Honoring authority

I did a 2-3 minute commentary through the 10 commandments during successive Sunday worship services a while back - here is one of them.

Fifth commandment: children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Beyond this, the authors of the Westminster confession wisely apply this commandment not just to parents, but to all God-ordained authority. In the beginning there was just the family. The church and state functions were part of the family. Due to sin, God has wisely divided society, not just into languages, but into different institutions. No one institution has a corner on the market. The church shepherds and teaches the family and state. The state protects the family and church. The family fuels and forms the church and state. Scripture calls both kings and church leaders – fathers, because honor and obedience are due to both. It is very easy to get out of balance and put any one of these over the others. Big gov’t liberals and libertarian individualist conservatives both look to the state against the family and church, violating family boundaries and moral standards. The church breaks apart the family when it gathers and it ignores political issues that the Word addresses. We tend to look to the family, emphasizing the state and church getting out of the family’s way, instead of honoring and obeying them. We get a fleshly thrill from hypothetical situations where we would need to disobey the church or state, rather than grieving over such a situation.

Finally, God calls us to honor father and mother. Fathers, while you seek to take responsibility for your office as head of the home, realize that one of those responsibilities is to train your children to respect and obey their mother. To do this, they will need to see YOU honoring their mother in front of them.

8/16/09