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The Ten Commandments are not a very popular topic these days. Judges get in trouble for trying to put the Ten Commandments in the courtroom. The Ten Commandments are not extremely popular. The truth is that the Ten Commandments are not a legalistic set of regulations for us. These commandments were written by the finger of God. He wrote them as an expression of His character so that we might know Him. It is more important to view the commandments in that way than any other.

What does this tell me about the Father? What does this tell me about God? I find that God is very interested in your relationship because the first four commandments have to do with your relationship with God. The fifth Commandment is where it turns. People say that the last six commandments have to do with our relationship with others. I would like to give a third division. The first four pertain to our relationship with God. The last five involve our relationships with others. But the fifth commandment is specifically focused on the home.

The fifth commandment is concerned with your relationship with father and mother, with children, with the family, because the family is the core of society. In fact, it is good to view this as concentric circles; it begins with our love for God in the inner circle. From there we expand to another circle which is family. We need to love God; we need to love family. Then we go one more circle and that is to love everyone else as well.

We see this same pattern in the gospel commission. Jesus told His disciples they were to start at Jerusalem (The Acts of the Apostles, 32) which is where they lived, where the first church was established. Start in Jerusalem and spread the word throughout the city. Then go to Judea, which is the country in which they live, and then to Samaria, their closest neighboring country, and then to the uttermost parts of the world. We start with God and then we move out like concentric circles. The gospel begins at home and then we move out. That seems to be God’s plan.

He asks how you could love others if you don’t even love the people He gave you to live with on a day-to-day basis. We have here God’s pattern for relationships. God says that good relationships have boundaries. A relationship without boundaries is codependent and extremely unhealthy. There are boundaries in my relationship with you.

All human relationships must have boundaries. My wife has commandments that I did not realize until I got married. One commandment is, Thou shalt have no other girlfriends before me. Another commandment is, Thou shalt not take my name in vain, either in my presence or away from me—talk nice about me is what she is saying. Those commandments are not a burden to me. I have more joy keeping those commandments because I love her and they are not a burden or a legalistic requirement of me at all.

Our relationship has boundaries. She has boundaries for me and I have boundaries for her and without those boundaries we would have an unhealthy relationship. There needs to be a set of expectations that we have in relationships. That is what the Ten Commandments are all about. God tells us that the Ten Commandments are boundaries for your relationship with me. There are boundaries for your family and boundaries for the rest of the world—it would be nice if you do not kill the people you love.

Don’t take from the people you love the things that belong to them; respect their property. These are boundaries for relationships. Don’t bear false witness; don’t trash their character. Every relationship must be governed by boundaries or the relationship becomes unhealthy. When you are raising children, you have boundaries for them. There are things you are trying to teach them because you want them to grow up and become responsible human beings. You want them to understand what a healthy relationship is all about.

One of those boundaries is found in Exodus 20:12. It says, “Honour your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God has given you.” One of the things God does is to put men and women on the same level. This was a new thought for that time because it was a very male dominated society.

In order to understand this passage better we need to understand a concept of the Eastern mind, especially the ancient Eastern mind, and it still exists today. This commandment could also be translated as, “Be sure you don’t shame your father and your mother.” A very strong motivating force in the Eastern mind is the idea of shame avoidance—saving face. It is difficult to understand any of the parables that Jesus taught without an understanding of this basic concept of shame avoidance. We will do anything to avoid shame personally and also collectively as a society. That was a key in the Eastern thought.

Remember the parable of the man who received guests into his home late, unexpectedly, and he had nothing in the house to feed them? He goes over to his neighbor and he bangs on the door and he says, “Give me some bread so I can feed my guests.” The man says, “Leave me alone; I am in bed; I have my children in bed with me” (Luke 11:5–7). We really don’t understand that parable here in the West. We think it means that God is reluctant to answer our prayers, but if we keep knocking on the door, eventually He will answer. That is not what the parable says.

In the East, when someone came to your home, not only were they the guests in your home but they were the guests in the entire community. It would be a point of shame, not just for the man who received him into his home, but for the entire community to not meet the needs of the guests. For this man to go to his neighbor and knock on the door and say I have a guest; I have nothing to feed him; help me out, Jesus was saying, Who would not get out of bed and give him the bread? After all, he would bring shame on himself, upon his neighbor and the entire community. Of course, he is going to defend his name; he is going to honor his reputation; he is going to honor his community by getting out of bed, getting the bread so that he will have something to feed his neighbor. By the way, what the man was asking for was primarily utensils. In those days the food was put into a common pot, usually a stew, and they would take flat bread and dip in the common pot, so the bread became the utensil. So for one man to refuse to do that would bring shame upon the entire community, and no one in their right mind would do that.

