What is the real secret to a successful and long life?
What is the real secret to success and longevity? But what does God say? We're going to read from the Ten Commandments and the fifth commandment tells us this in Exodus 20:12:
“Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.”
When I was speaking with my mother and she asked me what am I doing. I said, “I'm preparing a message on how to live longer.” And she said, “Oh you don't want to grow old,” and she complained about this and that. She's in a wheelchair now. She is not that strong anymore and so it is a struggle for her. As we bantered and joked around I said, “Well Mom count your blessings. You don't have pimples anymore and you don't have boyfriends breaking up with you and so there are many blessings with aging.” We are to remember that God has been good to us and that every season of life has its blessings. The problem is that just like with seasons, when it's winter we wish it was summer and when it's summer we wish it was cooler, as in autumn. Often we just are not content. God reminds us that in old age, even then there is the spring of eternal life to come. Then we'll have new bodies and live together with the Lord Jesus when He returns. We have that hope.
The problem is that now we live in an age, when youth is “in.” Old age of course is “not cool.” But hold on, if youth is so “cool,” why is it that there are just so many young people battling with depression; even teenage suicides? How come there are so many broken relationships? In our day the sickness of society creeps in on all sides. We need to relook at our actions and our attitudes towards age. We need to look at everything in the light of God's Word. Honouring your parents keeps you living longer. This is like the oil in the cogs of the engine of society. Right now society seems to be grinding and grating very painfully. There's very little oil in the mechanisms of society. Just like that old oil advertisement which said: “ABC oil you will keep your car running smoother and longer.” Likewise, honouring your parents makes your life and the life of all of society run a lot smoother and longer.
Honouring your father and mother is the social lubricant that starts you off in the process of learning to love your neighbour, as you love yourself. Effectively your parents are the first neighbours you know and so honouring your parents keeps you living longer. You say, why should I honour my parents? What are the reasons to honour my parents? Maybe you come from a broken home and it's been very painful. Maybe you've had a family that's abused you and there's a lot of grief. Maybe you've been abandoned by your parents or one of the parents. So, why should you honour both your parents?
Let's look firstly, then at five reasons the Bible gives to honour your parents. Firstly, in the second part of verse 12 of Exodus 20 it gives you a promise of security and stability. You are to honour your parents “that you might live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” In other words, that security in your home, where you may have stability. A stable family unit which is built on mutual respect, leads to emotional stability, in the members of that family. A family is where we have the opportunity of interacting at all generational levels. A family is a network of relationships. Yet as the wider family has disintegrated, so counselling, psychologists and psychiatrists now proliferate, because the extended family is virtually extinct.
When this command is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:16, in the repeat of these Ten Commandments, the second Biblical reason for honouring your parents is given: “that it may go well with you.” In other words, that there might be economic survival and prosperity, as God's people in a hostile world. We see a good example of this in Jewish and Muslim cultures, with high degrees of honour towards parents. They often start their children off in a business or train them in a family enterprise. As Christians, isn't it true that today in our country, that often we have to create our own jobs. Our families need to get us off the ground, perhaps with capital or expertise. There is a sense in which our economic survival depends on the family sticking together and on the family working together. Honouring of our parents becomes then that oil of the relationships that lubricates the success of our lives.
Thirdly, in Ephesians 6:1 it says that we're to honour our parents because it is right. It is the right thing to do. In Colossians 3:20 it gives us a fourth reason to honour our parents: because it pleases God. We want to please and honour God and so we honour our parents. Then, I remember reading a Grimm's fairy tale to my children and it told the story of a young mother with young children. She was caring for an elderly father-in-law. The elderly father-in-law had Parkinson’s and was shaking with his spoon to eat his soup. As he tried to feed himself he was messing all over himself. He dropped the spoon and the plate shattered. The young mother was so exasperated by it all, that she got a pig's trough and put it down in the corner of the room and she said to her father-in-law, “You eat in the pig's trough because you're messing up my lovely cutlery.” Well a few days later she found her two little children, the boy and the girl working away at some wood in their Dad's garage. She said, “What are you children doing in here?” The children said, “No Mom, we're making a pig's trough for you when you're old.” In a flash of illumination the mother realized that the way she had treated her father-in-law was now going to come back on her unless she changed her way. She quickly went and mended ways with her father-in-law, apologized seated him at the table with all the necessary aids to help him. She didn't put him with the pig's trough, because the way we treat our parents, is the way our children are going to treat us in turn. You want your own children to continually honour you, so you now chose daily to honour your own parents, which is then the fifth reason.
