Cazenovia Park Baptist Church

With 1992 an election year, you can bet that we’re going to hear a lot about public opinion polls. There’s a researcher named George Barna who conducts public opinion polls. But his subject is not politics, it is religion. In his latest book, entitled What Americans Believe, Barna has tried to take the spiritual temperature of America at the end of the 20th century. His book is full of statistical data that reflect what we really believe and who we are as a people in the 90’s.

One of Barna’s findings is very significant and rather disturbing. As he criss-crossed the country interviewing thousands of Americans, he asked them the following question: How do you feel about this statement - do you agree or disagree strongly or partially with it? And here is the statement:

“There is no such thing as absolute truth; different people can define truth in conflicting ways and still be correct.”

As he recorded the responses of a cross section of Americans to that question, Barna found that only 28% of all Americans expressed a strong belief in absolute truth. Even more surprisingly, he discovered that only 23% of people who identified themselves as born-again Christians accepted the idea of absolute truth!

What does this mean? It means that less than one out of three Americans, and less than one out of four who say they are born again Christians, believes that you can know anything for sure. It means that the prevailing opinion in our culture and in our churches is that nothing is absolutely true anymore. To the majority of Americans living today, whether they are Christians or not, truth is relative. You can’t know anything for certain. What’s true for me may not be true for you, because there is no such thing as absolute truth.

This view of truth is called relativism. It affects everything that we believe, including what we believe about morals. It appears that Americans have abandoned any concept of absolute truth in the area of moral behavior. We have accepted moral relativism as our guiding principle.

Let me give you an example. Our Governor, Mario Cuomo, happens to be a Roman Catholic. As a Roman Catholic, Governor Cuomo has expressed his personal moral opposition to the practice of abortion. As a Roman Catholic, he believes that abortion involves the taking of human life.

However, as Governor of the State of New York, Mr. Cuomo has refused to take any action against the practice of abortion. Why not? Well, he explains, if he were to do that, he would be imposing his personal views of right and wrong on others. That wouldn’t be very polite. People might not like him to presume that what was right for him could also be right for them. That would be presumptuous, and he wouldn’t want to be presumptuous. Let everybody believe what they want about abortion, and he won’t disturb them by trying to make laws about it. That’s moral relativism.

Relativism is the philosophy of today, and you find it everywhere you go. We’ve heard a lot about the disease AIDS, which stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Did you know that nobody dies of AIDS? They die of the diseases that attack the body because of the AIDS virus. The AIDS virus disconnects the body’s natural defence mechanisms; it pulls the plug on the body’s immune system. It opens the door and throws out the welcome mat to whatever viruses and microbes and bacteria happen to come along. And the body is paralyzed to prevent it.

When America abandoned a belief in absolute truth, you know what happened? We contracted spiritual AIDS. The virus of moral relativism causes our society to lose its immune defence system against ideas and practices that are fatal.

But unlike physical AIDS, there is a cure for spiritual AIDS. It is found in the Bible. God gave us standards for belief and behavior that are absolute. They’re not negotiable, not subject to change. They were true thousands of years ago, and they will be true thousands of years in the future.

These absolutes are expressed in a series of ten principles of behavior that we call the Ten Commandments. God gave these Commandments to his people Israel in the OT around the year 1400 BC. God wanted to teach them how to live properly, how to live in accord with his will. So he boiled it all down to a set of ten commands - ten urgent, important principles for human behavior. As someone has said, they are the Ten Commandments, not the Ten Suggestions.

When was the last time you heard a sermon on any one of the Ten Commandments? They’re just not preached anymore. Yet if what George Barna tells us about America is true, and I think it is, we need to be taught the Ten Commandments more now than ever. We need to hear them - we need to hear what God is saying to us through them. We need to see how and why the Ten Commandments apply today in 1992.

When I was looking for resource material on the Ten Commandments, I found it was difficult to come by. Most of the good books on the Ten Commandments have long since gone out of print, and believe me, there aren’t many new ones being written!

You can go into a Christian bookstore and find dozens, if not hundreds, of books on self-help, books on counseling, books on co-dependency, books that recommend 12 steps to overcome this problem, and seven steps to recover from that bad habit. But I challenge you to find even one book on the Ten Commandments. Maybe that explains why we’re in the shape we’re in today! We’ve substituted the self-improvement of psychology for the sacred imperatives of Scripture.

