Honor Thy Parents (Holding Tank for Drafts) 10 July 2025

                 Collection of Working Drafts 

A. Honor In Our Speech 6 July 2025

To honor your parents, strive to always treat them like an honored guest. Give your undivided attention first and foremost to them. Remember what your parents say, even the little things, and your days shall be not only long on this earth, but your days shall recline in peaceful, productive flourishing. And you shall find it vastly easier to let God flow through you as you love all peoples.

Do not disdain your parents or judge them. Do not interrupt them when they speak. Refrain from scorning them or admonishing them. Never discount their advice or wisdom, as if they were fools.

Rather, listen to them when they speak. Do not cross-examine them, ridicule them, or question them severely. Always answer the phone and listen to them well when they call. And thank God you only have two parents, whom you have to give this extra-high quality care to.

(Do not “castigate, excoriate, admonish, correct, criticize, contend with them.” Do not gossip about your parents to anyone, not even yourself. Keep negative thoughts of your parents far from your mind.)

Nor, does it stop when they die. You become more attuned to them and better at honoring and living in a way that defers to them and pleases them after they have passed away. This is a beautiful thing. God makes no mistakes when He selects your parents.

Do not listen to baseless accusations against them from anyone, but rather insist on having two or three witnesses, and you will find that none ever arise. For hearsay is not the same thing as a valid witness. Believers are held in check by the Holy Spirit; whereas, non-believers have the Devil as their father, and the Devil is the Father of Lies. So do not expect non-believers to spout truth.

Just as God points out, “What father among you would give his son a serpent when he asks for a fish? Even the evil among you will care for his son’s basic needs of hunger, thirst, and cold.” God built into man a quality of care for his own children that extends beyond the control of that man.

We should do all we can to minimize the potential for a parent to perceive your language as containing or expressing a condescending attitude towards them. We do not want to patronize a parent. That gets the whole relationship backwards. If parents are anything to you, they are your parents. So, we honor them in our speech.

With a view to culture, we can do even more to honor our parents. Certain aspects of honoring behavior are culture-specific. Just the other day, I picked up a book from the free “give-away” cart at the entrance of the library here at the local seminary. It was entitled “Grandpa’s Humor.” I read it to my wife when I visit her a few times a week.

While you can rather easily fool your friends, your psychological counselors, your Small Group members, and your work associates; you are least capable of ever surprising or fooling your parents with anything you could say or do. A thousand times over, they have seen all your potential in your childhood.

They know you better than you could know yourself, as they saw you before you developed self-awareness. They saw your most selfish tendencies unvarnished. As we gain self-awareness, we develop a persona and we lose our ability to discern differences between our genuine, innate desires and our fabricated expressions of desire and character, steadily fooling ourselves into imagining we are truly different from who we actually are. Self-deception is the most arduous, demanding, and pressing kind of deception, most difficult to get free of.

Furthermore, God instills within your parents the watchman capacity to look after your most basic needs at every stage of your development. God makes no mistake when He selects your parents.

Furthermore, they know you so well in some part because you have shared (if overcome in Christ) many of the same tendencies and persuasions. Blood is thicker than water and much runs within the family. I have been afflicted with the sin tendency to overeat. It is heavy on me, and the Lord alone delivers me each time I fall prey to this perversity of the Flesh. I wonder whether my mother did not have the same tendency, to overeat, when she worried about the moral rebellion of my two sisters, who chose to drink, smoke, and chase handsome boys in their teens and early twenties. They paid a pretty penny for one of my sisters to finish her final year of high school at a private Christian college in Raleigh. She said she did not slow down on her partying, but rather, perfunctorily expanded the bacchanalia at Saint Mary’s, due to female friend influences there worse than

If we speak the same way to our parents that we speak to everyone else, then how do we imagine we genuinely honor them? In fact, when we cultivate the life-long habit of honoring our parents, we learn to speak to our parents in a different register than we do to anyone else on earth.

We do well to make efforts and habits of speaking which minimize any potential for our parents to feel that you disdain them, that you ridicule them, that you chide them (coerce,

We should strive to be perceived in their language and culture as thoroughly cordial, joyous, convivial, felicitous, calm and patient, slow to anger, self-controlled.

Do not judge your parents. You lack the capacity. No other adult can understand you nearly so well as the parents who bore and raised you from birth, for they saw your personality in all its raw self-absorption before you began to become self-aware, and for years before you accepted Jesus as LORD of all and your personal savior. They know your worst proclivities, sin-tendencies, and selfish expressions. In their magnificent sacrificial love, they always overlook these ugly things as nothing, for they know how God can and will forgive.

