How to Honor Your Father 29 November 2025

Do not disdain your father.

The Bible says to honor a king. It also tells us to honor our parents. But, the two commands are not equivalent. One is a suggestion or round-about way of declaring a custom. The other is from the decalogue given by the LORD to Moses on Mount Sinai. If the Decalogue includes the command to honor one’s parents, then with all the more importance and gravity should one honor a parent than a king. It is easy to see in any culture how one honors a king, with many features held in common. In taking the command to honor one’s parents seriously, we do well to model our honor on the way a king or queen is honored… and then add to it what you can discern of the merit, place and value of a parent in society, plus the status bestowed and required by the Bible. The Bible should be your final rule.
A. Do not interrupt him. (Pay very careful attention to this, because I have a bad habit to do this, though the Lord has been curing me of this, by His grace, and I thank Him, though I still nonetheless flub up at times and feel bad.) In my Southern culture, we place a high value on waiting one’s turn to speak, which means that I am strongly affected by my children cutting me off in conversation. They got the tendency from me, and several of them have made great strides – consciously – by working to eliminate this habit. But that does not lessen the gravity of the offense and the effect upon them if the old habit leaks out, rearing its ugly head from days of yore in a moment of intense emotional duress. From my perspective it has always been easy to forgive, but that does not help them much, for it is a virtual absolute that they need to get it right, in the nascent incipient dawning of their efforts to work out their proper behavior to implement and fulfill the requirements of this positive commandment. Negative commandments are relatively easy, by comparison. All I have to do is ask, “Did I commit murder today?” Ans: “Nope, not so far as I can remember.” Check! I’m good on that. (This is still pretty much the case even taking into consideration the more sensitive analysis required by Christ, “when you are angry with your brother, it is murder in the heart.” For, when we are angry, it gets up our ire, there is no mistake about it, we feel it.

B. Give him the first slab of meat at a family meal. (Note: This would probably embarrass me, but my children know it and have a very fine sensibility on how to handle things like this. My father preferred me to give similar honors to his queen, my mother. Korean society would have me preferring to give the first slab of meat at a meal to my father, and my Korean mother would not want to be publicly embarrassed by having the first morsel offered to her. Here, Christians in South Korea might do differently, in smaller settings, like a home, with the father passing the first slice on to his wife. But in a wider, whole-church gathering, even Christians today would not risk embarrassment to the wife by transferring or passing the first slice to one’s wife.) So we see that many ques to honor are cultural-specific.

C. Share your heart with him. Tell him your more pressing fears, concerns, uncertainties, hopes, dreams, and breakthroughs. Call him daily. (Not to use this resource is mind-bogglingly stupid, for youshoot yourself in the foot. No one knows you like your parents know you, despite the heavy American and less so, Western, cultural tendency to celebrate any attempt for an individual to strive to divorce himself from his family strictures and cultural tendencies and “make his own man.” This is largely a farce anyway, but American nonetheless worship this radical individualism, as we can see the loner celebrated so much in popular movies spreading from the U.S. around the world, where one eccentric loner saves the day: Bruce Willis’ “DieHard series,” Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible series,” Paladin in “Have Gun Will Travel.” (the truth is that teams prevail in economic and social achievement. Francis Fukuyama explores this well in “Trust” or “Democracy and the Last Man” )

Your parents love you, by God’s design (even the wicked man will provide and practice self-sacrifice for his children) of the family unit. They are the last ones who would ever publicly reveal any information about you that would harm you.