One of the reasons that the Ten Commandments have been so under-emphasized in the church in America today is that Christians seriously misunderstand the relationship between the OT and the NT. There seems to be a brand of theology today that makes the OT almost a dead letter for Christians. We say, “Oh, we’re living in the age of grace, and the Ten Commandments were part of the Law. We’re not under that dispensation any more.”

But what did Jesus say? I spent all of last year with my people on Long Island studying the Sermon on the Mount, and in that sermon, Jesus said “I didn’t come to abolish the law; I came to fulfill it.” In other words, God hasn’t changed the rules of the game halfway through. What was righteous in his sight in the OT is still righteous today.

The moral principles in the Ten Commandments are not obsolete! They haven’t been replaced by Christianity, they are fulfilled in Christianity. Every one of the principles expressed in the Ten Commandments is reiterated and amplified in the New Testament. That means that the Ten Commandments are every bit as relevant to the Christian as they were to the Jews camped around the base of Mt. Sinai.

Does that mean that if you want to go to heaven you just have to keep the Ten Commandments? No. It never did mean that, not even in the OT.

Let me see if I can illustrate it for you. If you wanted to enroll in the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD., you would have to be nominated for appointment to the Academy by your Senator or Congressman. Each Senator and each Congressman can nominate a very limited number of candidates from his state or district for appointment to the Academy each year. Now let’s say that you are fortunate enough to be both nominated and appointed to the Naval Academy.

That gives you the privilege of getting a first-class education all expenses paid, and be paid a small salary as well. All your uniforms, all your books, all your supplies will be paid for. On graduation, you’ll receive a Bachelor of Science degree, and a commission in the U.S. Navy. In return, you’ll belong to the Navy for the next five years.

Upon your appointment to the Academy, you’ll receive a packet of information telling you what you’ll need to get ready to start classes: a Student Handbook, a description of life as a midshipman, some of the rules and regulations of the Academy, what personal belongings you can bring along with you, etc.. The Registrar’s Office will tell you to show up at the front gate on August 15, 1992, ready to begin.

Now what would happen if you really wanted to attend the U.S. Naval Academy, but you don’t bother to petition your Senator or your Congressman for a nomination. You simply go ahead on the strength of your shool record and you make plans to attend the Academy. Your get all your stuff together and on August 15, you present yourself at the front gate of the Academy, with your suitcase and your books and your personal belongings, ready to enroll.

Do you think they are going to let you in? Of course not. You are lacking the most important thing - without that letter of nomination, signed by your Senator or Congressman, you can’t get appointed. And without that appointment, you can’t get in! In spite of all your plans and preparations, you’re not going to the U.S. Naval Academy!

In the same way, we cannot earn our way into heaven by keeping the Ten Commandments. Admission into heaven is by appointment only. Only Jesus can appoint us to heaven. Only by his good name, written on our lives by his blood, can we get in. If only people would realize that fact! Eternal life isn’t based on what we do. It isn’t based on our best intentions, or our hopes, or our dreams, or our moral performance. It’s based on what Jesus did for us when he died on the cross. All we can do is to receive what he did for us. All we can do is to ask him to appoint us to heaven on the strength of his good name.

But once we receive Jesus, and we receive our appointment, then he begins to prepare us for heaven. He begins to enable us to live the way that God wants us to live. He begins to shape us into people who will be citizens of his kingdom. That’s where the Ten Commandments come in. The Ten Commandments are like ten chapters of our Student Handbook. We don’t follow them to gain admission; we follow them because we’ve been admitted.

Having said all that by way of introduction, let’s look at the fifth commandment.

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

The Ten Commandments fall into two sections. The first four commandments deal with our relationship with God. The last six deal with our relationship with people. The first four are vertical. The last six are horizontal. You can’t get your horizontal relationships right unless you’ve got your vertical relationship right.

The fifth commandment is the first one that deals with our horizontal relationships. It’s a very important one, because it deals with the subject of authority.

Each one of the Ten Commandments teaches us something about the character of God. The fifth commandment tells us that God is a God of authority. God wants things to be done decently and in order, and because he does, he has established certain lines of authority in the universe. Authority is an integral part of organization.

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Redskins won the Super Bowl. In the aftermath, everyone is admiring what a tremendous organization Coach Joe Gibbs has built. He’s hired the best assistant coaches, he has drafted and signed the right type of players, and he has designed a football organization that is flexible and efficient.

But throughout that organization, it’s evident that there are lines of authority. The authority flows back to Joe Gibbs. Without him being a dictator or a tyrant or an eccentric, everyone knows who’s the boss. You cannot have a football team, you cannot have a company, you cannot have an army, you cannot have an church without there being clear-cut lines of authority.

