anything in return, who took care of you.
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That's something to be grateful for. You think you earned that? You think when you were screaming your lungs out all the time and keeping your parents up and dirtying your diapers, you were just so great that you deserved all that?
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No. Maybe they didn't take care of you perfectly, but they took care of you enough to keep you alive.
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And they fulfilled that. Now, you should honor them. If you go around thinking every good thing that you have in life, you deserved it.
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You take it for granted. You take it from others including your parents, without any real gratitude. And then you're bitter about every perceived grievance.
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If you obsess that, you know, if only mom and dad had given me this, given me that, taken me here, put me in this school, taught me that.
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If only they had known to do this thing with me. Taken me here or there. You know, only if not for them,
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I'd be someone great by now. If you think like that, you're going to be a very hard person to live with.
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All your relationships will be poisoned with your bitterness. And it starts with this relationship.
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Your attitude toward your mother and father. Some of you may have much to be appreciative, to appreciate in your parents.
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Others, maybe have not so much. But if you can honor everything that can be honored, you will find, generally, that as it says here, it will go well with you.
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You will relate better with others. You'll see that there are a lot more favors being done for you than you ever imagined.
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Notice the command is to honor, not to love. I mean, Americans, wouldn't we kind of expect, if we were writing it, to say, love your father and mother?
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But he doesn't say that. He says honor. Now, today, people find this hard to understand because we want to be liked.
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Even many parents, they want to be pals with their kids. Get along. We're best buds. Oh, my mother's my best friend.
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This kind of thing. Which, I guess, if it works, whatever. Relationships, we think, are all about mutual affection.
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About warmth. Not respect. But God starts with this parent -child relationship because this is where authority begins.
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Disobedience and disrespect in the family leads to it despising a suspicion of authority in all its forms.
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Your boss at work, or your husband, or political leaders, or leaders in the church, all are leaders as God gives them to us.
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Right? I believe it's important to teach your children to respect authorities. Sometimes that means respect you, your authority.
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And I think, especially, the mother should be especially keen to protect the authority of the father, and vice versa.
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Parents, I think, never tolerate hearing a child speak badly of the other parent.
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I just think you draw the line with that. And that's one way you teach the kid authority.
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And in particular, it's easier. The father's protecting the mother's authority. The mother's protecting the father's authority. Then the child sees it's not just a selfish thing.
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It's not just dad insisting that he's got to have his way, and he's got to be respected. Oh, he's just this egomaniac who wants to be saluted like he's the general in the army.
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No, because the mom is doing, if she hears the kid disrespecting the father, she's going to come down hard on the kid, and vice versa.
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If children don't learn to be respectful with the first authorities they encounter, their parents, they'll probably never respect anyone.
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Not even God. They become disrespectful. Literally full of disrespect.
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What Paul calls a reviler in 1 Corinthians 5. One of those sins he listed for excommunication.
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He said, these revilers, people full of disrespect, just always accusing of those particular authorities.
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They should be cast out of the church, he said. 1 Corinthians 5. And it's that serious to him.
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To us, it's one of those sins we hardly think of as a sin at all. I mean, if you can make clever quips and disrespectful about the president or whoever, they'll put you on TV and make you a big comedian.
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That's our culture. Some people will say authorities need to earn our respect.
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But I found that you can never earn the respect of disrespectful people. You can never earn the trust of distrusting people.
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They don't have respect or trust in them to be earned. They're revilers.
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And that's their problem. They need a new heart full of, this time, respect, honor, true love.
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How we treat authorities, especially the first authority we come across, which is our parents, indicates how we feel about the authority.
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A suspicious, accusing, insulting, scoffing attitude toward authorities shows the same attitude toward the
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God who gave them. Third, reliance.
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To relate well with God and with others, we need to see how reliant we are on them.
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People today hate to admit to being reliant, particularly Americans, where we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, which seems to me defy the law of gravity, but whatever.
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We like do -it -yourself projects. In this culture, any position that seems to be dependent as regarded as constrained, as lacking freedom, and thus detrimental to our modern ideal of a free, unattached, sovereign, choosing individual.
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But then God gives us this command to remind us of our reliance. This command is not only for children in the home, it's also, it is for us all, telling us always, even well after our parents are buried and gone, to honor them.
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Remember that they brought you into this world, and even though they may have threatened to take you out of it, they did not.
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They kept you alive, at least alive, if not well, when you were utterly, immediately reliant.
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You know, none of us make it through life independent. No baby can survive independent.
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We're all reliant. Maybe we don't feel it as much now because we can get along a little better, but we still, that's the way we are.
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The only way we keep this command is to reject the lie of individual independence, that you can make it on your own, that you as an individual can be self -sustaining, self -providing, self -governing.