If those are the five reasons to honour your parents, what is the reality of the modern family? In 1970, Alvin Toffler, in his book called “Future Shock” wrote that he saw the future of the family as one of break up. He wrote and he says: “the modern family will shatter and will come together again in weird and novel ways.” He saw the artificial womb coming along. He saw male order babies, even professional parents - nannies I suppose we'd call them, who were caring for the children of career couples. He saw several marriages and marriages in serial polygamy. He saw the family with children, of his children, her children and our children and even ex-children. Then there was the families of semi-siblings and of course what Alvin Toffler foresaw has tragically come to pass in our day and age. It seems that youth today are generally alienated from adults and from their parents, in particular, now because of the industrialization of our world. The urbanization that has happened. The extended family is almost entirely destroyed. Now uncles and aunts live halfway around the world from us. And we have no contact. Even with grandparents, sometimes the family is shattered even on a parental level. Fathers living far away from mothers etc. Even in an age of better housing, better health, better education, holidays and all the modern conveniences in our kitchens. Yet there are deteriorating relationships in our families and now often children do not honour their parents. What happens is those children end up with all sorts of psychological issues. They go to the psychologist's couch and blame their parents for all their own feelings. The reality of the modern family called the “nuclear family” of 2.4 children, a dog, and a TV, now is no longer the same as the extended families of the Bible and the extended families of just a few decades ago. The nuclear family, is proving to be very unstable. The nuclear family is exploding. Now we see the new and the novel mix of family. More and more two dads parenting, two mothers parenting, and so the list of mixes and matches goes on and on. That is the reality of the modern family situation. What can we do about it?
Well let's look, thirdly, at the requirement of honouring your parents. This requirement is God's solution to a society that is grinding to a halt. With teenage rebellion, with crime at every corner, with family murders, even fathers murdering their children, attacks on the elderly, abuse, and gender-based violence of all sorts, is just growing exponentially. Remember, God started the family. God started the family way back in the garden of Eden and God has dealt with families all through the ages from Noah to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and families are God's idea. We find ourselves not by sitting and meditating over some mantra, and staring at our belly button and trying to figure out what's going on in our head. Rather, we find ourselves in community. In the family as we interact in the process of growing up, we learn to find what God intends for us, in the normal family dynamics of daily living.
Remember, as Ephesians 3:14 says: “I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” Now that means that families are God's idea. That we belong not just to an earthly family but to a great spiritual family, the family of God, if we have received adoption into His family through Jesus Christ. Do you know that Jesus, our Lord and our Saviour, spent more than ten-eleventh’s of His life on earth caring for His biological family? That was probably because, his step-dad, Joseph, had died when Jesus was young. Even when Jesus was dying on the cross and in the seven brief statements He could gasped out on the cross. One of those statements was a request to His own mother that John, His cousin would look after His mother, and that Mary would join John's family. That means that Jesus modelled for us the kind of family relations we are to have. The requirements of honouring your parents is God's order to you and to me.
God's order is that parents should be honoured and that parents in turn should be honourable. In Ephesians 6:4 we fathers are commanded by God, “Do not exasperate your children.” In other words, do not drive your kids nuts. Parents are to live lives worth honouring. The opposite danger, of course, is that we idolize our children, and we put before Jesus in our affections and behaviour. We are to love Jesus above everything and everybody, as we read in Matthew 10. But if Jesus is first in our life, He then calls us to honour our parents and in turn to teach our children to honour us.