The point of Jesus’ parable was when you ask for something in His name, God will always honor His name. He would not think of doing otherwise because of the concept in the Eastern mind of shame avoidance. I am going to avoid shame. That is what the fifth Commandment is based on; do not allow your parents to experience shame. Do not shame your mother and your father.

One way in which your mother or father could be shamed in their old age is especially through poverty. Poverty was seen in that mindset as a point of shame. Don’t allow your mother or father to be impoverished in their old age; you take care of their needs. Do not bring shame upon their gray heads.

Do you remember when Saddam Hussein was captured? The allies understood the importance of villages, especially in the Eastern culture. They understood the importance of shame and shame avoidance. In the photographs we saw of him being examined by a doctor and checking his hair and beard for lice, he looked old and tired and he was opening his mouth as they peered in for opium. It was to make this god-like figure experience shame in the eyes of those people he ruled over. It was a mental image they wanted to place in the Eastern mind. They were very intentional about that because they understood the concept of shame avoidance because now he looked like an old, poor, haggard man, filled with vermin. It was all about shame avoidance.

How shameful would it be for your father or mother to not have enough food to eat or to live in poverty while you have enough to eat? The commandment is telling you that you have a responsibility for your father and mother. You are to take care of them in their old age and make sure they have exactly what they need. You do not shame them. Why do you do this? The family is the core of society, so that you may live long in the land that the Lord your God has given you. That promise does not mean that if you take care of them and be respectful to them that you will live to a ripe old age. It says that your community or your society will be established and you will keep the land that God has given you as a community. I will keep the core of your community strong as long as the family values are strong.

We see the disintegration of the family today. We can see that society is crumbling and standards are melting away. Anything seems to go and it starts with the home. This is why God said that the very first commandment that deals with human relationship is, “Honor your father and your mother.” Take care of the family relationships and make sure that they are in good shape and if you will do that, your society will remain strong. Your community will remain strong.

Another way in which we are to honor our father and our mother is by the way we talk to them. When our children were small, we wanted to make sure that we did not get any back talk. I have been to the store and I have seen children smart mouthing their mother and I want to go over and take the child by the nap of the neck. When our children were small, I remember one of them saying something smart to her mother and it was my job when I heard that to intervene and my wife would intervene when they spoke that way to me. When I heard her speak that way to her mother I told her to wait just a minute, that I would not allow any man on the street to speak to her mother in that way and why on earth would I allow my own daughter to speak that way. You will not speak to your mother in that way. We had no problems after that. I also spoke to her mother with gentleness and kindness and our children were respectful. They did not grow up with mother and father screaming at each other. We wanted our children to be able to emulate our response to each other. Everybody gets irritated but we need to choose our words well. Remember that every word you say trains someone else.

I wanted my children to learn to honor their mother, so I had to honor her. I wanted them to learn to honor their grandparents so I had to honor them. I wanted my children to honor men and women who are older than they and to treat them with gentleness and respect, which means that I have to model that. What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear a word you say. If you say one thing and do another, no one spots a hypocrite faster than a child. All of our children need to learn how to honor father and mother. That does not stop when they leave the house.

I have seen people treat their parents who are in their 50s, 60s and older as if they were children. I have seen them speak disrespectfully to them as if this was just a child with no sense. I have seen them roll their eyes when they take so long to get up or to move from one place to another. There was a time when you were pretty slow too. There was a time when you messed your britches and when you drooled and someone took care of you. We have a responsibility to care for father and mother and to show them dignity and respect regardless of their age.

A man and a woman live their lives searching for some manner of dignity and respect in the world. They do business, they hold a job, they raise a family, participate hopefully in church and at the end of their lives when they should have earned all of this respect, all of a sudden their children treat them as if they do not have a lick of sense. The parents have lost all of the respect they spent their lives trying to earn. This is a society that worships youth and hates old age.