Now you may think that God had to invent authority because of the presence of sin in the universe. He had to establish authority in order to keep sinful people in line; to keep them from rebelling and going out of control.

But that isn’t so. Did you know that there was authority before there ever was sin in the universe? That’s right. There would have been authority in the universe whether there was sin or not. The reason we know this is that we see that there is authority in heaven, where there is no sin.

We read in the book of Revelation that the twenty-four elders and the living creatures and all the hosts of heaven bow down before God’s throne. The Bible tells us that there is authority among the angels. Some of the angels are in charge over other angels. Michael is an arch-angel.

But even more significantly, the Bible tells us that there are lines of authority in the godhead itself, among the three persons of the Trinity. Jesus, the Son of God, submitted himself to the authority of God the Father. When he was here on earth, he said that he came, not to do his own will, but to do the will of his father in heaven. When he agonized in the Garden of Gethsemane, he said “Not my will but thine be done.” He willingly submitted himself to the authority of God the Father.

And the Holy Spirit, the third member of the trinity, submits to the authority of the other two. Jesus said to his disciples: “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, he will testify about me. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears… He will bring glory to me by taking from what is mine and making it known to you.” The Holy Spirit willingly submits himself to the will of the Son and the Father.

So God is a God of authority, and that authority existed long before there was sin. Authority is part of the basic fabric of the universe; it’s part of the nature of things, because it’s part of the character of the one who made the universe. All the authority in the universe comes from God.

Now when God created man, he lent him some of that authority. Remember, he gave him authority over creation; over the animals and the plants and the environment. And then God created a helper for man; he created woman. He created marriage. And in that relationship, God put lines of authority also.

In spite of what the feminists say, and the Equal Rights Amendment boosters say, there are God-given lines of authority in the husband-wife relationship. The husband is the head of the wife. Now that headship is to be a loving and self-sacrificing kind of headship. The husband isn’t to use his authority to be domineering or abusive. The wife is to willingly and voluntarily submit to the husband’s authority over her, not as a doormat submits to being walked upon, not submitting in anger and resentment, but lovingly submitting to her husband’s leadership the way that the church responds to Christ. God designed marriage to be that way. If you don’t like it, you’re argument is with God, not with me.

Pretty soon, along come children. Now you’re talking about a family, and in the family, there is a whole new set of relationships - the relationship of children to parents. And in that set of relationships, there are God-given lines of authority.

They are described here in the fifth commandment. God wants children to honor their parents. God wants children to recognize the authority that God has given their parents over them. God wants children to learn to submit to that authority. The word “honor” in Hebrew literally means “heavy”.

A few years back, there was a popular expression among young people. Teenagers used to talk about things being “heavy”, and what they meant was “serious”. If something was “heavy”, it was something to be reckoned with, it was something significant, not something to be taken lightly.

That’s the idea here in the fifth commandment. Children should regard their parents as being heavy. Not heavy as in overweight! Heavy with dignity, heavy with respect, heavy with significance. And that heaviness comes not primarily because of what they do (after all, no parent is perfect), but because of who they are. They deserve that honor. And God expects children to give their parents that honor.

There’s a lot riding on it. The fifth commandment is the first commandment with a promise. The promise to Israel was that they would live long in the land the Lord was giving them if they obeyed the fifth commandment.

You have to understand that in the OT, God’s showed his favor by giving his people temporal blessings. The Israelites didn’t have a great deal of insight into the concept of heaven; they believed that if you lived for God, God would bless you here and now. He’d give you flocks and herds and a big family. He’d bless you by making you wealthy. He’d give you a long life. And he’d give you land to live on.

So when God tells the people that they would live long in the land, he was saying in terms they could understand: “I will bless you if you obey this command.”

Now the same is true today. God hasn’t changed. God will bless you if you honor your parents.

Now you may say, “Hey wait a minute! Surely this command doesn’t apply to me now that I’m an adult does it? Isn’t it like one of those store coupons that has an expiry date?” Well, let’s see.

Does it say “Honor your father and mother as long as you are young, but when you become an adult, you can ignore this one?” No, it doesn’t say that, does it?

This is a command for all children, whether they are young or old. When a child is a young child, honoring his parents involves obeying them.

Ephesians 6:1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Colossians 3:20 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.

The word that is used in those verses is the word for young children; children who are still living at home, children who are dependent upon their parents.

