that the family as an institution looked at from a worldwide lens. It’s had a tough time the last number of decades. Marriages aren’t viewed the same way as they were a generation or two ago. And and having children is viewed often as an unwanted burden or a bit of a luxury item. One of the starkkest examples of that Marvin’s just putting the PowerPoint up. One of the starkkest examples of that, of a failed state really when it comes to family, is South Korea. Because not long ago, not too long ago, uh, in the 1960s, the average Korean woman gave birth to six children. And then during a period of rapid industrialization, the government urged parents to have fewer children, but to raise the ones they had well. And that led to South Korea plummeting to what’s now the lowest fertility rate in the world. It’s.7 children per woman, far below the 2.1 that’s required uh for replacement level. And more recently, the government’s pumped billions of dollars trying to encourage couples to have more babies. But unless things change dramatically over the next couple of generations, South Korea is expected to go from a population of about 50 million today down to maybe 15 to 20 million. and not nearly enough young workers to support the social needs of a very aged population. One woman uh Arum Yu, if I can say that right, she was working for a large electronics conglomerate in Soul, Korea in the early 2010s. None of her colleagues at all had more than two children. One supervisor told her that that his parents had sold half their business just to pay for his education and he saw no way to provide uh similar examples or similar similar opportunities for his own children if he had any more. Another female manager handed her two children to her parents to raise so that she could uh devote herself to her career to earn money for their education. She felt lucky that her parents lived fairly close, but another manager only saw her one-year-old son on weekends since her parents lived on the other side of the country. And a Ramu said she worked so hard in her career, she eventually developed a debilitating migraine headache, forced her to go on medical leave. It jeopardized her career. And she remembered at that point her mother’s words, saying, “When we pour out our hearts to God, he surely listens.” So, she started attending her church’s daily 6:00 a.m. service every morning and praying for God’s healing. 6 months later, God’s answer came in the form of an unexpected pregnancy. And her husband and her they named their daughter Eli Anna, meaning my God has answered. And she says she then discovered a different mission in life than just her ambitious career goals. And her parental her parental leave ended a year later. Both her and her husband took the bold move to resign their jobs. They left for the mission field with their one-year-old daughter, and they now live in Dallas, Texas. She’s completing her PhD in Old Testament at Dallas Seminary, and the family manages to get by on a single income. She’s now the mother of five children, making her a complete anomaly to those back in her home countries. Recent years, South Korea has seen a proliferation of no kid zones, restaurants, and businesses where children are not allowed. And stay-at-home moms are often derogatorily referred to as mumb bugs or insect mums who spend their husband’s hard-earned money in coffee shops to allow their children and allow their children to cause all these disturbances in public places. But for a room, she says that she prays that she’ll be able to resist the temptation to see her children as economic investments or to judge their success by worldly standards, forcing them to pursue careers as doctors or lawyers or venture capitalists. And she prays that she’ll be able to encourage them instead to discover and follow their own unique God-given talents and interests. Such prayers like that are much more aligned with what God has to say about marriage and family in scripture because we read in scripture that God called men and women in marriage to be fruitful and to multiply. Psalm 127 says children are a heritage from the Lord likening them to arrows in a quiver that arrows in the hand of a warrior that are the are the children of one’s youth. She says now she finds that everything every morning she can shoot her children out into the world with prayer. trust that God will take care of them and in the evening she’ll reather them, learn all about their victories and their struggles. Now, some couples, of course, bear the grief of not being able to have children or have as many children as they’re like, but but having children is not the point of our message this morning. Our task is much easier and more straightforward because for any of us to be here this morning, we had to have two distinct parents, a father and a mother. and to varying degrees at least one of them wanted us to come into this life perhaps even viewing us as an arrow that they could shoot out into the world. Now they may have been I there’s a mixture I’m sure represented here they may have been great parents they may have been average parents may have been very below average parents but God says that no matter what parents we were dealt the task of each one of us is to relate to them in a way that gives them honor. Now, it may mean honoring them in person, maybe honoring their memory if they’re gone. But the fifth commandment stated in Exodus 20, it doesn’t really give any of us a way to opt out of what it means to honor our parents. First four of the ten commandments guide us into this is the way to have an authentic, genuine relationship with the one true God. We’re instructed to jealously guard our worship of him and and enjoy him as the only one and true entity in the universe, the sovereign ruler of all. First four commandments have to do with our relationship with God. And the last six direct our attention to how we’re to relate to people. And