Reformed Baptist Church in O'Fallon, Missouri
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Fatherhood

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Honor Your Father and Mother

All right, open your Bibles. [audio unclear]

“Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.

(Ephesians 6:2–4)

I wanted to talk briefly about the first part of this text, the command, or the exhortation to honor your father and your mother. By way of introduction, I understand that it’s hard to do that sometimes. There is no perfect father, right? As a matter of fact, all of our fathers have faults, and when you live with someone, you see them pretty clearly. Okay. So, you know, Lydia’s word was very encouraging, which she knows my faults. She knows I’m not a perfect dad. I’m not a perfect person. Now saying that, sometimes people say, well, you know, we’re not perfect. Like that’s an excuse. I don’t mean it as an excuse. I mean it as an understanding of reality. And it’s important for how we interpret and how we look, how we apply Scripture to our lives. Okay. Some people say, well, you know, my dad had this fault and this fault, therefore, I don’t have to honor him. Well, the Scripture doesn’t say that, because honoring one’s father, or really the command to honor one’s father, is much bigger than the command just to honor your father. It’s really about honoring something called fatherhood and motherhood, which we’ve lost in our society. We don’t honor any—we honor beauty and money. We don’t honor position. So when Scripture talks about honoring father, we really talk about honoring something that God has established as a—I like the old word office, but that word just doesn’t ring right with many people. It’s a God-ordained position, because the family is ordained by God and has a particular government involved in the family. You have good dads, bad dads, good moms, bad moms. Nonetheless, the establishment of the position, the calling, the ordinance, the office, whatever you want to call it, still stands. And so God calls us to honor not only the person, but really to honor that even above the person. So I understand I have a very checkered past and I had a very broken family and I understand how hard it is to honor a mother or father who was perhaps not so nice to you, if you put it nicely. But we can learn to do that because we can learn to understand God’s view of the family. And as we begin to understand God as well as the family, we begin to recognize the value of the father and the mother in the home as well as in society. Maybe I’ll say a few words more about that before the end.

A footnote, I mean an interruption. Is it warm in here? Somebody say yes. Because I’m really warm up here. Maybe it’s the lights, but we can get down a couple of notches. Okay, well, if it’s doing what it’s doing, it’s fine. I know Justus, he likes to say, every penny. It happens. [audio unclear] We still love you, man.

Honor Fathers for Their Provision

So a few reasons why we should honor our fathers, and really in this text it tells us to honor our father and our mother, honor the role of the parent. But particularly when it comes to the father, one of the reasons we honor the father is because the father is tasked with providing for the family, providing physically for the family. 1 Timothy chapter 5, if you want to turn there with me, we’ll look at a few Scriptures today. In 1 Timothy 5 the passage is about the responsibility to care for family members who are in need, in this case widows. Paul’s trying to define for them what is a real widow. In other words, who do we care for out of the church’s funds, if you will? The point he’s making is that the family has the first responsibility to provide for the family. And if the family cannot provide for the family then the church is to step in and help provide. So it says in verse 4, “But if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents; for this is good and acceptable before God. Now she who is really a widow, and left alone, trusts in God and continues in supplications and prayers night and day. But she who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives. And these things command, that they may be blameless. But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.” Or my version says—that’s the King James, I love that word, the infidel—an unbeliever. In other words, this is such a common-sense principle of morality that even unbelievers recognize the duty of, quote, piety at home. That is, that parents have a responsibility to provide for their children. Of course, when the parents are old, they can’t work, then the responsibility flips, right? Then it becomes the responsibility of the children to provide for the parents. So we honor our dads because of their provision for the family, all the long hours that they work, often times under stressful conditions, and they often have difficult situations of work to deal with. They often labor in jobs in which they are basically unhappy or unfulfilled. I read a stat a while back. A survey was done of people. If you could leave your job and get another job, would you do it? And it was like 70-something percent of the people said they were unhappy in their job. Pretty amazing. And so, you know, the myth that’s been sold to our culture is that you poor ladies, staying home with a kid, you’re getting ripped off because your husband gets to go to work. He gets to go to a job. It’s like a vacation. He gets to lounge around, drink coffee. All the people there are nice. The women are beautiful. The men are, you know, I mean, you talk about a myth, right? Many men don’t like the work. They don’t like the people they work with. Their bosses are not nice people. It’s cutthroat. It’s just a deplorable situation to work in, and yet they often work in that kind of situation, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, to provide for their family. So that is called sacrifice, amen? Sacrifice, daily sacrifice. And so we honor our dads because of their willingness to lay down their lives in that way in ways which really are taken for granted. I mean, it’s kind of assumed that you just go to work. But we now know that many dads don’t do that anymore. We see increasingly that fathers sadly are not providing for their children. Matter of fact, they’re not even recognizing and owning their own children. They’re just walking away from their pregnant girlfriend or their wife and kids, and they just walk away. This is an epidemic we have, which is why, over the past generation, with the rise of what I call radical feminism, we now have, we have seen a growing problem of single mothers and a fiasco on welfare. And it’s not just in the black community, which is what many people think. It’s across the board. It’s because of the breakdown of the family and the fact that men are abandoning their wives and kids. So this willingness of a father to sacrifice day in and day out for his wife and children is not a small matter to be taken for granted, amen? So we honor them for that.