There comes a time when you leave home and you become independent and you begin to make decisions for yourself. You are no longer obligated to obey your parents. God doesn’t demand that you obey your parents forever, but he does expect you to continue to honor your parents, even when you are an adult.

This is an area where we have really fallen down in America. There are so many heart-breaking stories of adult children who dishonor their parents in the way they treat them. I heard recently of a family who drove up to the door of a nursing home and simply dropped their elderly mother off in the driveway, leaving her sitting there in a wheelchair. They drove away, never to see her again.

How can we, as adult children, continue to honor our parents? Let me give you four ways:

1. Keep in touch. Pick up that phone. Write that letter. Remember birthdays and anniversaries. Back on Sunday, Jan. 19, I picked up the phone and called my mother in Montreal. I said “Hi Mom, you know what day it is today?” She said “It’s Sunday.” I said “Yeah. You know what the date is?” She said “It’s the 19th.” And then it dawned on her.

Sunday, January 19, 1964, twenty-eight years ago, was the day that my father died. He died in church. She said “Oh Peter, it seems like a lifetime.” And as the memories came flooding back, we had a good talk together. Keep in touch.

2. Tell them you love them. Nothing means so much to a parent than to hear their adult child say “I love you, Mom” or “I love you, Dad. I appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

Mickey Mantle was a great ballplayer for the New York Yankees. He grew up in Oklahoma, and he was very close to his Dad. His father worked in the mines. Every day at suppertime, his Dad would come walking down the dusty road, tired and dirty from a day underground. Mickey would come running to meet him carrying two old baseball mitts. The two of them would play baseball till sundown.

Pretty soon, Mickey got into little league baseball and Mickey’s Dad, on his day off would faithfully go to see Mickey play. The years went by and Mickey came up to the big leagues as a rookie for the New York Yankees. But during that rookie season, tragedy struck. His father, whom he adored, died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Mickey was stunned by the loss of the man who had meant so much to him.

At the funeral, Mickey and his mother stood beside that open grave. Eventually Mickey’s mother turned to go back to the car, but Mickey stayed there for a few more minutes. He was thinking about the fact that although he loved his Dad so much, he had never told him so. And now his Dad was dead, and he’d never get another chance.

Tell your parents you love them.

3. Make sure the grandchildren get to be with them. That’s not always easy when you live far away from your parents. So many families hurt themselves and their children by never allowing there to be a relationship between the grandparents and grandchildren.

We’re so grateful for the times our kids can be with their grandparents. The Bible says in Proverbs 17:6 that “Children’s children are a crown to the aged”, so if you want to crown your parents, let ‘em see their grandchildren!

4. Care for their earthly needs when they lose the ability to do it themselves. Irma Bombeck tells the story of her changing relationship with her aging mother. She makes the observation that so often, with the onset of old age, there is a role reversal in the family: the child becomes the parent, and the parent becomes the child.

In Mark 7, Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for failing to provide for their parents. They evaded their responsibility to care for their parents, and they did it in the name of religion.

The Pharisees were playing a nice little religious game called Corban. Here’s how it worked: A devout Jew could go to the Temple and make an arrangement with the priests. By signing a paper, he could turn all his possessions over to the Temple - they were Corban - which means, “devoted to God”. But then the priests would give him a receipt. They gave him permission to go ahead and use whatever he needed for his own personal needs, and then they’d settle up with him when he died. They’d take whatever was left in his estate.

So you see what this did? Whenever someone came up to you and asked you to give him something, you could say “Oh no. That’s Corban - that’s devoted to God. I can’t let you have that.” If your parents were elderly and had needs, you could say “Gee, Mom and Dad, I’d really like to help, but you know, I don’t really have anything - it all belongs to God now. You’ll have to go ask him for it.” Pretty neat little game!

Jesus said to them: “you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down.”

Once, when we were living in Denver, we were right on the edge of poverty. We were down to the last $100 in our bank account and we were starting to wonder how we were going to put food on the table. But then began a chain of events in which God intervened in our situation and provided for our needs in a miraculous way.

It all started on a Sunday. We got home from church, and we were getting lunch ready, when the doorbell rang. You can imagine my surprise when I opened the door and found myself standing face to face with a mailman. He was a real U.S. Postal Service mailman. He had a real U.S. Postal Service mail truck sitting at the curb. It was Sunday! I have never seen, either before or since, a mailman delivering letters on a Sunday.

