Recipe for Staying Alive

Ephesians 6:1-3

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When I was a kid, one of the most mystifying commandments to me was the fourth commandment, honor your father and mother, that it may go well with you, that you may enjoy a long life on the earth. It’s not that the commandment itself didn’t make sense to me, honoring my father and mother, doing the things that they said that is to some extent intuitive. Right? That’s written on my heart. I knew it was a good idea to listen to mom and dad. It was that other part that part at the end that always kind of got me a little bit so that I might enjoy a long life on the earth. Was obeying this particular commandment, some sort of a magic spell that got cast over me so that I would make it to 80 or 90. It was a weird one.

It wasn’t until I was actually a grown up that some clarity started to get shed on this, especially when I would view it in the light of how it’s written out in Ephesians

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise: “that it may go well with you and that you may live a long life on the earth.” (Ephesians 6:1-3)

Now that I’m a parent, I can see the wisdom that’s being relayed here because a good 75% of my parenting time is spent trying to prevent my children from killing themselves. They are consistently inventing brand new creative ways to try to off themselves. It is perpetually horrifying. They are like suicidal Looney Tunes characters. I have watched my oldest child on separate occasions almost be crushed by a piano and an anvil. I’ve only seen two Anvil’s in my entire life and one of them almost did her in.

Trying to keep your kids alive is a constant exercise. Your calling after them, Brin! Please stop! As they run into the Pacific Ocean. Madison! Stop, wait! You’re always trying to pull them back from danger. And there’s a scariness there as a parent because it only takes one time, one lapse in attention, where they don’t honor their father and mother, where they don’t obey their father. And that call of stop, as my daughter runs out into traffic, ends in tragedy.

This commandment is a recipe for staying alive. But beyond just that. This is talking about other relationships and other forms of authority that we have in our lives. There’s our relationship with the government and of course, most relevantly, there’s our relationship with our God, the need to obey him.

Now, Ephesians the word that’s being used for Obey here is actually kind of an interesting one. It’s the word that gets used for answering the door when somebody knocks. That’s not really something I usually think of as obeying. It’s not like that when somebody knocks on the door. I feel like they’ve put some big, onerous obligation on me. It’s just something that I do. It’s almost reflexive. I don’t even really think about this. Someone’s knocking at the door, I just, I go in and answer it. And it’s usually a wonderful thing. It’s not too often that I answer the door and I feel depressed. It could be a package from Amazon that’s getting dropped off. It could be a visitor to hang out with me. Maybe the neighbor kids came over to play and they’re going to take the kids out for a little bit. It’s usually going to be good news. It doesn’t feel onerous. It doesn’t feel like a difficult thing to do, to obey, in that sense.

When we take our relationship with God and we put that same spin on it, this commandment takes on a whole new light. God gave us the commandments for our benefit. We don’t obey the commandments to do anything nice for him. These are things that we do for our own good by reflexively and quickly heeding the word of our God, hearing his voice and doing as he says, we benefit ourselves.

Of course, we have the same lapses in judgment, and when we have our lapses, just like a child running into traffic, ignoring their parents cries to stop, for us it can end in tragedy as well. But rather than have us bear the pain and humiliation and death of our failures, God took all of that and transferred it to his infinitely obedient Son. His Son obeyed the fourth commandment, honored his Father, even though honoring his Father meant taking every time I have failed to honor mine and carrying the punishment for those failures onto the cross. He honored his Father to the end so that I can have his reward. Now because of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, I can look at God and truly call him my Father, even to the point that I receive a Son’s inheritance. Walking into the kingdom of heaven after my death and living there for eternity in my Father’s house.