7 “Honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.
- Exodus 20:12, The New International Version, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan
Publishing House) 1984.
"The Fourth Commandment"
In the name of Christ Jesus, dear friends:
If you are a person who studies your bulletin carefully when you come into church, you have probably noticed a pattern over the past month. For four weeks in a row now the artwork on the bulletin cover has been the same, a rolled up scroll lying next to a Bible with two tablets of stone in the background.
You may have also paid close enough attention to see ten Roman numerals on those stone tablets representing the Ten Commandments, one through five on one and six through ten on the other. Unless the artist knows something I don’t, it is my guess that he arranged the numbers that way simply because they divided evenly with five on each side.
You might remember from your days in catechism that the pastor numbered the tablets a bit differently on the chalkboard. There were still two tablets, but commandments one, two and three were on the first tablet and commandments four through ten were on the second. In that case, the commandments were arranged by subject matter. The first three commandments talk about our relationship with God and the final seven discuss our relationships with others.
If you are willing to go along with this uneven division, then our summer study of the first tablet is complete. The first commandment is dedicated to God’s glory, the second to God’s name, and the third to God’s Word. In the fourth commandment, God begins to tell us how he wants us to interact with other people.
Really, this commandment provides us with a perfect transition. Even thought it doesn’t speak directly about our relationship with God, it does address our relationship with God’s representatives, the people God himself has placed over us. As our focus shifts this morning from God to God’s people, we ask the Lord to help us apply what He has to say to us in...
The Fourth Commandment
Honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Luther expands on the meaning of the fourth commandment with this explanation: We should fear and love God that we do not dishonor or anger our parents and others in authority, but, honor serve, and obey them, and give them love and respect. If we want to keep the fourth commandment, we must first understand what is meant by the phrase, "others in authority." Who exactly has God placed over us? What institutions has the Lord set up for our good? Who are we supposed to obey?For the answer to those questions, we tu to God’s Word. In his first letter, Peter writes: "Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men: whether to the king, as the supreme authority, or to governors" (2:13,14). God has placed the government in a position of power and authority. He has given our elected leaders the responsibility to care for people’s physical needs through things like taxes, laws, courts, police, national defense, and the list goes on and on.
The care for our spiritual needs come from another source. From the letter to the Hebrews: "Remember your leaders, who spoke the word of God to you...Obey your leaders and submit to their authority. They keep watch over you as men who must give an account" (13:7,17). To care for people’s souls, God has established the church. And he calls pastors and teachers and staff ministers and church leaders to carry out this important work.
You may be able to think of other positions of authority in our society like employers or teachers or coaches, but all of these pale in comparison to the most important and influential job in the world. In fact, God puts this position in a class by itself when he says: Honor your father and mother..."
The role of parents is so important because fathers and mothers care for their children’s bodies and souls. They are the ones who clothed and fed us. They are the ones who taught us by their words and actions.
They are also the ones who brought us to God when they carried us to the baptismal font, when our mothers said our bedtime prayers with us at night and when our fathers taught us Bible stories at the dinner table.
In Luther’s opinion, good parents are so valuable that he calls them "earth’s greatest treasure" and says that they deserve to "occupy the highest place in our lives next to God" (from Luther’s Large Catechism).
God has established all of these authorities, parents, elected officials, employers and pastors and teachers, for our good. Through the government we reap the blessings of peace and order. Through the church, we reap the blessings of instruction in God’s saving Word. Through God-fearing parents, we get some of each.
But when was the last time you heard someone mail a tax return on April 15th and say something like this? "I just love this. I did so well last year that I made it to the next tax bracket. And my property taxes are going up too. Government is such a blessing."
Or when was the last time you heard a person walk out of church and say the following? "I can’t believe how well the pastor preaches the law. I felt like he was looking right at me, like he could read my mind. He made me feel about this big. He is such a blessing."
Or when was the last time you heard this coming out of the mouth of a teenager? "You wouldn’t believe it. I missed curfew last night, and my parents grounded me for a month. And now they are also requiring that I let them know where I am and what I am doing every minute of every day. They must be doing it because they love me. Aren’t my mom and dad a blessing?"
Realistically, you could probably go back to those three situations and replace the word, "blessing," with "burden." How many office conversations don’t include complaining about government at the local or state or national level? How many lunch hour discussions at work eventually get around to grumbling about the boss? How many times in a day do children talk back to their parents or cut down their teachers without a second thought?