D. Do not lie to your parents: learn to be honest with your parents, and you will be able to be honest with anyone.

E. Do not try to change your parents. Be grateful that they made it this far in life and bequeathed unto you the best that they have. I have not known a child to find a situation wherein he had enough evidence (two or three witnesses) that he could convict his father of a moral breach on the level of the Ten Commandments. So do not try to convict them, but especially when you have no evidence but hearsay and the anger and suggestive power of your own mind. Expect to be angry with your parents, particularly if you were raised in a Christian home, if only because Christians have a strong command for parents to teach Christian morality to their children, who will like all children, chafe at the bit. Be glad you have Christian parents active in your life, willing to take “the risk” that you might get angry with them. Do not worry about trying to love your parents. No healthy Christian parent cares much whether you love them or not (though they know it is good for you to love all people.) They fear far more facing God at the end of their lives and having to speak to the occasions where they softened their moral teachings in order to lessen the temporary pain to you, their child. Parents only know that they must love their children in perfect Christian love, which is self-sacrificial and uncompromising as unto the truth. There is so much they must teach you and they know all too well how little time there is in which they can teach you before they must pass on. They are keenly aware of the asymmetrical lifetime relationship between parent and child. They know that much of what they teach you will only begin to take effect in your moral development decades later, largely after they are gone on to glory. So they have to get it right in a timely fashion. When Children isolate themselves from their parents, they stupidly cut themselves off from God’s primary institutional way of building moral character across time. The best Sunday school teacher has a colossal handicap relative to the parent, when he steps in to try to help in this education process, for he knows so relatively little about the child’s history.

WSJ article quote “Listening to my father on the phone, 30 minutes a day, very tiring.”

Do not try to judge your parents. It is impossible to judge a person whom you cannot truly know. Parents and child live together on different levels in a hierarchy. Parents know their children in the most basic ways of inborn personality tendencies better than the children know themselves: A, because God needs them to, B) because they share much genetics and culture and have lived decades through the same relative advantages (gifts) and weaknesses (fault tendencies). Christians should hold some slight advantage in gaining some psychological distance, from their rich and thorough concept of sin, less developed in other religions and cultures not infected by the Gospel message. Forgiveness brings surprising, marvelous relief from sin, after which the person has a greater capacity to recognize his own error, in a sort of metacognitive analysis of his personal faults. Christians should be marked by steady improvement in recognizing and thoroughly renouncing sin tendencies (as opposed to the most common human tendency of covering up sin, deceiving oneself with elaborate persona disguises to cover weaknesses).

Why instruction on honoring father rather than treating both on equal terms in the same treatise?

In fact, this writing IS instruction for honoring both father and mother. The recessed nature of the feminine makes it impossible to describe her (and by extension the ways we walk in honoring her) in explicit detail and do the task justice (for we would assume she is the same as her husband and in doing so would omit so much of what it is to be female and , it is better to focus on honoring the father, and derive a feminine form of honor from this more clear picture of what it means to honor the Father, whom God installs as the head of the family.

And yes, I am attempting to contribute to a definition (or understanding) of what the feminine may entail. However, I say that the feminine is best depicted by negative impression, as suggestion. Direct, description – even that which purports to hold some complete, definitive value, quality, or aspect, surely derides the greater essence of the feminine, which can only be approached by one’s periferal vision, much as one gathers better the starlight shining from the Seven Sisters through the side of one’s eyes than by direct gawking stares.

Baptist shine in their contribution to theology, vis-a-vis the relative strengths of other denominations galore. But Baptist theology through so much of its history, precisely because it focused so beautifully on getting theology right, has suffered from a corresponding relative dearth in appreciating, welcoming, understanding, embracing, and finally in lifting up and celebrating Beauty and Love, qualities which in a relative sense other denominations may have given greater focus: Think Eastern Orthodox, Moravian, even Anglican (and Episcopalian before the exit of so many loving, tolerant congregants who finally left the Episcopal Church upon the vote to admit female and homosexual priests).

Do not judge your parents. (There is a colossal and dominant way in which you truly cannot know them, largely because you lack the parental, adult knowledge/vision in witness of them when they were in their childhood, before their personas, the outward expression of their personalities, congealed and began to take form in their adolescence years. Parents stand in a precious perspective in witness of the child, afforded few others (absent an ever-present, doting aunt or uncle, a long-term babysitter, heavily invested Sunday school teacher who spent countless hours at the home of their charges). Within this perspective, gleaning indelible witness of a child’s innate character tendencies and proclivities. (I once said, “That looks so much like Jordan.” to which my wife replied, “Jordan is Jordan.” However, people can hide from all but their spouses and parents traits which can never be seen with any confidence by others, despite their working and/or living together for decades. For, after a certain time in childhood/adolescence, people increasingly come to live by impression in public life, displaying only an outward, shiny patina, if men do this less so than the opposite sex.