You did not raise them. Neither are you typically anywhere near their stages of life. (You are always arriving at their life stages a generation too late to be a “contemporaneous equal.”

If you are to hear judgments against your parents, you must follow Jesus’ proscription against hearsay, being sure to get two or three witnesses. A witness is someone who directly saw something and can communicate that clearly. Believers are better witnesses because they operate under the conviction of The Holy Spirit and are accordingly far less likely to fabricate mendacious material, even when they are tempted in their flesh (in which case the Spirit will not leave them alone and they are rather likely to recant, repent, and be restored in faith with a different witness, one which sits more squarely in the Truth.

Beyond the general command to “love God above all else and your neighbor as yourself,” the Bible does not specifically command that a person love his parents in any particular fashion. Nor, have I met any parents who particularly cared whether their children loved them or not. Primarily what they hold with the deepest instinctual implanting is a desire that you honor them, if only because they know so clearly just how debilitating it is to your moral growth and how injurious it is to you for you to fall short in honoring them. As often as not, they can see with moral clarity the pernicious effects of their own moral failures when precipitated by a singular failure to honor their parents.

The Long Family Parents:

My parents’ teachings were biblical. They taught us the Ten Commandments, with zero apologies or excuses, not reducing the moral force of any of them. They embodied the sacrificial love of Christ in their continual care and moral teaching of us throughout their lives. Never has there surfaced even a shred of evidence that either of our parents ever cheated anyone, ever spoke out with unrighteous anger, ever committed even a hint of adulterous behavior or flirted with such intimations. Nor coveted anything of their neighbors. They took Sabbath rest regularly and enjoyed their family and home, working in the garden and caring for our livestock, enjoying hobbies, such as photography, reading, walking, bird-watching, and other pure and good activities. But no one in our whole community ever brought a charge against them, over the decades that we lived there. They knew our parents well, having had my mother for a teacher of themselves and/or of their offspring, and having had my father for a doctor.

I never received a spanking or any other kind of discipline which I did not fully merit in spades. My brother recognizes the stellar moral qualities of our parents and has agreed with me that we had the finest parents that you could ever find ... while our sisters (who do not confess Christ and who have steadily attacked the biblical teachings our parents transmitted unto us).

You are not commanded to honor elderly other than your two parents within the decalog. Only parents receive that particular emphasis, which is good; we would go crazy trying to honor any and every adult we meet, at least at that level, The Decalog. Cultural manners are good for all our elderly, such as holding doors for them, helping them across the street, carrying grocery bags for them.

But, other adults cannot understand our parents very well, and even suffer a disadvantage in efforts for various reasons (different family sin tendencies and moral strengths are different. It is far easier for certain lineages to abstain from lust, or murderous anger, than for others. We are just different). If an adult outside your family has only children of a much younger age, then he is greatly compromised in his ability to rightly understand the difficulties you may feel you suffer in relation to your parents, and will often be dumbly persuaded agree with you, out of a peculiar Western desire to mollify and coddle the individual, celebrating the individual (which as often as not results in a perversion of God’s principles for guiding the growth of youth).

If perchance that extra-familial adult you have enlisted to help you make sense of your relation to your parents has suffered the loss of a child of the same sex as you, he will be hard put not to have idealized the loss of that child, more so if the child was quite young at the time of his death. Then inasmuch as our conjecture be true, that he has idealized the loss of his child, he thereupon will be more susceptible to erring towards giving you increasing benefit of the doubt in encouraging and supporting your doubts or unwarranted judgments against your parents – in his naive, unconscious attempts to comfort and console you, in effect “living out” on the largely unconscious level the life of relation to the child that did not fully live the normally allotted years. (And he will harbor a deceptively determined and resilient desire to engage beyond the minimum you may have requested, of his time and advice. Psychology of the transference binding him.)

All of this is particularly true if the child he lost had no surviving siblings of the same sex. In the minds of parents, daughters and sons have clear categorical differences, and are treated differently in so many respects.

Honoring parents is one of the positive commandments within the decalog, which are said to be (Heimbach) more difficult to fully comprehend. It is on one level relatively easy to determine whether you have committed adultery, stolen something, or murdered someone on a given day, but at the end of the day when you ask yourself, “Have I honored my parents today?”, you do not have an easy and immediate answer that you can be sure of.

