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Honor Your Parents: The fifth command is to honor your father and your mother. Parents are supposed to help their kids grow in their faith and in wisdom for life. But what does it look like to honor your parents when they fail to do these things? How do we honor them if we have a broken or even abusive relationship with them? Recorded on Feb 26, 2023, on Exodus 20:12 by Pastor David Parks. Ten Commandments: Learning the Law of Love is a sermon series on the most influential legal code in human history. Why should we learn about the Ten Commandments today? Because they reveal God’s will for how human beings ought to live: to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. Ultimately, the law of love points us directly to Jesus. Sermon Transcript All year, the theme of our preaching ministry is Learning the way of Jesus. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments, as part of God’s moral law, reveal how God wants us to live. And ultimately, this new way of life can be summed up as learning to love the Lord our God, heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbor as ourselves. The Ten Commandments are really a law of love. So today, we are considering the fifth command to honor your father and your mother. Why should we do this, and what does it look like for us to obey this command? What if we have a broken or abusive relationship with our parents? There is much to unpack here. So if you have a Bible/app, please open to Exodus 20:12. We’ll read through the remaining commandments and then unpack the fifth together today. Exodus 20:12-17 (NIV), “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.” As we’ve said, the book of Exodus, written about 4,300 years ago by Moses, the prophet and leader of ancient Israel, describes a key turning point in history when God rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and entered into a covenant relationship with them, which included giving them the Law. The first four commands are focused vertically on what it means to love the Lord your God, heart, soul, mind, and strength. And we’ve seen that there is only one true God, the creator of heaven and earth, who is worthy of worship, deserving of respect, and we must rest in him. Those are commands 1-4. Here, with the fifth command, and for the rest of the Ten Commandments, we'll turn from a vertical focus on God to a horizontal focus on what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. To love your neighbor starts with your closest neighbors, those living in your own home when you are young, and those in your family when you are older, including your father and your mother. Once again, v. 12 says, “Honor your father and your mother,” which, as the Apostle Paul says in Eph 6, “is the first commandment with a promise.” And here’s the promise: “that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Now, most commentators don’t believe this promise is meant to be taken individually but nationally. If Israel as a people honors their parents, as a society/nation, they will live for a long time in the Promised Land. But the language of this particular promise is interesting. It’s found again in Dt 25, although with a different command. Deuteronomy 25:15–16 (NIV), “You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. For the Lord your God detests anyone who does these things, anyone who deals dishonestly.” So in Dt 25, it refers to the corrupt practice of using different weights for trading or payment,