Honor Fathers for Spiritual Instruction

We also honor them for not only providing physically, but providing spiritually for their kids. Deuteronomy 6, a well-known text, worth reading, just to remind ourselves, Deuteronomy 6 is a reiteration of the law. In chapter 5, we have the original giving of the Ten Commandments is in Exodus 20, but then they are reiterated again in Deuteronomy 5 because what happened between Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. Say that again. I can’t hear, I’m going deaf. In any case, the generation that heard the first giving died in the wilderness. So it’s being reiterated now to the younger generation, which is going in. Okay? And so, of course, the fifth commandment is to honor your father and your mother. And then in chapter 6, we have this after Moses re-gives the Ten Commandments, he says, verse 3, “Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord God of your fathers has promised you—‘a land flowing with milk and honey.’ 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 strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So the exhortation here to the parents, and it’s primarily the fathers, is to instruct their children in the Word and in the ways of God. So the parents, more than the school, more than the government, even more than the church, have the responsibility to instruct their children in the things of God, amen? Now it doesn’t mean the church doesn’t have a role. But it’s subsidiary, if you will, to the role of the parents. All education should be done under the guidance of the parents. And we even have a doctrine in our educational system. I’m not sure it’s observed much anymore, but it’s called in loco parentis. That the teacher functions in loco parentis, in the place of the parent. That’s what gives the teacher their authority. They’re representing not the state, or not even the church, their authority is derived from the fact that they’re representing the parent. And the parent is the one that has authority in the family. So all throughout Scripture, this is assumed. This teaching on the responsibility of the parents and primarily the father to instruct his children is assumed. Read the, go back and just read the first, well just read the book of Proverbs, over and over and over and over, right? It talks about, “give you what I’ve learned.” And then he gives them basically the book of Proverbs. So, dads should be honored for the work that they do in instructing their kids in the ways of the Lord. Because to do it properly, it requires for the dad to himself know the Word of God. And Deuteronomy 6, notice this. Moses says in verse 6, “And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.” He’s talking to the parents, your heart. Because if it’s not in your heart, you can’t pass it on to your kids so it’s in their heart. So the calling to train in the things of God is first of all a calling to the parent to know God and to know the things of God. So it’s a call to personal sanctification and personal growth, and then that can be transmitted to one’s children. So the father has to study the Word so that he can help instruct his children in the ways of God. I believe it also involves bringing your children to worship, maybe getting them involved in youth Bible studies or different programs where they learn the Scripture. There’s a variety of ways of doing it, but ultimately the parents are responsible. The dads therefore, in addition to their physical provision, also provide spiritually and they should be honored for that.

Honor Fathers for Modeling Christ

Thirdly, they should be honored for their efforts to model Christ and Christianity in the home. You know, you can fake it in certain situations, right? But pretty much at home, that’s who you are, right? No, no amen to that? Amen. And so, you know, a lot of times what happens is dad goes to work all day, eight to ten hours at the job that he doesn’t like with the annoying boss and et cetera, et cetera. And then when he comes home, he just blahs all over his family. He comes in, he kicks the dog and ignores his wife and screams at his little kid. So he’s not modeling Christ and the things that he’s attempting to teach. Our most powerful teaching tool as fathers is our example. It’s just the way it is. The things of the Spirit are often more caught than taught, if you know what I mean. So it’s not that we should pit verbal instruction against example, but the truth is that we have, parents have to be careful of saying one thing and doing another, because you know what that’s called? Yeah, and that’s the one thing kids can smell. They can smell hypocrisy, they can see it. And that makes it very hard for them to embrace what you’re saying, when what you’re doing contradicts what you’re saying. So this requires that we not only teach by our words, but that we teach by our example. Personal sanctification. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the name John Owen. He was a great Puritan theologian. He said sanctification is basically stomping on your belly. In other words, sanctification means mortifying your personal lusts and desires. And that is hard work. And that is sacrifice. It’s hard to be holy. It’s hard to be holy. Regardless of where you are in your spiritual trajectory, in your spiritual journey, you know that when you’re confronting a weakness or a bad habit or a sin in your life, you know the power of that. And it takes a battle. It takes a commitment on your part to grow spiritually. It doesn’t just happen. Okay, and so when you see a dad who’s striving for holiness so that he can exemplify it for his kids, that’s something for which he should be honored. Amen.

