Title: Respect and Obedience to Parents
Contents
1. Background of the text
- The Apostle Paul explained the greatness of Christian doctrine while writing to the members of the Ephesian Church, and then in Chapter 5, he teaches how believers who have received God's grace should live. Chapter 5 deals with the relationship between the church and the saints, and Chapter 6 deals with the relationship between the family and the employer and employee. The apostle first deals with attitudes toward parents in chapter 6 and says that obeying them is honoring them.
2. The Commandment of Honoring Parents
① Do not neglect your parents (Deuteronomy 27:16)
- Do not take the existence of parents lightly, and do not take sympathetic filial filial piety towards them, but perform religious filial piety. Only filial piety that comes from a heart that values and loves parents is acceptable to God.
- Disrespect for parents is a great crime that goes hand in hand with idolatry and serious sexual depravity.
② Give your heart (Proverbs 22:26)
- In order to respect and honor your parents, you must give your heart to them.
- The first step to filial piety is to value the relationship with parents and to develop that relationship. Therefore, accepting parents with their hearts and rejoicing in their hearts with their hearts is the first necessary virtue.
③ Saving souls (Joshua 2:12)
- The ultimate goal of filial piety is to save the soul. If we are believers and accept the sentence of the book of Hebrews (Hebrews 9:27) as true, it is not religious filial piety to love our parents and do all our filial piety and watch their souls fall into hell.
- Therefore, in season and out of season, we must, with all our might and effort, regard the fate of the souls of our parents as ours, and pray for their souls and make every effort.
3. Respect and Obedience to Parents
① Love before respect...
Respect literally means honoring and serving parents. God has instilled in all human beings the nature to honor their parents. However, in reality, many people live without honoring their parents. When it comes to respecting parents, the foundation is love. Respect is possible only when love precedes it, and when there is respect, one can obey parents. Only when we truly love our parents will all the commandments about honoring our parents be fulfilled.
- However, if you don't live with your parents from a young age, a sense of distance always arises. If there is a relationship between parents and children who have a difficult past to love, it is necessary to liquidate them in faith and restore the relationship of love.
② The identity of love, rejoicing and cherishing
- There are two types of love, one is to rejoice and the other is to cherish. When we say we are happy, the reason for that joy is our existence itself. Additionally, if you love because of the other things that follow, you have no more reason to love when it is gone. Therefore, even if there are wounds in family relationships, we must have embracing love in the faith of knowing God's providence like Joseph (Genesis 50:19-21). That is the right attitude of a believer who has been loved by God. The fact that our parents are alive should not be a heavy burden on us, but an indescribably great gift. Love is the power that overcomes everything. To see and rejoice in seeing father and mother as one soul is love, and that love should be the motive for obedience.
- The essence of love is the second thing you value. Tolstoy said that the emotion of love is superior to the fear of death. When you value an object, you only think about what you can do for it and not about the sacrifices you have to pay for it. Because if you have the best value, you don't think it's great even if you sacrifice unlimitedly. The true nature of love for parents is that they value their very existence because they are parents.
③ The basis of obedience, respect for parents
- This cherished heart is the basis of obedience. However, if the parents are unbelievers or remain in a formal faith, their thoughts are secular and they do not communicate well, mental union is difficult. At that time, complete obedience becomes difficult. So sometimes children who stand right in the faith need to be mentally parents. Therefore, in order to obey our earthly father, we must not disobey our heavenly Father. However, if the wishes of the parents do not conflict with the will of Heavenly Father, even if his thoughts are inferior to mine, we must obey them completely.
- But here comes our wickedness. Because our parents are unbelievers or formal Christians, we often think that everything he wants is against God's will, and we do not obey them, and we often succumb to sympathetic filial piety. The love for down is a universal nature that is hard to resist in the order of creation, but the love for Ollie is given only to humans. The uniqueness of the believer is revived in the personality of these two loves coexisting together. What our Heavenly Father, who gave His Son for us, wants of us is that we deeply love and obey our parents in faith.
Be the saints who rejoice and cherish your parents, and completely obey them with the heart of love.
2004-05-09