usually the first people in our lives that we’re going to have to develop a relationship with are our parents. So, it’s no surprise that the first of those last six commandments that instruct us how to relate to others says, “Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” And we’ll talk about that more in a few moments, but we need to recognize right from the start that for some here this morning, honoring your parents is a is a relatively natural and easy and a delightful thing for you to do. Others of you, it’s probably a tremendously difficult task. This commandment seems like an overwhelming challenge. Whatever the situation is for us, none of our parents are or were entirely successful in being all that they could have been for us. So, there’s some thoughtful work we all have to do in learning to honor them as God calls us to. Now, honor is an interesting word to think about. It’s not quite the same as obey. In fact, we should probably think of it like this. Although all of us need to start out lives rather blindly obeying our parents, that obedience is meant to transition over time from obedience to honoring. Proverbs 22:15 states that something we all know that says foolishness or folly is bound up in the heart of a child. And it’s the job of parents to dislodge that natural foolishness and replace it with wisdom. And children start out life, they’re so naive. They’re so gullible. You can hide a coin and pretend that it’s coming out of their ear. And you can make them think that you’re the strongest person in the world. And if you want to torture them a bit, you can tell them there’s a monster that lives behind your furnace and they should never go down to the furnace room and they’ll believe you. And it’s kind of cute. And it’s great fun to observe and enjoy that natural foolishness of children. But you certainly don’t want that the consequences of foolishness to dog them into adult life. Children are naive little fools. They have to be commanded to don’t put the knife in the wall socket and don’t touch the pot that’s boiling on the stove. And our parents are the ones who’ve kept our our hands from being chopped off from lawnmowers and being battered by cars in the street and drinking paint thinner or being drowned in a lake. I think all of us here would probably have fewer digits on our hands if our parents hadn’t at least done some looking after us in our early life. Parents have to be very authoritarian the early stages because kids don’t understand how things work and they don’t understand how relationships work. If one of them grabs a toy and takes it away from another child, we have to tell them to give it back and to apologize for taking it and to listen to their teachers and to be respectful toward adults and and we don’t let our children get away with lying or hitting or screaming or never cleaning up their own messes. If we let them get away with those things, we’re bad parents. We’re not equipping our kids for future lives where they’ll be safe, where they can actually have and make friends, where they can function in a work environment. We’re setting them up for a very dismal life if we don’t require some raw obedience from them at an early age. But we certainly don’t want our relationship with children to remain at that level. I would hate to have to call up my four adult children every morning and tell them to get out of bed and tell them to brush their teeth and make sure they get out the door and get to work on time and tell them to pay for their cell phone bills and and be nice to their boss and their co-workers. And you know, foolishness in a child is to be expected, but foolishness in a grown man or woman, that’s lamented. So, as parents, we want our children to transition from a relationship of obedience to something more mature. And that’s why if you look at what parents are instructed to do in the Bible in raising children, their prominent task, their main job is to send people out into the world who are wise. Just read over the Proverbs sometime and you’ll find this theme repeated over and over. My son, hear the instruction of your father. Forsake not your mother’s teaching, for there are graceful garland to your head and pendants for your neck. My son, keep your father’s command. Don’t reject your mother’s teaching. Wise children make their fathers proud of them. Foolish ones bring their mother’s grief. My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad. My inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right. So our job as parents is not to to have children so they become our little retirement plan or or so that we can have this little cadre of best friends who will always be there for us. Purpose of parenting is more than that. It’s to develop people of wisdom who will no longer have to sit under our authority. They’ll no longer have to think about obeying us. They’re people we can shoot out like arrows into the world and trust that they’ll be okay. We want to develop critical thinkers to offer our children a world view of what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s worth living for, what’s worth dying for. A worldview that assists them with going with the grain of the universe, not against it. So authority and discipline, they’re the temporary early me uh uh means measures that a parent uses with the end goal of producing wise children. And our children, they may at some point reject some of our teaching. They might question our worldview. They might experiment in ways that we know is not helping them. But we’ve really done our job as parents if we can pull back the bow, let fly the arrow, send them out into the world as basically wise people. People who are in touch with reality, with the way things are, they understand how things work in the world. Uh they have some character, some humility, they can be people focused and serviceoriented. And then although our children’s need to obey us to