He handed me a letter and said “special delivery.” Inside was a little note that said “I thought you might be able to use this. Love, Mom.” And there was a check for $50. That letter had come 1,800 miles from Montreal to Denver, but it went through heaven’s post office along the way.

Now a few years ago, it became necessary for my mother to move into an apartment of her own. She didn’t have much money, only her Canada Pension check. She was going to need help with the rent. So my brothers and sisters and I got together and we decided that if we all chipped in $50 a month, she’d have enough. Now with 5 kids of my own, I’ve got lots of other ways I could spend that $50! But I thank God that he’s given me the opportunity to help my Mom, and every time I write that check, I think about that $50 she sent me.

1 Timothy 5:4 But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

1 Timothy 5:8 If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

Listen, if your parents are in need, you’d better take care of them first even before you bring your offering to church. God cares very deeply about how we treat our parents, even when we are adults. Because the way we treat our parents reveals how we’re going to treat God.

But what about our role in the other direction? What about the way we treat our children?

If there’s anyone here who was never a child, please put your hand up. Every one of us was once a child. Not one of us came into this world any other way. We all had a mother and a father. We all grew up under the authority of parents. Why did God design it to work this way? Why did God make all of us go through that rite of passage to adulthood? Because God had some lessons to teach us about authority.

God designed the family to serve as a spiritual boot camp. The family, and especially the relationship between children and parents, is God’s way of teaching us how to respond to authority. If we’re ever going to have a relationship with God, we’re going to have to know how to respond to authority, because God is the ultimate authority in the universe. A child learns how to respond to God by learning how to respond to his parents.

So that makes my role as a parent absolutely crucial. God has given me a mission. God wants me to teach my children how to respond to my authority so that when they grow up, they will know how to respond to God’s authority. My assignment is to teach my children to honor me so that they’ll know how to honor God. But many parents today get this all mixed up.

Some parents think that parenting is a popularity contest. They are soft and lenient with their kids, never confronting them, never discipline them, never show them where the limits are. These parents are hoping that their children will grow up to like them, because Mom and Dad never gave them any hassles.

Have you ever driven on a freshly paved highway, where they haven’t painted the lines on yet? It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it. You drive along, and say, “Boy, I hope I’m in the right lane. I wonder if that car over there is going to veer into me?” It’s disorienting not to know where the boundaries are.

Children who grow up in a home without clear limits end up really messed up. They grow up to be very insecure adults, because their parents never gave them the security of loving limits for their behavior. Their parents never said “That’s the line. Don’t cross it.” So the kids grow up wondering whether Dad and Mom really love them at all.

But on the other hand, there are parents who think that teaching your kids to honor authority means that you have to be a Marine drill sergeant. They are constantly barking orders, and demanding instant and total obedience. They have focused so heavily on producing outward conformity, that they’ve forgotten all about building inward character.

Kids who grow up in a home like that usually rebel as soon as they are able to. One day there is an explosion. All the while they were obeying on the outside, they were seething on the inside. They were not learning to honor authority, they were learning to resent it. And kids who rebel against their parents like that rebel against God, too.

So how, as a parent, can you find the balance? How can you teach your children to honor your authority so that one day they’ll know how to honor God?

Well, it involves being a certain kind of person. G. Campbell Morgan said “Honorable parents are easier to honor.” Dad and Mom, if you’re going to be an honorable parent, you’re going to have to be an honorable person. An honorable person is not a perfect person. An honorable person is not a person who never makes mistakes. But an honorable person is a person who does the right thing with his mistakes.

None of us are perfect. In the heat of the moment, in the pressure of raising a family, we often say and do the wrong things. What do we do then? How do we handle those mistakes we make, those sins we commit against our children? Do we gloss right over them, and say “Well, I had a right to be angry, or I had a right to say those things. Do we say, “Ahh, they’re only kids. They’re feelings don’t matter.” Or do we humble ourselves, and confess our sins to God and acknowledge our wrongs to our children? Do our kids ever hear us say “Hey. I’m sorry. I blew it. Will you forgive me?”

The Bible says that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up. That’s how you get honor. You can’t get it for yourself, you can’t demand it; only God can give it to you. You bow down before God, and he will lift you up. You go down humble; you come up honorable. Your children see you bowing before the authority of God, and you will rise in stature in their eyes. You set an example for them, and they’ll follow you.

And by teaching your children to honor you, you’ll be giving them the greatest possible gift. You’ll be putting them in the place where they will gain the blessing of God on their lives.

God bless you parents as you raise your children to honor you and to honor God. And God bless all of us as children we seek to honor our parents.