I remember hearing an actor answer a question about who his hero was. He said his son, who was four years old, was his hero. His son had not battled some dread disease and survived or was not a child prodigy. He was just a normal four year old. He spoke of that child as being his ideal and he did not want to teach his child anything because he thought he might spoil that purity. He wanted to be like that child. This is life upside down. Your boy needs a hero and that should be you, dad, because you teach him values. You show him the way to live as a man. You show your daughter what it is to have a man love her appropriately. You don’t worship youth; you train youth.

We respect our elders by recognizing that they have something of value to give us. Honor your father and your mother.

We honor our father and mother by living lives of dignity, respect, purity, truth and honesty. When you are a man or woman of integrity, you give honor to your father and mother. I met a young man who was sharp, well-spoken and he seemed to live by good values. He seemed to have his head together and he seemed to know where he was going in this life. He knew what he wanted to do and what he wanted to accomplish. He knew who he was and what life was all about.

I was so impressed with him that I made a comment to my wife that someone had taught this young man well and that he must have come from a good home. When I had an opportunity to talk with this young man, particularly about his family, I found out just the opposite was true. His father, when he was a child, had been very abusive of the boy and before he had reached his teenage years, his father had abandoned him and he had not seen him in years. His mother was a drug addict and after his father left he saw a long procession of boyfriends move into the house and move out. They had taught him nothing but yet, somewhere along the line, someone had influenced him so that he had become a young man of integrity and dignity. Do you realize that the choices this young man made honored his father and mother who really did not deserve it or may not even be aware of it? And as you have chosen to live lives that honor God this will bring honor to your father and mother.

Honor comes from a root word for heavy or weighty, giving weight to. This can be taken in a positive way. When you consider a weighty matter, it would be something of significance, some substance or value. So when you add weight to this matter you are adding significance, substance and value. That is a positive way of looking at honor. The negative way of looking at honor is when it becomes a heavy burden to carry.

If you grew up in a home where father and mother did their best to care for you and raise you right and they made their mistakes along the way just like any other parent, then this matter of adding weightiness and substance to their lives is a positive command. Now you can respect them, their wisdom, their stories and their history and that becomes a part of your story and adds credence and value to your life, weight to your life. You are honored to give significance to their life at the time of anniversaries, birthdays, retirement and by visiting them. You are there to give honor to your father and your mother.

My family used to run a nursing home and there are a lot of people who were simply placed there and abandoned until they died. You never saw son or daughter or grandchildren; nobody came by until we sent the notice that they had died and they needed to pick up their things. To treat them positively is to add weight to their life and to show up, to be there and to love them and celebrate the moments with them and to thank them for what they have done for you. That is the positive way of looking at the commandment.

There is also a negative side to this. Not everybody grew up in a loving home. Many grew up in homes that were extremely abusive; they were abandoned or molested. This happens in American homes with far too great a frequency. What about those people whose lives have been negatively impacted by a dysfunctional family, a family that told them they were not good enough or abused them? What do you do with a father and mother in that circumstance? That is when the weight of honoring father and mother becomes heavy.

The commandment does not say to honor your father and mother unless your father was a louse, worthless or abusive. How do you honor that father? A work of reconciliation has to be done in your heart first. You need to not gloss over the pain in your life as though it never happened, but to acknowledge it. The only Christian option is to forgive. Forgiveness does not mean that what they did didn’t matter, or what they did was right, or that it did not hurt you. Forgiveness means that what you did was wrong, it hurt me and destroyed my life but I have chosen not to carry the resentment or anger around with me anymore. I lay it at the foot of the cross and I extend to you the same grace that was extended to me. I choose to forgive you. Forgiveness is not an emotion but a decision.

Ephesians 6:1–4 tells us that there is a second side to this: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother (which is the first commandment with promise); That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Do you see the principle here? God never gives privilege without responsibility. Fathers and mothers have the privilege of having God command that our children honor us. The responsibility is that we live lives of integrity and be honorable people.

Jesus will give you the strength that is necessary to honor your father and your mother and to be a father or mother of integrity that your children can honor and love. This is God’s law, not a legalistic requirement. It is a glorious privilege that He wants us to have appropriate boundaries for healthy relationships, relationships with Himself, relationships with the greater community and relationships at home.

Michael Tucker’s sermon was taken from the Ten Commandment Weekend, 2008 series aired on 3ABN. For more information contact www.3ABN.org.