submit to our authority, that’s expired. All children for all time remain called to pay attention to the fifth commandment to honor their parents. And they’ll be called to do that by by God to do that for the rest of their parents’ lives. Now, we’ll look at what honoring entails in a moment. But before we do, notice the second part of this fifth commandment. Says, “Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” That’s not saying that honoring parents is a way to guarantee an individual long life because we know that’s not true. Lots of uh really parent honoring children suffer unfortunate and premature deaths. This is a promise God’s making to an entire society of people to the ancient people of Israel. It’s a promise given to a community. When God says, “Honor your father and mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you,” he’s offering a promise to one specific nation, one nation under God, the nation of Israel, chosen not because they were better or more powerful than other nations, but they were the nation called to represent God to the world and to one day bring about the Messiah who would come to forgive all sin, past, present, and future. And Jesus would emerge from Israel, from the line of David. He’d come in the as God in the form of a man and he’d endure capital punish punishment for all of us commandment breakers. So now when we put our faith and trust in what Jesus has done on the cross, we don’t just live long in the land as Israel could. We live forever with the God who embraces us as his children, who happily calls us his own. So the promise in this fifth commandment shouldn’t be seen. This doesn’t just apply to ancient Israel. We’re we’re unlike them in that we’re not one nation under God. We’re a pluralistic society. We have no special assignment or commission from God as the nation of Israel had. But we know full well that when children disregard any of the commandments, including the fifth commandment, if they establish a spirit of rebellion in their home life, they’ll take that rebellion toward authority to school with them. They’ll take it into their jobs, into the way they view government, into the way they respond to the laws of the city and and the province, and they’ll take it into church, and they’ll propagate these unhealthy attitudes of rebellion throughout all of society. Dishonoring in the home spills out into every aspect of life. So, bad children become bad citizens. And societies society won’t work if families don’t work. And if families unravel, communities will unravel and entire cultures will suffer. If our family doesn’t work well, there won’t be any living and prospering in the land or in any land. Conversely though, the the best side of this, the flip side is that children who honor parents, they become kind of a national treasure. They bring a corporate grace to the nation. They’re tomorrow’s employers and employees and teachers and healthcare workers and social workers and elders and pastors and politicians. And if they’ve learned the humility of honoring their parents in their own homes, they’ll carry something of that spirit with them as they go throughout life. Fifth commandment has a pretty long reach into society, into our world. So, it’s our it’s on us to pay attention to it. Fifth commandment, uh, here’s some ways to do it. We’ve seen that honoring parents is not the same as obeying. Go even further and say that honoring parents really doesn’t require grown children to obey their parents at all. It doesn’t even require that we admire our parents, that we trust them, or even that we feel real affection toward them. I think that honoring stands objectively above all those things. Honoring is different than trusting and admiring and feeling affection. You can give a person genuine honor without any of those things. That word translated honor in the fifth commandment, it’s the Hebrew word caved, which literally means to be heavy, to have weight. To honor someone is to regard them as a weighty, substantial person. If you ever held just a tiny little nugget of gold, first thing you notice might not be its color or its shine, especially if it’s in a natural state, but you’ll notice it seems to weigh far more than it ought to for a rock that size. And honored relationships are like that. We see in that person there’s a weight, there’s a substance, a significance that that they hold in our lives. Honoring parents, assigning them that weight. It’s kind of a moral choice we make. It’s not necessarily an emotional choice. We’re ultimately honoring the God who has placed those people above us in our lives. We’re acknowledging that God has set us in our families. We’re acknowledging his work in our families of origin. Now, in a great family, in a functional family, there is a long-term loyalty. There’s a commitment to look out for one another’s best interests. That’s kind of the context of learning to honor our parents. So, if we want to be specific and think of some ways that we can truly honor our parents, I’d like to offer five brief suggestions. One way that we can honor our parents is for us to simply grow up and apply ourselves to becoming a wise person of character. If your parents job is to inculcate wisdom in you, don’t fight what they’re doing. Receive their instruction without rebellion. Mirror the character that they want to see developed in your life. Proverbs 23 says, “The father of a righteous man has great joy. He who has a wise son delights in him. May your father and mother be glad. May she who gave you birth rejoice.” So through your own character and reputation and integrity and humility and uprightness, you become a precious crown to your parents and you’ll honor them just by the way you are and the way you conduct your life. Second way that we might be called to honor our parents is to provide for their needs. You know, one thing Jesus noted in Matthew 15 was that the religious leaders, the