How to honor (the positive perspective):

Listen to your parents when they speak, keeping silence so that you can better focus on their words. If you suffer from a habit of interrupting people, you will have a much harder time getting this right, learning to listen and understand what they say to you. Work assiduously without ceasing to gladly welcome (even yearn for) a joy and delight in gleaning and receiving the wisdom and advice of your parents. (I know that this is what I miss most about my parents. I called them several times a week during my 14-year sojourn in South Korea, Land of the Morning Calm, and I conferred with them in luxurious detail on every aspect of my life, every challenge, every temptation, every small victory in Christ, our Common LORD! I have one son who does this now – having already discovered the wealth of beauty, peace, and glory in this subtle, deceptively invaluable, unique (no substitute) practice instated by God for the family.

Do not treat your parents like an equal. Rather, look to them as having some superior status to you, as if they have always been privy to some knowledge and awareness lacking to you, as if they knew you before you knew yourself, and as if they have always loved and sacrificed for you more than you ever could for yourself, as if you were not built to sacrifice for yourself, or to love yourself (the way recent Western psychology would endeavor to teach you to do, “Love thyself, to thine own self be true, then as the day follows the night, thou canst be false to any man.” Shakespeare … decidedly not Jesus. 

 

B. Segment for 9 July 2025: Honor Parents (Persona Non Grata)

Do not resent or ignore your parent, do not make him feel unwelcome.

Do not make your parent feel like a person non grata.

Do not Resent your parents.
Do not humiliate him.
Do not disdain him.

[Parenthetical]
Do not ask your parents questions that are serious sin and have you ever murdered somebody? Have you ever embezzled money? Have you ever coveted things or committed adultery? Okay. You're not in the same position that they are. It's not healthy. It's not good for you to ask that.

It is perhaps sometimes okay for you to ask one of your peers, a co-worker, a close friend of a similar age, whether he has committed adultery or murder or embezzlement or coveting things like that in the right circumstances. But your mother and your father are not your peers. These are your peers. Nothing in the Ten Commandments tells you to honor your peers.
Your parents are not your peers. Your peers did not sire you. Your peers did not hold you as hope in their hearts before you were ever born. Your peers did not change everything in their lives to provide for you. Your peers have not known you from the moment you were born until the last day of their lives and cared about you and sacrificed for you, providing everything that you need to the best of their ability. That's not a peer. That is something else more worthy of honor in God's mind.

God did not have to create a hierarchy in raising human beings, but he chose to, and that's his own business, and we respect it without question. We thrive in accordance with how well we can get with his program and do as he tells us to do. That is our job to read simple things and be obedient, like first Corinthians 5, 16 through 18. These simple things are easy to do if you honor your parents, but almost impossible if you do not honor your parents.


A. The essence of honor to parents inheres in the subjective comportment. The son or daughter’s intent is key – even if you fail to make the proper gesture of respect, or follow through with the promised, expected duty effectively. (if you are carrying a plate of food to set at the father’s place at the table in a ceremonial fashion in accordance with the broad tradition of your culture, and you slip and slide into your father, spilling the hors d’ouvres into his lap; God is still pleased if you did not intend to do so. He looks on your heart.

But if you render lip service only, while executing a lovely genuflection/curtsey (or whatever constitutes honor in a particular culture), but you do not really mean it in your heart; then you are not truly honoring your parents, and you are not honoring the Lord your God in the way He intended when he wrote you into the Ten Commandments as the subject, Thou shalt… (or, merely “you understood” in a simple command form).

So, Share your heart and do so gladly, with your parents, regularly, until your final shared breath with them. Don’t be coy, or lack the freshness of openness and genuine loving sincerity. If your parents ask what you are doing, fill them in with everything you can. Don’t keep secrets. Learn to trust them with your hopes, fears, dreams, and successes, for in learning to trust your parents, you become supple unto God, keeping that commandment to honor parents, and in so doing, walking in God’s way, trusting that his creation of family works best for your growth and development.

B. Do not roll your eyes at your parents. Don't even think about it. Always take such a rebellious, patronizing, nascent thought captive and scourge it. ...Nip it in the bud, once and for all time.
Eradicate such a defiant, proud thought from the erstwhile clean and pure corridors of your mind. Kill the radical self a aggrandizing impulse before it sees the light of day.
Don't try to be your parents theological teacher or don't try to explain the Bible to them. They should have a church and they probably do, A biblically sound church with the which respects in their state beliefs The first here Partly resurrection Inerrancy of the Bible the homostatic union homeostatic Christ the God man in Christ the Immaculate conception and the gospel message.



But if other people suggest or accuse your parents of anything like that, you have a duty to take up for them by asking them for evidence of two or three witnesses, not hearsay, the actual witnesses that would stand up in a court of law or be in accordance with the Bible's standards for determining truth.

