Over the weekend the whole fam returned from whence we came: a blitz through some friends, a wedding, and our old life back in Richmond. One of the many highlights from the trip was returning to the church that was our home for nine years, West End Pres.
During my nine years under the pastor, Steve Shelby, he taught me to apply the gospel in real-time. He also taught me much about how to speak and teach--honest confession of sin, hilarious stories, bringing it back to Jesus. He was a tremendous preacher before, and he's just gotten better since I've left.
Sunday he was vintage Steve--and I'm not just saying this because he told me afterwards that he reads my blog (it felt like Ansel Adams saying that he liked my photos or Brittany Spears saying I could write a mean pop-song or how Luke felt when Yoda told him, "no more training do you require").
He talked about the biblical command to honor (in Leviticus "revere") our parents. A couple of highlights here, some more thoughts tomorrow:
1. The word for "revere" used in the Leviticus passage is only used in two contexts: God and our parents. Think about this.
2. Our culture generally paints parents (particularly dads) as unhelpful or simply idiots. We are smarter than them, so of course we don't owe them anything.
3. But the biblical command does not leave it contingent on whether or not our parents are 'worthy' of reverence. There's no conditional clause here. We are commanded to revere, honor our parents, whether they deserve it or not.
That doesn't mean we jump every time they say to or that we put ourselves in harms way, but it's not about whether or not they deserve or have earned our reverence.
4. And that's because God has ordered the universe so that we can never experience true life apart from learning submission. If we will not submit our lives to God, we cannot know life.
So God has ordained the family unit to teach us submission. He has put us in our family for our good and his glory. How we respond to the place where he has put us is about our parents, but it is also about us. The family is our training ground for walking in submission to God.
3 comments:
Not going to lie, Alex. Right now, this pisses me off. Don't misunderstand. YOU don't piss me off... I guess Leviticus pisses me off... or God pisses me off? Either way, I'm mad. :) But that doesn't have to mean that I'm going to chuck this and run. I'm sure that I will be wrestling with this pretty consistently in the years to come. I'm interested to hear the rest of your thoughts tomorrow. Thanks for refusing to dodge the not-so-popular topics.
amanda,
always good to hear when you're pissed off!
yeah, this is hard stuff...and i got convicted during the sermon that i often council students that i'm working with in ways that probably dishonors their parents since parents do seem to be the cause of so much pain and brokenness in people's lives!
thanks for checking in.
Point #2 - SO true.
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