Pharisees of the day, they had found a loophole to exempt themselves from taking care of their elderly parents. And Jesus thoroughly condemned them for it. He told them they needed to pay close attention to the fifth commandment. And then we we went over it a few weeks ago that Jesus at the end of his life, he’s hanging on the cross. He’s dying for you and for me. He’s feeling forsaken by his heavenly father. But in the midst of all that cosmic drama and battle, even in his last agonized moments as the eldest son of his family, he realized he wouldn’t be able to take care of his mom in her old age. So on the cross in John 19 he gave her to another son to his friend John one of his disciples. He transferred to John the responsibility of looking after his mom. And it says from that time on that this disciple took her into his home. That’s honoring a parent. Jesus really is the perfect example of knowing that he didn’t want to leave his mom destitute. Uh we don’t get over this command. Children don’t get over their parents. They honor and rever them throughout their lives. So any Christian who neglects or uh or or ignores his needy parents is not paying attention to this commandment. Honor them as they get older. Don’t treat them as an inconvenience. Not just financial support that might be needed, but it’s time with them. It’s emotional support. It’s friendship. It’s prayer support. Seeing them safely through to the end of their days. Now, third way for us to honor our parents is to is to be a little more realist realistic. You know, I’m well aware I’m I’ve had four kids. I’m far from perfect. There are situations, conversations with my kids that I’d very much like to take back if I could. Not only are parents going to be the first people we’re called to love, they’re also the first people we’re going to be called to forgive. And we need to remain committed to forgiving them for the mistakes and the blunders that they make. No parent has ever perfectly loved or taught their child. No parent has been perfectly consistent in the delivery of values and lessons. So you shouldn’t demand that from your parents because they can’t do that. No parent is capable of giving us the unconditional love that only God can give us. And that has consequences. What that means is when we’re young, our parents are there. They are kind of a proxy for God in our lives. If they say we’re wonderful, we feel great. If they say we’re failing or we’re ugly or we’re bad, it devastates us. We can’t honor our parents until we can crawl out from under that influence in our lives. We can’t give them a godlike place in our lives any longer. Otherwise, we’re always going to be so desperate for their approval or we’ll be broken and bitter because they haven’t given us the kind of unconditional love we felt they should have and we won’t develop a relationship of realistic wisdom with them. So unless we’re realistic about where what parents can give and can’t give us, we won’t be able to have the distance to honor them properly. Now, speaking of distance, what do you do with this commandment if you had really lousy parents? And some of you may have. Some of you may have had parents who were profoundly below average. Maybe they were untruthful and inconsistent and abusive. Might have been consumed with anger, overcome with addictions. Maybe they were really evil people. Maybe they couldn’t have cared less about being around you and offering you any love and support. Unstable and mean and untrustworthy. How on earth are we to honor parents like that? I think the best answer is to honor them from a safe distance. You shouldn’t feel guilty if you don’t feel affection for them or if you don’t have any particularly positive feelings toward them. God won’t command you to have feelings that you can’t feel for them. You might completely disapprove of their lives and their character. You might despise their behavior. How do you honor parents like that? Maybe the best you can do in that situation is to limit your contact with them. Keep yourself out of the pathway of harm. Maybe you can send them a card for their birthday or communicate every now and then through the safety of an email. Maybe you’ll be able to give them a short call every six months. or maybe the best you can do and all you can do is just pray for them to repent with genuine hope that God would intervene in their lives. All of those things I think are still ways to honor and assign weight and offer a kind of family loyalty to even a very bad parent. Yeah. I was talking to a young guy in Jamaica last week and and uh he’s he’s about 33. He’s a dad to a young son. He’s got a daughter on the way. And he was talking about how in his family tree, none of the dads ever stuck around. They were all absent or distant or selfish and uncaring. And he talked to me about his family tree and he pondered what it would mean for him to break that mold. And we talked about some things, you know, just how he could be the dad who comes home and he leaves his work side and just plays with his kids. And even if your family line has been very dishonorable and hasn’t left you with any good models to emulate, you can still become a person who makes it a little bit easier, a little more natural for the next generation to honor their parents. Now, we could go on for this for a while. One last thing, though, that way that you can observe the fifth commandment to honor your parents. And I see this as a pretty simple life hack. It’s not hard to do, but it can bring great results. and that’s to let your parents know that something of them lives on in you and will continue to live in you after you’re gone. There’s a philosopher named Samuel Sheffller and he’s studied and written some some really interesting things about the afterlife. He’s not a Christian. In fact, he’s not religious at all. He doesn’t believe that he will in any way survive uh his own biological death. But he sees the need