Honor Fathers for Prayer and Representation

Lastly, dads should be honored because of the time they spend praying for their children. There’s a beautiful picture, and we won’t go there, but in the book of Job, in the opening chapter, about how Job would sacrifice to the Lord, and it says that just in case, my translation, just in case his kids had sinned, he offered a sacrifice for them. Now you know we Americans think of our relationship with God as a solitary affair. You know what I’m saying? You have a relationship with God, your wife has a relationship with God, your kids have a relationship with God. And we don’t think corporately and we don’t think representatively. But when a dad goes before the Lord, he’s going not only as an individual, he’s going before the Lord as the representative of his family. And so it’s appropriate for a dad to confess the sins of his family before the Lord. And so he goes on their behalf as the priest of the family, interceding for them and confessing for them, not just for himself, but for them also. So he takes the responsibility upon himself for the sins that he sees in his home. That is a heavy burden for fathers to carry. But those fathers that carry that truly should be honored. Here’s what Wesley said to dads. He said, next to your wife are your children, who are immortal spirits whom God has for a time entrusted to you, to train them up in all holiness and fit them for the enjoyment of God in eternity. This is a glorious and important trust, seeing a soul is of more value than all the world besides. Every child therefore you are to watch over with the utmost care so that when you are called to give an account of each to the Father of lights, you may give your account with joy and not with grief. Amen.

This Is Right, Because God Commanded It

Let’s go back to our original text and read it again and then we’re going to close. Ephesians 6:1: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise: that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth.” All of the things that we just mentioned, the physical provision, the hard work, the spiritual instruction, the prayer, the sacrifice that fathers make. All of these things are part of what Paul means by saying, this is right. It’s the right thing to do for all of those reasons. But lastly, it’s the right thing to do for one more reason I want to mention, and that is, it’s the right thing to do because God commanded it. You know, we’re at the place in our culture where everybody questions first principles. Okay? In other words, we’ve denied first principles. We’ve denied anything is absolute truth. And absolute truth is the truth that is asserted and no longer questioned, and then you build on that truth. But if you have no absolute truth, you have nothing to build on. And as many philosophers will tell you, that the more you think about it, the more you realize first principles cannot be established by reason. Because reason is built on the first principle. And so God has commanded us to honor father and mother, and that’s the ultimate reason. That’s the ultimate reason why we do it. Yes, fathers provide, they pray, they teach, they do all these things and we should be grateful for these things, we should acknowledge these things. But as I said before, no father is perfect. Some fathers are actually tragic failures. Yet God commands us to honor father and mother. He says this is right and he says this is the first commandment with promise. I actually believe that the proper translation is, this is the prime commandment with promise, not merely the first in order. Why? Because this commandment is the foundation of honoring all authority. If children do not learn to honor parental authority, they will not respect the authority of the church or the authority of the school or the authority of the government, and what will happen is you will have social chaos. Matter of fact, that is what we’re seeing today. The questioning of authority that began way back in the 60s is now bearing the fruit that we’re seeing in our culture which is very, very ugly. All the social indicators are bad. They’re all bad and they’re getting worse.

I want to show you this real quick and then we’ll wrap it up. I know I’ve talked too long. This is a plaque of the Ten Commandments. Y’all see it? This hung in a public school in Kentucky in a third-grade girls’ class. And on the bottom of it, it says this, the secular application of the Ten Commandments, the very, very tiny print here. “The secular application of the Ten Commandments is clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western civilization and the common law of the United States.” This hung in every classroom in our public schools before 1963. Okay. Right there in the middle, it says, honor your father and your mother. Because this is the foundation of Western civilization and American common law. And when you take this, you take these away, this crumbles. It crumbles and it’s been crumbling for over a generation now. So, we need to do our part. I’m not saying go out and write a letter to somebody and get it put back in the classroom. Okay, that will only happen when there’s a revival in our culture. But we in our own sphere, in our own family, in our own church community, we can obey and we ought to obey. Right. We can apply and we ought to apply. And as the church does apply, the church does live it out, then we set the example for our culture, and of course, by the grace of God, if He chooses there to be a restoration of honor for God’s Word in our society. Amen. Be awesome, wouldn’t it?

Let’s stand and pray. Lord, we thank You that You’ve given us Your Word to show us what is true and what is right. Lord, there’s many things we don’t understand, but we do understand that You are true and right. And then when You say something, it must be true. And so we honor it, we honor Your Word. I want to thank You for sharing today, thank You for the testimonies, thank You for all the dads that have just been faithful. In so many ways, I bless them on this day. I also pray for those, Lord, that may be even struggling today with their relationship with their parents in some way. We do ask that You might bring healing there. We know that our fathers are fallen fathers, help us to forgive, help us to walk in grace so that we ultimately honor You by honoring them. We pray all this, Lord, in the name of Your precious Son, Jesus. Amen. Happy Father’s Day.