Mary Permelia Jordan Long comments here, pointing out that women have held throughout history a special place in the English language, unavailable to the male sex. For hundreds of years, during which Christian theology was dominant in the public English-speaking world, the female sex held a privilege not afforded to men. Females had their own pronoun, designated for their exclusive use. No grammarian espoused any rule which would permit men to be described using she, her, hers. These pronouns were solely for females. For hundreds of years, there was a stability within English which enjoyed clarity on the division of the sexes, and the rule was that the third person masculine pronoun was the proper pronoun to use for any being or entity of unknown sex. Women got an extra pronoun for special use (say, when a speaker or writer elects – for whatever reason, but surely including the situation wherein “he” may wish to describe or refer to women in a less direct and explicit sense, if to preserve some ineffable value of their femininity). Men had access to but one. My mother appreciated that greatly, and taught it with confidence. I would submit that there is something inherent in the nature of this cultural feature of relegating a special pronoun exclusive to the female sex, which preserves a profound respect for the ineffable, numinous qualities of female being in a way unavailable to other methods. We find this deference in most common features of the very language.

God creates man in His image, male and female does He create this man, who reflects and displays the image of God on Earth. There are aspects of God which are better exhibited in each sex; the union of male and female best displays the image of God. The feminine are more diffuse, subliminal, inchoate, mysterious. And there is a kind of beauty about the feminine which is lost when put under the light of direct, explicit language. Poetry renders (or points to) it better than dry didactic description.

Periferal vision

Above all, do not judge your parents.

Always defend the character of your father. If any believer approaches you with accusations of your father, require the biblical standard of two or three witnesses, keeping in mind that a witness is a believer holding direct vision of the behavior in question. Hearsay is not valid.

My sisters (Elizabeth and Ann) make no claim to worship Jesus as LORD over their lives. Jesus describes some of the pharisees as having Satan as their father. And Satan is the Father of Lies. My sisters behave as if they hate Christ. Kierkegaard asserts that no one can be neutral about Jesus; either you love Him or you dislike what He says and steadily come to hate him over the course of your life. If you do not come to accept Jesus as LORD, then the more you learn of Jesus, the more your hatred grows toward Him. Why would Jesus say “two or three” witnesses? One reason is that a congregation under the Guidance of the Holy Spirit understands that the value of some witnesses, in certain situations, will be greater than the value of others, such that A fixed number could not embrace and express. Too, certain situations would move a congregation to desire a larger number of witnesses, certainly anything dealing with more serious charges. (As well, a congregation places and should place clearly greater confidence in the testimony of those within their own denomination, and moreover, those in the same congregation, whom they break bread with… those who share the identical confession of faith and covenant relationship.)

If the Devil is their father, then my sisters are Liars. I have seen them rise up in their greatest passion when an issue of Christ comes to the fore. For example, as the father is the titular emblem of the family, they work to impugn their father’s character, accusing him of vague, inchoate crimes… But, they avoid using witnesses, or certainly any potential live witnesses. They ascribe quotes to an aunt who may say something disparaging about our father, Walter Nathaniel Long Jr. But, this is hearsay, and can only remain so. Even their comments are indirect and avoid direct assertions of truth. This is the style of Satan.

My brother, James Jordan, is not so. He has not fallen steadily into a future of increasing patterns of deception. Accordingly, he holds the same high opinion of our parents. He agrees that they were very good parents, amazing in their self-sacrificial love in so many ways. And, he can cite clear examples. Too, he agrees with my examples.

More than a student, a son or daughter, inherits a stronger (even near perfect) pressure to adopt the teachings of Christ exemplified and taught by a person. None of my mother’s students ever broused, carped, or grumbled about the pressure to adopt my mother’s Christian teachings. But my sisters increasingly began to attack the teachings of Christ at every turn.

