Honor Supplement to 9 December 2025

 

A. The Reputations of My Fathers 9 Dec 2025

*If today I slight my father (who passed away on Midsommer of 2007); then I must apologize to my Father in heaven for my sin before I can again worship the LORD.
* I never received a punishment or correction from my father that I did not deserve.
* The reputations of my father and grandfathers have not one smirch, mar, or stain. There is no record of any witness ever speaking or writing against them. And my brother, James Jordan Long, can vouchsafe this.
* God blessed me beyond measure in the character of my ancestors. Everyone in my community knew this and countless people told me this (people I had never before met (such as old men at country stores way out in the countryside when I stopped in to get a drink of water during a long run.
* Therefore, I have no excuse not to do well in life and community.
* Therefore, I stand without excuse. I must know God and worship Him.
* They are the means by which God built me to into the man that Ib have become, as he always dues. This is the method He prefers to use. God had been pleased to work by proxy, thru His institution of he family.

B. In The Valley
* So I walk in an easy, well-worn valley of a tradition.
* The Sermon on the Mount is radical.
* In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives radical support to honoring one's father.
* Dr. Quarles notes this sermon is normative. Jesus' primary audience is His disciples.
* We have been given new hearts: Jeremiah 36

C. As the Day Follows the Night 9 May 2025
* All good comes from God. If I serve anyone well or have a good influence on anyone, I cannot take credit for it.

* For my Father in Heaven has blessed me through the de-traditions of my parents.
* He has built good into our works, our ways, our behaviors, and our traditions.
* Eric Wilson and Terry Price told me some years after I had graduated from high school that I was a legend there, that it had a good effect on people. That is from God alone working through the traditions of my fathers.
* I could have done none of that alone. I was a mere tool.
* As the eddies spin in the sides of the creeks, so natural it is unavoidable that a man walks in goodness by that which he learned from his father's.
* No man creates himself.

D. The Traditions of my Fathers 9 Dec 2025

* I carry on the traditions of my father.
* I never need to ask why I have these traditions that I do. They came from my father. I carry on the traditions of my mother. I never ask why.
* I carry on because I am part of a family. And I honor my father in his memory. I honor my mother in her memory. I'm not alone.
* God created the family as an institution, the smallest economic unit in society. No man is an island. Neither am I.
* Learning to live properly in a family, honoring my parents, is essential for me to learn to be in right relation to God the Father.

E. Every Misstep & Short Accounts 9 Dec 2025

* If I slight an earthly king, I have failed to honor him as I should.

* How much more should I honor my father? The Bible tells me to honor a king, but that is not placed in the Ten Commandments, unlike the command to honor my father.
* Short Accounts: I must stay on short accounts with my father as with God, seeking forgiveness at every wrong turn, at every misstep of mine.
* How can I even pretend to worship God the Father if I have dishonored my Father and not yet sought forgiveness with a pure, repentant and vibrissae, chastened heart?

* My father never cared whether I merely recited the "correct words" of apology if I was not circumcised in my heart. Like God, for whom he served as agent and proxy, he always wanted my heart. Nothing else was his enough for him because he loved me (as even the wicked fathers among men love their sons and give not to their son a serpent when the son asks for a fish)

Do not be sneaky, withholding or hiding information. Sequestering or withholding information which you know matters to your parents. These patterns begin in early childhood, and it is impossible to keep your mother from knowing when you are sneaky. Older Fathers develop this intuitive powers as well, particularly those who spend much care time with their children in the early years, such as those who function as either, A) a “DeFacto Mom” (meeting with teachers, arranging doctor’s visits, taking the kids to public events, and thus and such); B) a Stay-at-Home Dad (while his wife goes out to Bring Home the Bacon, unot unlike the Marjorlie Woman of margarine fame); or C) Both A & B.