The fourth part of this command is the relevance of honouring parents in the 21st century, as Christians today. For some of you today it may mean that honouring your parents comes easy because you've had faithful and honourable parents and you can do the honouring out of a devotion to loving and caring parents. But I know that there are still many that have parents that they struggle to honour. If you have parents who have not been faithful, Jesus still commands you to honour your parents. Now not necessarily out of devotion, but you need to honour your parents out of duty. Dutifully you honour them, because you realise that they did not do what they were meant to do. Part of that duty is to forgive them, as Jesus has forgiven you, your billions of sins. Forgive your parents and honour them out of duty.
All of us whether it's out of devotion or out of duty, must honour our parents. The definition of honouring is to respect with love (our parents.) Now how does that work practically for little children? Little children need to be taught by their parents to honour them. I know that since the 1950’s we have seen the failure of that philosophy, by Dr Spock and others who said: “Be your child's friend.” No! When they proposed that parents are not to insist on their children calling them, “Mom or Dad,” just let them call you by your first name. No! God has given you the honour of, and the title of, Mother or Father, Mom or Dad. Insist that your children call you by those titles. Gary Ezzo points out that “friendship is the goal of parenting, not the starting point.” When we have adult children we would like to be friends with them. But when they're growing up, when they're little children, we need to teach them to respect and honour us as parents.
Little children honour their parents by obedience. Obeying their parents straight away, with a cheerful attitude. That is what we are to teach little children. Don't teach them to just be disrespectful in some way or other. God is calling you to teach them to honour you. You say why is this important? Well let me read you a tongue-in-cheek 12 easy rules to make your child into a delinquent. This was drawn up by the Police department of Houston in Texas in the USA. The police department says: 1) Begin at infancy to give the child everything he wants. In this way he will grow up to believe that the world owes him a living. 2) When he picks up bad language laugh at him. This will make him think he is cute. 3) Never give him any spiritual training, wait until he is 21 and then let him decide for himself. 4) Avoid the use of the word wrong. It may develop a guilt complex. This will be conditioning him to believe later that when he is arrested for stealing a car that society is against him and that he is being persecuted. 5) Pick up everything he leaves lying around – books, shoes, clothes. Do everything for him so that he will be experienced in throwing all responsibility on others. 6) Let him read and watch anything he can get his hands on. But be very careful to sanitize all your plates and cutlery. Let them be sterilized but let his mind feast on garbage. 7) Quarrel frequently in front of your children in this way they will not be too shocked when the home is broken up later. 8) Give a child all the spending money he wants. Never let him earn his own money. Why should he have things as tough as you did? 9) Satisfy every craving for food, drink and comfort. See that every essential desire is gratified. Denial may lead to harmful frustration for the little darling. 10) Take his part against neighbours, teachers and policemen. They are prejudiced against your child. Ah shame! 11) when he gets into real trouble, apologize for yourself by saying: “Oh I never could do anything with him.” 12) prepare for a life of grief, you will be likely to have it.
God has told you to train up your children in the ways of God and the way of God is to teach them to honour you. Don't settle for anything less than obedience straight away with a cheerful attitude. That is for little children, but what happens when they start growing? For teenagers obedience turns into submission. Where they submit to the rules of the family and where they take on willing responsibility. By submission to their parents they then honour their parents.
Then what about adult children of parents? Well adults who marry and move out of their parents’ home, are no longer to obey their parents or no longer to submit to them, as they now need to be joined with their spouse. But they are to honour their parents by devotion or out of duty, depending on how good or bad their parents were. Either out of a good relationship as they maybe grew up in a lovely Christian home and they honour out of devotion. On the other hand, if their parents failed in many ways, to still honour them out of duty. Your parents need your honour, which may include gratitude. Your honour may include even financial support for elderly parents and whether that's supporting them within your own home or within a retirement centre. Whichever is the most loving in your particular context.