These are terrible sins, blatant violations of the fourth commandment. And God hears these very things all the time, in our homes and our schools and our workplaces too.
If you had a scorecard for this sermon series on the Ten Commandments and kept track of how you are doing, you could say that we are all batting 1000% or 0%, depending on your perspective.
Like the three commandments before, every single one of us has broken the fourth commandment. The problem is sin, and the punishment is the same. We deserve to die. The good news is that the solution hasn’t changed either.
Where every other person who ever lived has failed, Jesus was perfect. During his life, he actively obeyed the fourth commandment. He was obedient to the ruling authority in his day. When the Pharisees tried to trap Jesus by asking if it was right to pay taxes to Rome, he answered without hesitation: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s" (Matthew 22:21).
In the gospel lesson for today, we heard that Jesus respected his parents. When they left Jerusalem "Jesus went down to Nazareth with them [his parents] and was obedient to them" (Luke 2:51).
Even when he was suffering the pains of hell on the cross, Jesus was still thinking about his mother’s welfare. He said to Mary: "Dear woman, here is your son," and to John, "Here is your mother" (John 19:26,27). And from that time on, John took Mary into his home.
But the greatest thing Jesus did to obey the fourth commandment was actually something he didn’t do at all. In John 3:16, Jesus said: "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son..." This passage is very simple, but its fulfillment wasn’t. Our salvation came at a tremendous price. It cost us nothing. It cost Jesus everything, even his life.
Seeing the difficult road ahead of him, Jesus prayed to the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane: "Take this cup from me" (Mark 14:36). "God, if it is at all possible, find another way to save the world." But this was God’s plan from the beginning, and it would not change. So how did Jesus react? He didn’t rebel. He didn’t complain. He didn’t quit. Jesus willingly obeyed his Father’s will.
First and foremost, Jesus is our Savior. He kept the commandments perfectly in our place. He obeyed his earthly parents and heavenly Father in our place. He sacrificed himself on the cross in our place. And because he did, heaven is ours.
Because we know that Jesus is our Savior, we can also look at him as our perfect role model. Motivated by God’s love for us, empowered by God’s love, we in turn show the same kind of love to others. Using the fourth commandment as our guide, let’s use our remaining time to discuss some ways in which forgiven sinners can "honor, serve and obey" God’s representatives.
The first word in the fourth commandment is "honor." Listen to what Luther has to say about that concept: "To honor is a much higher thing than to love, for honor includes not only love but also respect, humility, and awe..." (from Luther’s Large Catechism).
When we are trying to please our parents, we may say the right things. When we honor them, we really mean it. When we try to make a good impression on our employer, we may work hard so that he will notice. When we honor our employer, we do the right thing even when no one is watching. Honor connects words with actions, and actions with attitudes.
The fourth commandment also calls Christians to "serve and obey." What does that mean? For an employee it might mean doing what needs to be done even if it isn’t in your job description. For a child it might mean doing what your parents tell you to do the first time. For an adult it might include making sacrifices in order to take care of aging parents the same way they took care of you.
Finally, God wants us to treat his representatives with "love and respect." Understand that they might not deserve your love. It is quite possible that they haven’t earned your respect either. Because God’s representatives are just as sinful as everyone else, they sometimes do things that make them unworthy of our admiration. Even then we are not to be influenced by their failures and shortcomings, but rather by the will of God who has placed them where they are.
In the second lesson, Paul correctly points out that the fourth commandment is different from all the others. It is the first and only commandment with a promise attached: "...that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth."
This promise does not imply that a life of obedience equals a life on easy street. The promise is not meant to be a bribe God offers to get people to behave in a particular way. Rather the Lord gives us this promise to emphasize that he wants to bless us through his representatives.
And generally speaking, these words usually come true. Obedient children, respectful sons and daughters, make for a happier home. Law abiding citizens create safer neighborhoods and better communities. Faithful Christians listen to God’s Word regularly and find true spiritual peace.
It is my prayer that our study of the fourth commandment will help us see the authorities God has placed over us as the blessing they are. And it is also good for God’s people to remember that whenever we honor, serve and obey God’s representatives, we also honor the One they represent. God’s blessings on all of us as we seek to live what we have learned and apply God’s Word as it relates to the fourth commandment. Amen.