When and where he remains unwilling to adopt those teachings, he then begins to attack his parents, typically the father in greater measure, as Christ as placed him as the spiritual head of the family. (Oddly, like the story of Naaman, these shunned teachings require relatively little effort in accepting and complying with them… so rejection merely exposes more basic motives, in hatred of the Christ of the Bible.)

Self Deception is the worst sort of deception. For there is very little recourse to finding a way out.

Children should not attempt to judge their parents. But, invariably they do, and all the more so when the parents are Christian. For Christian parents impart a more exacting challenge. The greatest challenge on earth is to drop one’s pride, wrath, sloth, envy, lust, avarice, gluttony, and accept Christ as one’s Savior from the hold of sin. Christian parents embody this challenge and hold it more visibly than other adults, if only because no one can ever escape the memories of his parents … and that which what they seek to escape with the greatest vehemence are the teachings of Christ along with the memories of the parents embodying Christian love in the self-sacrificial behavior towards the good of their children.

When you judge someone, you cannot escape being thereafter judged by the very same standard. Nearly always in my experience, when a child judges his father, he selects a convenient standard which is rarely, if ever purely biblical. So, the upshot is that he has royally shot himself in the foot when he “merely” sought to judge his father. But any rational mind could see that the primary reason for his desire to judge his father was infected with the inescapable desire to carve for himself an easier moral picture of how to navigate his life, walking some distance from Christ, however apparently “slight” that distance may seem to be. And “Self-Deception is the worst form of deception,” this we must ever keep in mind. We are our own worst enemy in our fight with Truth. In my reflections over my life, within the related experiences of friends, family, and neighbors, co-workers galore), I cannot with any confidence say that I have ever been privy to a case wherein the son (or daughter) elected to attempt to attach a judgment to the father (in even the most vain, precarious, attenuated hope that such a judgment might stick) without the wicked indwelling seed of a self-deceptive desire to twist Scriptures, Truth, and whatever stood in his way, in order to fool himself into thinking he has made for himself an easier life, shielded in part, from the blazing voice of Truth in Christ.

Parents are not perfect (though Christian ones correct themselves and as readily accept correction from the Holy Spirit, if only because they could not live to set a wrong example for their children), but as any father will refrain from giving his son a serpent when that son asks for a fish, so will the father in question acknowledge the truth and conform to Christ. I believe this to be the reason I have no knowledge of any son or daughter among my friends, pagan (many) or believers (few) find a pattern of unrepentant sin from a believing father or mother. And, I believe that by the wisdom and providence of God, this care to moral self-sacrifice extends even to non-believing parents, if in a lesser measure. God seems to have great mercy and in His grace has built into non-believing families a clear echo of the truth, so that as Roman’s 1 says of the heavens, we find also true among the God-created family unit an ineffaceable picture of the kingdom of heaven and the love abiding there … so that we “are without excuse” when we choose to not believe in Jesus as our LORD.

William J. Luther in Today’s WSJ (29^th November 2025) notes that “A well-chosen pair of socks isn’t a thoughtless gift. It is a small but meaningful act of service. It is, in a modest and practical way, an expression of the biblical injunction to honor one’s parents – not by grand gestures, but by assuming a few of the small responsibilities they habitually postpone.” I never need socks, as that is one responsibility I stay way ahead of the game on. More needful for me is the task of organizing and cleaning up so that I can find all the socks. I found two boxes of socks recently, in my Thanksgiving cleaning spree. I get four days off from work so I went at it on one morning when Nathaniel IV and his mother were yet abed. For that matter, my wife and I desire nothing new in the material sense, for we have an abundance of stuff, by the grace of God. Hands down, my wife and I prefer that our children merely spend time with us and share their hearts. Conversation and working together on a simple, quiet task is what we treasure above gold and all the jewels of this earth. By comparison, everything else is but trashy junk.