Notice that the Bible doesn't just stop with your own parents. It calls us to honour even those who are our elders. Older than us in some way. Much the same way Zulu culture speaks of the elderly as Baba or father and they are revered as authorities or elders within society. One of the ways you can honour the elderly is to stand up when they come into the room or to open the door for them and step aside. I had to learn that lesson. My parents didn't teach me that when I was growing up but when I went to boarding school we were told to stand aside at the door, even if there was a person from just one grade higher than us behind us. They were to go through the door first. This honouring of older grades was to practically teach us to honour our parents and honour those who are older than ourselves. Honouring parents keeps you living longer. This is then the lubricant in this abrasive world. That honouring is what we must do day by day. We must not buy into this youth crazy culture in which we live.
The Bible says old age is a blessing and I want to suggest that elderly people, and I'm think I'm in that category now myself. We need to do a better public relations job on promoting old age. I have a Godly friend and deacon who served with me many years ago and whenever I saw him, I would greet and ask: “How are you?” and he'd say: “Every day better.” No matter how he was physically or whether he was under the weather or not. Even if he was struggling it was always: “Every day better!” And he taught me that there is a way to make the best of old age. He's still playing golf as far as I know and I still have contact with him.
God calls us to take our aches and pains to Him in prayer and if necessary to the doctor, but not to broadcast them to all the other generations around us. We are to realize that every season in life has its pros and cons. That means for parents of children honouring starts with disciplining them as young children to obey you straight away the first time you speak. That's how they honour you. Then to train older children as they grow up into the teenage years, to coach them into submission and working with the family. As they then leave the house, they then honour their parents in the way of devotion or duty.
The whole process is God designed to bring blessing on you. That you might in a sense find the real secret of a long and successful life, which starts early when you obey your parents. When you honour them even when you're taller than them as a teenager, or when you're an adult and you have the opportunity to help them financially. Do all that you can and so practically whether they're older or younger than you remember to train up the young and honour the old. Stand for the elderly. Show respect and be considerate for those who have gone before you. In a sense and the real question is: “How do you measure up, when you compare yourself with the requirements of this command?” The fifth commandment to honour your parents that you might live long in the land. Is there a sense in which you fall short of God's standards and you have sinned against your parents? Well, there's no human cure for sin, but to run to your Creator, your Father in Heaven. Confess your sins to God and ask Him to forgive you and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness and then to empower you by His Holy Spirit to love those parents that He's given you, even if they failed you. Forgive them and honour them, even if it has to be out of duty. Why? That you might live long in the land. That you might find the secret of real success in life and a long life. That's God's desire for you. So don't miss that. Make the changes in your life that are necessary. Put right those relationships that need to be put right. Make every effort to live at peace with all people, including your parents, as far as is possible for you. That’s because honouring your parents keeps you living longer.
Let's pray together.
Oh Lord Jesus, help us we pray in this age where everything seems to be falling apart. Help us to love as You have first loved us. You are the perfect Father and because You have perfectly loved us and have perfectly forgiven us in Jesus Christ, help us now as we have received Your forgiveness, to forgive even our parents. Perhaps setting them free from the prison of our hearts, because of deep and lasting wounds. Then out of duty to honour them and to treat them with loving respect that we might be blessed by You with a long, fruitful and successful life. Oh Lord Jesus, forgive us now and empower us to live for You faithfully in this age. For Jesus sake we ask this. Amen.
Well as you honour God so may you bring honour and praise to His name as you honour your parents as well. And may you put Him first and then your parents and those that God has put around you. Training up your children all to be the lubrication of a society that is struggling. That is clunking and creaking because of all the breakdowns. Won't you be part of the solution in this broken world? That your life might bring honour and praise to our one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.