Don't accuse your father or mother of being a hypocrite if he tells you or she tells you not to smoke cigarettes. And then he has been smoking for 30 years and continues smoking. A hypocrite is somebody who says he does not do something when in fact he does do it. But if he has the experience, he has the best experience to tell you it's better not to smoke


If from his wealth of experience in evaluating the good and the evil about smoking tobacco, he speaks to you and says, do not ever smoke cigarettes, then for the love of God, don't ever smoke one, even long after he's dead. That is to honor your father.

And what father will give his son a stone when he asks for an egg? So don't worry about it. Trust God and the system he has set up, God has instilled within fathers to provide good things, the basic food, clothing, shelter that a son or daughter needs.

If your father says he values formal education, then take him at his word. Anything he claims, take him at his word, unless you have some obvious reason not to.

If your father tells you to feed on the Word of God, normally that means read the Bible daily, then take him at his Word. If the two of you go hiking together or on a canoe trip and you get lost and you have to walk and your Bible gets soaked in the water and you're there two or three days without it, don't just assume that he doesn't feed on the Word every day. He may have actually memorized some of scripture and been reciting Scripture in his head, even when he's looking at you. So you just don't know you are not peers. Don't make assumptions. Always assume the best for your parents and take them at their word.

C. "Continue in the things that you find older and wiser than you." from Paul to Timothy.
Collect items, nuggets, gyms of wisdom passed to you from your parents and store them as a treasure. See them in scripture. Search these statements of wisdom and find them in scripture in various aspects and ways and shine them in your lines. Memorize the same scripture that your parents memorize and then spoke to you when you were young.

When someone in authority over you If you had your good at heart asks to do something, you respond in simple obedience. You don't even ask why.

Paul was lonely in a Timothy. Keep your parents company as they age.
Find WSJ article on Man who listened to his father on the telephone every day for 30 minutes or more, found it very difficult, but understood that to be his duty in honoring his father.
Don't be nosy. Don't try to take over the family management or take your father's place if he's the head of the household.
Learn to accept an answer one time and don't keep asking the same thing as if a reputation is going to wear the person down, wear your parent down to agree.
If there's something you want from your parents to do and you ask them and they tell you, then listen carefully and fully so that you'll never forget and you won't need to ask again, but you'll know exactly why. You can even ask for more detail about why.
Listen, as if you truly care to understand why they do not want to do whatever it is you want to do, or they do want to do something you don't want them to do, but learn self-control ever to not become a busybody. If you're a busybody in your family, that's going to extend to your church and your workplace, and that never works. But your desire to be a busy body begins with desire over the restrictions that you have from childhood in the family unit that God gives us, the smallest economic unit in society. And if you can learn to control that, then it won't be a problem anywhere else. You can learn to respect other people's boundaries, the people who you work with as peers, those above you and those below you.

From the works of love by Soren Kierkegåard: "Love is not merely the feeling of a full heart, a glad and happy conscience. Rather, love is the works of love which you do in the name of love."



Failure to learning obedience to your parents with a cheerful heart is one of the greatest impediments for a professing Christian or a would-be Christian, someone flirting with the idea of accepting Christ to actually commit and walk with the Lord thereafter in obedience. The family is set up as a hierarchy of authority for reasons that allow proper growth, that is, optimal growth in Christ. Humans do frequently fail to suddenly convert and become properly obedient. We are creatures of habit and may continue on Sin, after given a new heart.
     So a good childhood and a good youth time, even in young adulthood, reviewing and honoring your parents is of inestimible value as a way of learning to view God constantly as the authority figure guiding your life.

    Then at last can you have the power to pray without ceasing, to rejoice evermore, and in all things, to give thanks to God? For this is God's will for you. (Cf. 1 Thessalonians. 5:16-8)


"There's much good in heart from this passage in 2 Timothy. You just respond in simple obedience." Chuck Swindoll Wednesday 9 July 2025 BBN radio 10:30 a.m.

"Cross-Cultural Servanthood: Serving the World in Christlike Humility," by Duane Elmer author of "Cross Cultural Conflict." P.44
Profanity.
    Every human contact requires an openness that invites others into our presence for a moment of grace, if we so choose—or a moment of profanity. Yes, that is the right word. We profane another person whenever we fail to honor them as human beings. Because every human being is made in the image of God, each is intrinsically connected to Him and is therefore sacred, being stamped with God's own imprint. How I treat "the least of these" is how I treat their Creator. If I extend to them hospitality, I reveal God's beauty and grace. If I am uncharitable toward another person, I fail to honor the God who gave them dignity. Jesus' identification with us is so intense that whatever touches us touches Him. And whatever I do to another human, I do to Him. By profaning another person, I profane God. Thus, the greater profanity may not be cursing, bad as that is, but failing to extend openness and hospitality to another person who bears that Creator's image. "He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for their maker." (Proverbs 14:31)

     Perhaps the family metaphor will clarify this further. I am a father. My children bear in part my image. We are connected. You touch my children for good or ill and you touch me in the same way. The same is true for my wife and grandchild. In whatever way you touch them, you also touch me. God has created us all and in that sense we are His family—His family in creation. He is our Father in creation. He has shared His image with us. He is connected to each of us. Touching one of His own is touching Him.