for people to believe maybe not necessarily in a personal afterlife, but in what he terms a collective afterlife. So he proposes a thought experiment. It’s been dramatized in the book and the movie entitled Children of Men. And you can see that’s 2027. That’s coming up really soon. So we better be aware of that. But in that story, something has happened to the world and it’s taken away human fertility. No more babies are ever going to be born. Although your generation will likely live out a normal lifespan, your generation is going to be the last generation of humans on the planet. And Sheffler wonders in that scenario, would people consider anything important anymore? Would the value laden lives we live now have any meaning? Would people doing cancer research or climate change work, would they simply stop? Would people writing novels or poems or histories, would they carry on if they knew that in a few years there’d be no one left to read them? Would anyone write a song or teach school or fix a photocopier or work with homeless people or alleviate hunger or care for refugees? Would we even care very much about the education development of our own children? Would anyone retain a commitment to any project? And would anyone find pleasure in anything? Sheffller as he thinks about that he finds it plausible to think that people would just become dejected and apathetic, unenthusiastic, joyless. His proposal is that the values we hold in our lives right now are surprisingly dependent on believing that some people, even if they’re not our close loved ones, even just strangers, they will carry on living after we’re gone. We can be resigned to our own deaths. We’re used to the idea that everyone, including ourselves, must die. but would absolutely devastate us to think that human life wouldn’t carry on for any appreciable time beyond ourselves. As he puts it, we can be sort of okay with leaving the party early so long as we believe that the party will keep going on after we’re gone. Now, I Sheffller’s book I find philosophically, theologically interesting. Obviously, as Christians, we have a don’t have as bleak a view of that. We believe in a personal afterlife and a collective afterlife. But it’s interesting to consider that God has hardwired everyone, no matter whether they believe or not, to have their values very much dependent on the fact that those values are going to be passed on to someone else. Our values are far more dependent than we realize on the fact that life’s going to carry on after we’re gone. So theological musings aside, Sheffller’s thesis I think has something to say to us this morning about the parent child relationship because it’s an immensely honoring thing to do to let our parents know that something of them lives inside of us and will carry on after they’re gone. Last month, our daughter Jessica was she was interviewed on CKUA a UA radio about her work as a children’s entertainer and at one point interviewer asked her where the idea came to start up her own company focused on making children’s music. Where did that idea come from? And her answer was this. She says, “You know, I’d probably have to credit my mom. When we were growing up, she had four kids and was just a busy mom, but she was so musical and so creative. She would turn everything into a song. Every routine had a song. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of songs for kids that probably no one will ever hear. And so she was really our inspiration as artists, my siblings and I. Then the interviewer asked her, “Well, what kind of music did you listen to growing up?” And she said, “Well, my dad was a jazz fanatic.” And so our household was almost exclusively jazz, and we would do Ella Fitzgerald and Louisie Armstrong, all the greats, as well as some very experimental jazz. And my dad would have challenges for us like is this the A part or the B part and what instruments playing and stuff like that. So we were kind of steeped in it all our life in the interview and then said, “Didn’t that get annoying after a while?” Like, “Dad, dad, can’t just be a regular dad and go out and play and throw the baseball around with me.” And it’s disheartening for me to think that all of the CQA uh CKUA listeners who tune in on Wednesday afternoons, probably two of them. They now have the impression that I never went outside and played ball with my kids. So, I I don’t think I can set the record straight on that. Jessica did say, “I think the really experimental jazz got kind of annoying, but the lyrical stuff we all loved, and for me and my three siblings, it’s influenced all of our music.” If you want to honor your parents, assure them that there’s just something in you that uh that comes from them and just watch for their reaction. They need to see something of themselves in you. Don’t be afraid to point it out. Don’t be afraid to be specific. It’s a powerful thing to let our parents know that something good has been transferred into our lives and it’s going to carry on after they’re gone. So, not just Mother’s Day or Father’s Day, but every day, God’s given us this commandment. He’s issued us a challenge that he expects us to follow through on to honor our parents. And as we take up that challenge, God says, not just our immediate families, but our whole land is going to benefit from all that honoring that goes on. So, let’s just take a few moments of prayer. And here’s some things you might want to pray about as you bow before the Lord. Just thank God for his wisdom and his sovereignty and the family he placed you in and the parents he gave you. That might be a hard prayer to pray, but I think it’s a worthy prayer to honor God’s word. Pray for grace and creativity to honor your parents well. And thank God that he’s your perfect father who’s prepared a home to be with you forever. This is just your own time with God. Take a few moments of personal prayer. And uh I’ll close us off in a moment.