Honor Your Father and Mother

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother (which is the first commandment with a promise), so that it may be well with you, and that you may live long in the land” (Eph. 6:1-3).

As one who grew up in a homeschooling, believing family, especially with the kind of parents I have, this admonition in the Scriptures has never seemed to be terribly difficult to obey, with the exception of my childhood years when they issued certain commands I disliked. When I examine the conditions of my life, I have in my parents and my in-laws wells of wisdom and counsel. In thankfulness to the grace of God for giving me this blessing and also making this blessing known to me, the way I try to honor them is to carry on the legacy of faithfulness I have inherited.

I know that I have received a rare blessing, but I also am able to look back and see the ways my parents and my in-laws fell short. Yet knowledge of their failures is no license for me to resent them. What I must recognize is that they built on the foundation they received, since my dad is a first-generation Christian and my maternal grandfather was an unbeliever until shortly before his death, but recognize that they did an incredible job. They gave me a better foundation of faith, tradition, and even wealth than they received.

What I must do is build upon that foundation and make good on what I have been given by providing my children with something even more robust.

However, as I have become older, I have come to know many men whose parents are entirely undeserving of honor. I have met young women whose fathers show little care for their spiritual wellbeing, and young men whose faith demands they do not follow the examples of their fathers. For Christians with that kind of background, what is to be done? When your father and mother are entirely undeserving of honor, how do you fulfill the command of God to honor them?

When we zoom out and examine the whole narrative laid out for us in the Scriptures, we see that God is telling a grand story of redemption. For His own reasons, He allowed the fall of man to occur, and He laid out a plan for evil to be finally defeated and Himself to be crowned the Victor over sin and death. As creatures made in His image and then tainted by sin, the plan of God for Mankind is redemption through the atonement of Christ. When we are regenerated, we are redeemed, even re-judged, and made into new creatures with new natures.

What does that have to do with honoring father and mother?

The New Covenant does not require us to merely spiritualize every command. The fact that we, His people, become sons of God does not mean that we are not still sons of our earthly fathers. Obviously, since the Scriptures tell children to obey their father and mother, the commandment refers to earthly familial relationships.

Elsewhere in the Scriptures, the commandment of God to us is to render honor to those who hold particular positions. Wives are to be subject to their husbands even though they sometimes make mistakes (1 Pet. 3:1-2). Servants are to render reverence to their masters even when they are crooked (1 Pet. 2:18). Citizens are to be subjected to civil rulers even when they are not personally honorable (Rom. 13:1-7). The way we relate to our own parents should then be understood as a duty to render honor even if that honor is sometimes undeserved.

But how do we render undeserved honor without being two-faced or dishonest?

We in no way need to lie and ascribe honorable attributes to our parents that they do not actually embody. Those of us who do not live near our parents as adults, however, are “ambassadors” for our families. 

“A good name is to be chosen over great wealth, Favor is better than silver and gold” (Prov. 22:1).

At our own workplaces, in our churches, and among our friends; we are the ones whose conduct affects the way people think about the names we carry. During my time at the ALERT Academy, we would witness progressions of brothers come through the ministry and perform similarly in trials. One set of brothers would all do very well, and another set would all be duds. The rest of us men would consequently develop an opinion of what the fathers of these brothers must be like. Most of the time we were right. After one or two brothers from a family would come through the ALERT Academy, we automatically had either a high or low opinion of their fathers and of any of their brothers who came after them.

However, there were a few young men who came through the program who did very well, but whose fathers were far from exceptional. One close friend of mine whom I greatly respect has a terrible father and a foolish mother. He is nevertheless an individual whose name means something good. As a Christian ready to be refined by the hand of God and conformed to the image of His Son, the bad legacy of his family ends with him; his children will inherit something good, just like I did through the transformation of my own father.

Because God is objectively good and righteous, those who are joined to Him can have a real and true view of honor. Our own parents of course all have their vices, while some seem to only have vices and no virtues. God nevertheless tells us to honor them. For those who have received the great and increasingly rare blessing of virtuous parents, the work ahead is to be good stewards of their legacy and build upon that legacy to give our future generations something even greater.

“Grandchildren are the crown of old men, and the beauty of sons is their fathers” (Prov. 17:6).

For those Christians who mark the first generation of a redeemed family line, the commandment is in no way lessened, but the obedience will take a somewhat different form. If your father gave you no inheritance of faith, you have some foundation work to do for your own. God never gives us excuses for laziness: of those who have received much, much is required, and to those who received little, faithfulness will yield the chance to be trusted with more. Whether they are in the first generation or the fiftieth, Christian fathers as well as mothers bear the responsibility to foster greatness in their children for the glory of God.

Let us honor our fathers by making our sons proud to bear their names.

SKYLAR BORSMAN
1689 Federalism | Post Millennialism | General Equity Theonomist
Skylar works as a machine operator at a metal shop in his hometown. He lives with his wife, Morgan, and their two children. Skylar graduated from the International ALERT Academy and earned his Bachelor's degree in Youth Ministry from Pensacola Christian College in 2020.