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October 7, 2024 | Daily Devotionals | October 7

Where Honor Is Due (Day 5)

Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.  ––Exodus 20:12

For some of us, the concept of honoring our mother and father is a tough one. What if you had an abusive mom and absentee dad? Or vice versa? Or perhaps you were raised in a single-parent household and your other parent just wasn’t around for part—or all—of your life.

Yeah. Pause here … I am sincerely sorry that if as a child (and teen, and adult) you did not have that which God would have deeply wanted for you: parents who loved you and honored their duties to raise you in a positive way. I don’t want to skip over such trauma, or seem glib in today’s reading.

What I am talking about—which is a running theme here—is about you grasping ahold of honor as God intended it, and for you to understand two key ideas about this whole “honor your mother and father” thing (which is one of the 10 Commandments, of course).

  1. God calls us to extend honor and respect to our father and mother, as well as our elders (those who have gone before us chronologically and in experience and wisdom).
  2. We can honor those who never honored us, because it is the Holy Spirit who does the act, rather than anything we need to gin up inside us.

You may say, “So Kenny, how do I honor a Dad who beat my mom, abandoned us kids, and never took any interest in our lives?”

First, by forgiving them. (Don’t quit reading yet. Hear me out.) Very, very tough to do, I know. Don’t do it alone—work through the anger and trauma with a professional (e.g., a psychologist, therapist, or trained counselor) and share the burden of your process with a spouse, pastor, or friend. Why forgive? It will free you from the anger, which subsequently will eradicate any power that parent still has over you. (That’s one dense paragraph—a subject for entire books. Here’s two I recommend: Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers by Drs. Leslie Leyland and Jill Hubbard, and Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa TerKeurst).

And whether or not your parents are alive or dead, honor is still active and available. It doesn’t mean you forget what they did to you, or don’t still have a lot of negative emotions. It simply means you invite God into the process and the Holy Spirit is allowed to do His work through you.

This is a big one. I get it. Far be it for me to oversimplify something as complex as the parent-child relationship. I DO know, however (from personal experience), that when we anguish and wrestle with this issue and invite the Holy Spirit into the pain, over time (sometimes a LONG time), the bitterness subsides and we begin to see our parents as God sees them. That’s a miracle for sure.

Lord, You know my feelings toward my parents. I surrender them both to You today—all the good and all the bad—and ask that You help me honor them as You desire.

 

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