Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
5/5/2022
The Reversing of Morality Part IV Honoring Parents and Authority
Exodus 20. The fifth commandment is this: “Honor your father and mother that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord has given you.” Honor your father and your mother and you’ll have a long life. So parents are given the responsibility to teach. Children are given the responsibility to honor their father and mother and live a long life. Leviticus 19:3 says, “Every one of you shall reverence his mother and father.” Not just obeying but honoring and reverencing.
Then the flipside, Deuteronomy 27:16, “Cursed is he who dishonors his father and mother.” This is a powerful relational restraint that God has built into the world. Faithful parents, righteous parents who take the responsibility to teach their children and their grandchildren about God, to love God and obey God; and children who respond by showing honor to their parents; that’s a family that passes righteousness from one generation to the next.
If you start reading Proverbs in chapter 2 through 7; every chapter begins, “My son,” or, “My child, or hear the instruction of your father or mother,” chapter, after chapter, and it’s all about… all kinds of things. It’s all about money; it’s all about relationships; it’s all about the friends you choose; it’s all about staying away from the adulterous woman; it’s all about how you order your life; it’s about honoring your parents’ chapter, after chapter. This is family and family is a gift from God.
Now have you noticed that your little sinners aren’t really compliant about this? Certainly, the five that were born into our family weren’t. So the Bible gives us a formula for helping them with their compliance. Listen to this, Proverbs 13:24, “He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.” Spanking – I know that’s a bad word. It happens to be biblical.
Listen to Proverbs 19:18. “Discipline your son while there is hope and do not desire his death.” Undisciplined children die young.
Listen to Proverbs 22:15. “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will remove it far from him.”
Proverbs 23:13, “Do not hold back discipline from the child. Although you strike him with the rod, he will not die.” You shall strike him with the rod,” listen to this, “and rescue his soul.”
Proverbs 29:15, “The rod of reproof gives wisdom, but the child who gets his own way shames his mother.”
Now that’s a simple formula – parent, married, man and woman, love each other, love God, teach righteousness. Teach children to honor God, to do what is right. Enforce that with loving discipline – we’re not talking about child abuse, we’re talking about a loving, corrective discipline that associates a measure of pain with disobedience. That’s a very important way to train people.
We have an undisciplined, overly rebellious youth culture that is completely alienated from families. That is the product of all kinds of shattered, broken families – or non-families – who wear violations of the fifth commandment like a badge of honor. Just listen to some of the rap music and how they refer to their mothers.
The devastation of marriage and the devastation of the family shatters this divinely designed restraint. So whether you’re devastating marriage, or whether you’re failing to instruct children in a cohesive home, or whether you’re failing to discipline them, or whether you’re perverting the law of God written in the heart and twisting it, or whether you’re confusing and silencing the consciences, you’re just moving society toward its own death.
The conscience is under assault. The family is under assault. Civil authority is under assault. As the law of God in the heart is twisted, as conscience crumbles, as the family crumbles, as civil authority is attacked by the culture, we move toward nihilism, the overthrowing of all institutions, and a kind of suicide. So we do everything we can to protect those things.
There’s another restraint. The church. That is a spiritual restraint. And when I talk about the church, I’m talking about the organized church because there are a lot of false churches and a lot of phony religions as you all know very well. I’m talking about true Christians, true believers. What makes us a restraint is because God has done a work in us that is internal. The real cure for problems in the world is to change human beings from the inside because that’s where all the sin comes from. And that’s what the gospel of Jesus Christ does. “If any man is in Christ he is a new creation. Old things have passed away, everything has become new.”
The Spirit of God has done a miracle and changed us on the inside so that we love God, and we love others, and we love the truth, and we love the institutions of God. We’ve become the real restraint because we have the message that changes hearts. It’s called the love of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Father, Son, Spirit (Official Lyric Video) // A Table Full Of Strangers // Jason Upton
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qULnbRmU0F8
Excerpts are taken from John MacArthur's "How God Restrains Evil in the World"