Another task I could use help with is care for Brother Nathaniel, for anyone who feels that he is indeed his brother’s keeper. It is not difficult, and I believe such care (keeping him company, reading the Bible to him, listening to his heart) build character in spades. Nathaniel needs companionship, good listeners. As his mother puts it, pastors and church people do not want to come and listen to Nathaniel because it is too difficult for them, and being Americans, they prefer ease and comfort.

I agree, though I believe they would be spiritually richer if they were to recognize this as error and commit to a remedy under the Holy Spirit’s movement. It is scary when people claim that the Holy Spirit would rather they preach (what the listener already full well knows) something to a believer in need, rather than merely “abide with” them, as Christ did with his disciples. This kind of love is far more challenging than reading a short bit of the Bible, saying a quick prayer, and whipping up a five-step plan of self-help to dole out to a person who is lonely, mentally ill, and obviously needs long term patient, loving attention and companionship above all else. (South Korean culture has a saying, from the precursor Chosun people, 긴병에 정자없다 –“There is no loyal son in the face of a long illness.”

This saying took root in the culture before Christian witness was noticeable.

Only after you build the social capital of having invested time and great listening to a person such as our mentally ill son, do you then acquire social capital by which you can say anything that might be a challenge one such as our son would be up to the task to attempt on his own. Or a truly lovingly mild, measured challenge to modify one of his commitments or asserted beliefs.

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In high school, I was introduced to the idea that students had sex. I was not able to believe them. It was just preposterous that they would actually have sex. After growing up and getting married, I still feel that way and I cannot change it, though I can acknowledge that they may well have done what they said. But, without evidence, my mind cannot accept it as fact. I have always been that way, particularly with things that are not normative. Sex in high school without marriage it not normative. And never has been. It has always been a breach, a severe aberration, of culture. Everybody knows it somehow.

My Unplanned Introduction to the Idea: My sisters said that they had sexual boyfriends, Ann with Rodney Oliver, and Sister Elizabeth with a guy named Randy, a friend of Mark Bennett, boyfriend of Holly Carter, best friend of my sister, Elizabeth. I was in high school when I drove to Bethlehem to visit Elizabeth at a party. I think she had called me to come and get her. She was not feeling well. When I came to the basement door of Mark Bennett’s parents house, there were many people there, all about high school age. They were drinking beer and listening to music. It was a despairing scene because nobody was doing anything positive or interesting. My sister sat in a sofa chair with Randy. She introduced me to him, and I shook his hand. I didn’t know what else to do. But he looked empty, devoid of spirit, as did everybody else. My sister sat beside him, or on his lap crossways, and had her hand on his chest, which was weird, unnatural at the extreme.

I knew my sister well, and there was nothing about her personality or her character which would mesh in any way with her doing that, sitting there with Randy, her hand on his chest. They were not married, and they knew next to nothing about each other’s most sacred beliefs or philosophy on life.

He, too, was just a kid. Wallowing in the most obvious despair and utter lack of purpose. Totally helpless, a slave to a sinful perspective on life, living willfully in self-deception (always and every time, the worst form of deception). I wonder where Randy is now, and whether he ever got down on his knees in contrition and accepted Jesus as his savior. Neither of my sisters shows any evidence of ever having done that. They live in active opposition to Jesus, and cannot read His Word.

Ann Marie spent her time with Rodney. They used to go on dates and ride around in his van. She met Rodney through my best friend, Harry Hewitt Schrum. Harry (Rhythm Guitar), Rodney (Bass guitar) and I played in a rock band together with Steve Oliver (lead guitar), Warren G. (rhythm guitar), Joey Hollar (vocals), and Bobby Pitt (vocals). I played drums.

Observing my life from a distance of some decades (The LORD willing, I should turn 65 within six months.), “I can see clearly now that the rain is gone.”

I have forgotten the name of our Southern Rock Band. Actually, it was Ethan Brand. It just came to me. Named after a character in a Nathaniel Hawthorne story. Nathaniel was a great writer. I studied him in my 19^th Century American English class under Emory Maiden. I had Shakespeare Comedies under Susan Staub, Romanticism English Lit under

Shakespeare Tragedies under Roger Stilling

Ron Coulthard Victorian

Richard Rupp,