Understanding the 5th Commandment

While studying my Bible today, something hit me like a ton of bricks. While my mind was still reeling from the blow, I began to write down some notes. I know this is rough, and it may be long, but this is what went through my head today. I had never thought of the fifth commandment in this way. It brought new insight to me and I hope it does to you also. Please forgive the way it’s written, it was rushed and not refined, but at three in the morning, I hope it’s a good excuse

If you look at the 10 Commandments, you will see that they can be divided into three sections. The first section includes the first four commandments, and they deal with our relationship to God. The last five deal with our relationship with other persons. But there is one that seems to be out of place, and that is the fifth commandment which says “Honor your father and your mother”.

This doesn’t seem to deal with our relationship with God, or our relationships with other people. However, if you look deeper, it ties the first four commandments with the last five.

Honor your father and your mother. God tells us that he is our father, so we are to honor him. Honoring our own father, and our mother, is in essence a way to honor God. The way that we treat our mother and father, in public and in private, give society an idea of how we will treat others by the way that we treat our parents.

Most of us look at honoring our mother and father as in how we treat them in the home, or in public while we are with them. If we hold them in high esteem, people see that, and they know that we have learned from them the things that are good, and that will be passed on to those around us. However, if we treat them badly, society knows that we generally will treat others the same way.

But what about when we leave the house, and we began our own families? We are no longer under the roof of her mother and father. Our everyday actions usually do not include our parents. The only time that we are to honor them it seems, is when we go to visit, or when they are old and we must face the task of putting them into a retirement community.

Our actions, and the decisions that we make every day, are a reflection of what our parents have taught us. If we are good to our families, if we are good to our wife or husband, if we treat our neighbor with respect, then, in most instances, we have learned what our parents have taught us. If we treat others with disdain, then we have gone against our parents, we have thrown away all the good that they have tried to instill in us, and we have gone her own way and we live by our own will. I know there are exceptions to this, sometimes the parents have not taught their children right from wrong, and you can see this in the way that the parents live themselves.

As we grow up and leave the house to be on our own, everything that we do, everything that we say, is a reflection of our parents. We honor or dishonor our parents every day of our lives, even when they are long gone from this earth. When we treat others with respect, when we hold the door open and allow someone else to go first, when we say yes ma’am and no sir, when we uphold our contracts, others see us and in their minds, or to their friends, they say “their parents raised them right”. We are constantly a mirror of our mom and dad.

So you can see in one instance, when we honor our earthly mother or father, then we are honoring our heavenly Father, also. When we live our lives the way that most of our mothers and fathers have taught us, then the last five Commandments are reflected in the way we live our lives in the world around us.

The fifth commandment, honor your father and your mother, ties the spiritual world to the natural world.

Every day, people who knew my father, or see pictures of me with my father, they comment on how much I look like my father. But what’s more important, I want them to see my actions, and I want them to be able to know my father through me. It’s been A long journey, and I know that there were times in my life that people cannot see my father or my mother in me. I know that they could not see my Heavenly Father in me. I look back on those times with regret and remorse. I can’t change the things that I have done. Believe me if I could, I would! I also can’t spend the rest of my life living in regret.

What I can do is show the world that I have changed. My actions and my words can be my proof to other people that I have turned my life around, and I am no longer living by my will, but the will of my Father. The third step in Celebrate Recovery, and other secular recovery groups, states, “We made a decision to turn our lives and our wills over to the care of God.” God, and we have already declared that God is our Heavenly Father. This is where secular recovery groups leave it. But Celebrate Recovery goes even further, and ties this into Scripture, “Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is your spiritual act of worship.” Romans 12:1.

While we are in our addictions, while we are living under our own wills, we are not honoring our father or mother. I know, there are many out there whose addictions today were their fathers or mother’s addictions yesterday. So while their actions are actually a reflection of their earthly parents, they are not honoring their Heavenly Father. When we leave our addictions, when we leave our will, and begin to seek our Heavenly Father, we begin to honor him the way that we should.

Honor your father and your mother. I never gave it a thought as to how much it hurt them when I was not honoring them. I had to have kids of my own to begin to understand that. I tell my kids the same thing that my parents told me one day you’ll have children and you’ll know. I hope that my actions today honor my father and my mother, and my Father in heaven, the way that I should.