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You keep this command when you freely admit that despite all the faults your parents may have had, they were the instruments in God's hands to bring you into this world, to preserve you day by day when you were helpless.
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Now, how many other ways they may have failed you, I don't know, but they preserved your life, and even that you don't deserve.
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So we honor them for doing it for us. Finally, we have this commandment, not only to restrain our rebelliousness, not only to learn to relate to others, not only to admit our reliance, but to have the reward that respect gives.
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The Apostle Paul notes that this first commandment, this commandment is the first commandment with a promise.
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That promise is that it may go well with us, that we may stay long in the blessings the
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Lord has given us that will live. Giving respect gives us a reward.
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Quite simply, those who build a society in which old age and especially our parents have an honored place can expect to enjoy that place themselves one day.
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I mean, you think about it. If you're going to grow old, wouldn't you want to be honored one day? It starts with you honoring right now.
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A culture of respect is rewarding for all, but we Christians believe in a God. It's not just that. It is that,
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I think, in part, but it's not just that. We believe also that God will reward us personally for our obedience to Him either now or later.
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See, the blessings now builds into society or builds into the universe or later.
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Even a few others note the sacrificial care a woman gives her mother during her mother's last days on earth.
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The Lord notes, even though the world will not reward her, the
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Lord rewards. Sometimes the Lord will give some of that reward now in this life to those who in faith obey the commandment, but even if He doesn't yet, eventually
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He will give all of His reward to all who obey the commandment in faith.
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But then you might think, well, what of the one who, the one person who perfectly obeyed the commandment, who honored his parents, but didn't get the reward of a long and happy life?
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What of our Lord Jesus? Even though He was perfect, He was God in human flesh, Luke chapter 2 verse 51 tells us that He was submissive to His sinful, merely human parents.
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Now, if He could do that, surely we can, can't we? If He could do that, certainly we should.
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Even at the very end, one of the seven last statements Jesus makes from the cross. Think of that! He's on the cross and one of the things
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He does there was to practically care for His mother. Attending to the needs of His mother was so important, it's one of the things
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He did on the cross. He perfectly obeyed this fifth commandment, right to the very end.
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Then why didn't He receive the reward? You might ask, the commandment comes with a reward. How could there be a promise of a prolonged life but Jesus, who perfectly kept it, died young and died like He did.
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Why wasn't He rewarded with a prolonged life? Oh, but He was.
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Don't forget. He came out of death alive. In the resurrection, the promise of the fifth commandment is fulfilled.
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His days were continued. He was raised from the dead and His days continue and are prolonged until today.
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He is living long in the blessings the Father has for Him. The promise, the reward is beyond what merely this earth can offer.
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The reward for respect is eternal. Our parents can do us great good and harm, but they can never do us more harm than they did us good.
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I mean, even if they kill us, they've only taken away what, by God's grace, they gave us. So if we're alive, we should honor our parents.
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That restrains our rebellion. It enables us to relate, to confess our reliance, and to reap a reward.
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And yet, even the best parents cannot help but to fail. They will disappoint us.
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They'll be too stern or too soft or both.
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They'll smother us with affection or leave us emotionally cold or a little of both.
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They'll give us both good and bad advice, advantages and disadvantages. So if, in our case, if Freud is right about us, and we are building our impressions about who
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God is based on our experiences with our parents, we will have a woefully inadequate, even dishonoring view of God.
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We will blaspheme Him as we think of Him as indulgent, like our parents, or stingy, like our parents, or whatever image we picked up from our parents and are now projecting onto this fictional being we now call
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God. We will reduce God to the limitations of our parents. The only solution is similar to that of the two silly therapists who squeezed that girl to death.
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We need to be born again, but not just think we're born again, not just some kind of subjective, psychological trick to fool ourselves into forgetting the reality of the failures of our parents.
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No, that's not at all what the Lord Jesus was getting at when He told Nicodemus that we all must be born again.
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Rather, we must encounter the real, living God who gives us life from spiritual death.
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We must be transformed by Him and get to know Him as He really is. And then, if that happens, then we will no longer be creating an image of God in our minds, an image made out of the scraps and pieces left over from our experience with our parents.
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We'll no longer be just trapped in that old cage of only knowing God through the image of our parents, but we would be seeing the true
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God as He is. And then, then our experience of God will start to change our experience with our parents.
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When we have tasted that He is good, that the Lord is good, it makes it possible for us to see that every good thing we received from our parents was a gift from God through our parents.
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A gracious gift, completely gracious. And even the bad things, those things that maybe used to make us bitter, we will see as just punishments for our sins, prods to make us repent, to turn us from being self -centered and egotistical and reviling, turn us from our bitterness and turn us to the true
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Heavenly Father, the good, good Father, whom now we honor above all.
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You don't need a psychological trick or to pretend the past wasn't really what it was.