LAW HOMILY: Honor and the Glory of God

Learning the Law to Know and Love God

Every week we look at the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people. We want to understand what the law says. We want to know how to obey. We want to know what it looks like as it works its way down into every single facet of our life.

A healthy tree, if you've ever gone outside and looked at it, my dad was like, I don't know what they're called, like a treologist, whatever that word is. Sure. Sure. My dad would tell me that if you look at a tree on the outside of the tree, the root system looks roughly the same below because the roots itself grow down deep in order to match the structure on top so that it can hold it stable.

Well, we want to know the law so that we can grow our roots down into knowing and loving God deeply so that the fruit of that would actually grow in our life. So that's what we want. Today, we're looking at the fifth commandment.

The Fifth Commandment: Honor Father and Mother

And the reason we're doing that is because last week was the fourth commandment. I'll read it to you, and then we will jump in. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God has given you.

Honor as Weight and God-Given Authority

Now, the word honor that's translated there is kaved, which means weighty. It means heavy. It means gloriously significant. It's like when you say something profound in high school and someone says, oh, that's heavy.

Get it? That's what it means, heavy in that sense, weighty. To honor your father and mother, therefore, is to treat them as weighty because God has made them weighty. That doesn't mean that they're perfect.

It doesn't mean that they always have been wise. It doesn't mean that they've never sinned against you. Clearly, we all come from families that were not perfect, but it does mean that God deliberately chose your father and your mother for you to be your father and mother so that he could raise you up in the way that he wanted to.

Your mother and your father are deliberately chosen by God for you, and that's a weighty thing. And so that means dishonoring them actually is dishonoring God. Because if God chose your father for you and you dishonor your father, who are you actually dishonoring but your father in heaven?

If God chose your mother as imperfect as she is as well and you dishonor her, you're dishonoring the God who gave her to you. Rolling eyes when your father speaks, brushing off your mother when she becomes an annoyance is acting out rebellion against the God who gave her and him to you.

Learning from Fathers, Mothers, and Those in Authority

Young people have always suffered from the same disease. They've discovered that after a few years of life, they know everything. We all have went through that, and maybe some of us still struggle with that from time to time.

But God himself in his wisdom has given you people, mother and father, and also fathers and mothers around you who are more seasoned in life than you, who know more than you. Every single person in this room has someone in your life, whether you know it or not, who could be a father and a mother to you, a guide to you, so honor them.

And if you're the one who is the father and the mother, if you are the one who is the seasoned one who everyone's looking to treat that role in a very honorable and a deliberate way, remember, God has placed you specifically in someone else's life to be a ministry to them.

So don't take it lightly. Don't take it lightly upward as you honor your father and mother or those who are in authority over you. Don't take it lightly if you're in authority and you care for the ones below you.

A Culture of Honor and the Promise of Long Life

Because the promise that God has given is actually quite profound, that your days may be long upon the earth, your collective, your plural, y 'all's days may be long upon the earth. The promise is not an individual promise that if you honor your specific mother and father, you will live to be 100.

That's not what it is. It's that if a culture of honor is built, the culture will have long days. And how needed is that in our culture today that is filled full of dishonor, that is filled full of parents who dishonor their children and children who dishonor their parents.

Let the Christian church be where revival happens. Let the Christian church be where repentance happens. And let us, through the Spirit's power, examine our heart and repent before we fall short. Amen?

Repentance, Grace, and Obedience in Christ

Let's pray. Lord, if you operated based off of strict standards of equity, then our days would be short upon the land because we have been a people of dishonor. We've dishonored our parents. We've dishonored our children.

We've dishonored each other. We've participated at times in a culture of dishonor in small ways and in big ways. And the if-then of the promise, if you do these things, then you will have long life. Then the society that you're a part of will live long in the land.

Applied specifically to Israel in the Old Testament, but in a more broad sense, to any land that calls upon the name of the Lord. If it were based on strict justice, we would not have long life. We would not have longevity.

We would be cut off, exiled, forgotten. And yet, Lord, by the merits of Christ and Christ alone, you have sustained us and you have accounted to us his righteousness instead of ours. The gun pointed at us that should, the trigger should have been pulled was pulled and pointed at Christ.

And by his wounds, we are healed. So Lord, let no one here today hear this and think that if I could just obey harder, if I could just follow the rules better, then maybe God would love me to hell with that thought.

And at the same time, let no one think that because of what Christ has done, we now can do whatever we want. Christ did not die to make us thoroughgoing legalist, but he also didn't die to make us antinomians either.

Help us, Lord, as people who are forgiven to now repent with joy and follow after him with delight. Help us to be a people of honor, help the world around us like we learned last week through our brother Paul, that the world, the watching world will see our love for one another, will see our unity with one another and they will say clearly God sent his son because humans don't act that way.

Unity as a Witness to the Gospel

Lord, let us be so starkly different than society around us that they would have to stop and balk at what goes on in your Christian church. Lord, I also pray for your church, not just this church, but the church at large that has been fractured into 30 ,000 denominations and spend so much time infighting.

Lord, would we take to heart John 17, 23, that we would be one and that we would see that as a way of even honoring father and mother and honoring those around us who are called in the household of faith.

Loving and Obeying God's Law Through Christ

Forgive us for all the ways we fall short, Lord. By your spirit, help us grow. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. Thank you for listening to this homily on the law of God from our covenant renewal worship this past Lord's Day.

We publish these messages each week because we believe that God loves his law and far from throwing it away, we believe that the death and resurrection of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will actually help us learn to love and obey God's law.

And that's our prayer for you, that as you chew on these expositions each week, that you would both learn to love and come into alignment with the law of God. And we pray that you would do that by the spirit's power through the finished work of Christ and to the glory of God.

And with that, God bless you.