By Jordan Guerra
I’m going to talk about something that a lot of college age students don’t want to hear: parents.
I personally feel like I have the best parents in the world. My parents have expectations of me, and I try to meet them. I don’t want to let my parents down. I probably feel this way because of Sunday School. Do you remember when we had a lesson over each of the 10 commandments? I feel like we had twice as many lessons over the commandment: honor your father and mother. That was drilled into our heads as children! Today I’m going to talk about some things in the Bible that wasn’t mentioned to me in Sunday School.
In Deuteronomy 21, the Bible says that if a child isn’t obedient to their parents, the parents could take the child to the town square and the community could stone him/her. Exodus 21 says that if a person curses his/her mother or father they will be put to death. Wow, that seems pretty brutal right? Back in the day they took respecting parents very seriously! Thank God that He sent Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice so we wouldn’t be punished anymore.
Now I don’t want to focus on the gloom and doom here, because we don’t live by the old law anymore. I just want you to understand how serious this is to God. I know what a lot of you are thinking, “My parents don’t respect me, so why should I respect them?” This is a very common thought that a lot of us have. I’m not going to sugar coat it, some people don’t have the best parents. But the Word says we need to honor (and respect) them. As Christians, we know that we may be persecuted, even by our parents. The Word says that we must forgive them. And the Word says to respect them. This doesn’t mean be a door mat, but we must be respectful to our parents. Keep in mind, that the Word says God is our Father. No matter how horrible our earthly parents are, we have a perfect one up in heaven that we get to talk to.
Thank God that He sent Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice so we wouldn’t be punished anymore.
Now that that is covered, we can go to the focus of this post. Something that our Sunday School teachers often leave out of the lesson is the rest of the scripture. The entire verse of Exodus 20:12 says “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” So… the Bible says that if we respect our parents, we will live a long life. This is a PROMISE FROM GOD. There is no biblical backup to this next point, but do you ever wonder if that is why people in the Old Testament lived so much longer than present day? Today’s culture is all about me, myself, and I; we also live shorter lives. Just food for thought… I know that I have a lot of plans in my life. For example I want to graduate college, run a Spartan race, have a career, sky dive, have a family, etc. I want to live as long as I possibly can to be able to do all the things on that list. And I believe in what the Word says about living a long life. I know my parents love me. And they do things or say things that I don’t always agree with, but I will continue to respect them because I know they’re doing their best and I want to live by God says.
More Scriptures on honoring your parents:
Christian of Tomorrow 