Stephen Rhodes summarizes so powerfully:
    Hospitality, when you get right down to it, is unnatural. It is difficult to place others first because our inclination is to take care of ourselves first. Hospitality takes courage. It takes a willingness to risk. But as our Lord reminds us, if we only love those who we are sure will love us and welcome those who will welcome us, then we have done little to share the love of God. For as Jesus says, even the heathen do that. (End Quote)

C. Honor Thy Mother and Thy Father 21 August 2023

18 April 2025 Respect, even reverence, for God’s ordained institution of the family guards one from sexual promiscuity. No other force (particuarly some half-baked pseudo-psycho-babble remedy) offers remotely the same quality of protection and certainty of staying clean and far away from this modern Western scourge of coveting materialism and dalliance in sexual promiscuity.

The two are inseparable, part and parcel of one another, with overall submission to the LORD by extension respect for His Kingdom and law. For men on earth and then in heaven.

Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy says in his book, Out of Revolution, “The state of war begins when one party refuses to listen to the other.”

Jesus tells us that if we are angry with our brother, it is the same as murder. Both of these accord great importance unto the psychological realm, not reserving the instantiation of war or sin to a later point, depending on a corresponding action. No, properly understood, war and sin begin in the heart.

Matthew 15:

3 He answered them, “Why do you break God’s commandment because of your tradition? 4 For God said:[b] Honor your father and your mother;[c] and, Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must be put to death.[d] 5 But you say, ‘Whoever tells his father or mother, “Whatever benefit you might have received from me is a gift committed to the temple,” 6 he does not have to honor his father.’[e] In this way, you have nullified the word of God[f] because of your tradition. 7 Hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied correctly about you when he said:

8 This people[g] honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me.
9 They worship me in vain,
teaching as doctrines human commands.”[h]

It is gladly acknowledged that children should obey their parents, that is children (under a certain age, depending on the society, 18 in the U.S. or perhaps 21) And adults should “Honor,” but not obey. Really? Is the Bible that cut and dried, that clear on this? If I disobey my Father (even after he has passed on, as mine have), then does the Bible readily hand out a Get Out of Jail Free card to me so that I can go on my merry way, even if I yet may feel compromised in my pricked heart?

We need not argue that even a child (let alone an adult child) should effectively disobey his parents in the immediate sense and refrain from breaking one of the core elements of the Ten Commandments.

If your father commands you to go out and commit adultery, you should not. We feel no need to think twice about this.

However, if there is no biblical precept to be broken and you know that your parents would have preferred you to do something a certain way, rather than another, how much freedom do you have when you know you are bought with a price by Christ, and you know that you stand in a line of care (in which even the wicked man will not give his son a stone when he asks for bread). From the negative perspective (studying this line of descent and interdependency, wherein no child could ever nurse and raise himself), we know that a man’s sin extends its effects unto seven generations. From the positive perspective, we understand that we, owing a debt from care in our infancy and childhood, may well inherit a duty to carry on the wisdom we receive, precisely because our parents and their parents cannot continue it. Not all wisdom is written out explicitly within the pages of the Bible.

Does not common sense then so richly suggest that you are not so independent and autonomous as the very new Western Culture’s comparatively radical emphasis on individualism, in which we teach young people that they are free to do whatever they wish, provided they do not breach one of the core tenets of Libertarianism. Not so does the Bible teach such a radical “freedom,” but rather is replete with wisdom suggesting strong bonds of gratitude and emotional indebtedness to a friend or one who sacrificed to you.

And non-Christian cultures feel this at least as much. South Koreans feel a powerful, ineluctable duty to protect a friend and cover for him, based upon the time they had invested together, even though they are of approximately the same age, meaning there is not this extra bond resting upon a child even after his mother and father have passed on, a bond which as surely as the night follows the day verily erupts in the conscience of the child to shame him without end until he changes course and goes back to behave or speak (even reform his thinking) in the manner according with the way his parents thought.

15 Then Peter said, “Explain this parable to us.”

16“Do you still lack understanding?” he[j] asked. 17 “Don’t you realize[k] that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is eliminated?[l] 18 But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a person. 19 For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander. 20 These are the things that defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person.”