Ephesians 6:1-3 Obey our Parents

Ephesians 6:1-3 Obey our Parents

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” - which is the first commandment with a promise, - “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

We have come to the final chapter of Ephesians, in which Paul is coming to the end of teaching the Ephesian churches valuable practical lessons. We come now to an important lesson that we ought to remind ourselves, obeying our parents.

This is so basic and simple, but yet it risks our over-familiarity with it that we just brush it off without examining our own lives to see how we fall short of this.

Obey Your Parents as You Would the Lord

In the NIV, the verse writes, “Obey your parents, in the Lord.” In the HCSB version, it writes, “Obey your parents, as you would the Lord,” Naturally, Paul is saying, how you have obeyed the Lord, you ought to likewise obey your parents in a similar fashion. Paul assumes here that the reader is in obedience to the Lord. This will also lead the inference that, if we don’t obey the Lord in the first place, chances are, we are not going to obey our parents. If your spiritual life is bad, your relationship with your parents will be bad. 

When you do not have a sense of your heavenly father, you will not have a sense of your earthly father.

In a sense, our testimony in church mirrors our lives outside the church. Members of the church who do not seem serious about serving, not interested in pursing ways to submit to the Lord, often, they have a strained relationship with their parents. They are haphazard about service in church, and they are haphazard about serving their own duty in the household. They only want to indulge in their interests but are not concerned about the needs of the family.

We are constantly fighting to establish ourselves as authority that we need to be reminded about submission to God ordained authority through Him and through our parents.

Obey our Parents because they are God’s Ordained Authority in our Lives.

The child in the home is to be willingly under the authority of parents with obedient submission to them. Our parents are the agents of authority our Lord has placed over us. We have to obey our parents as though obeying our Lord. Obeying our Lord will bring forth true obedience to our parents. How we submit to the Lord, we should submit to our parents too. They are God’s ordained authority in our lives. This is the way God has designed and required it.

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

If you claim God as Lord, you will obey your parents. Else, you might just be a seemingly fervent religious fanatic but yet is a hypocrite. You serve fervently in church, but yet at home, you put on a different face. May we examine ourselves in this.

Obey Our Parents not just Physically but in Inward Attitudes, Honor them as well

Verse 1 speaks of action. We are to obey our parents. Verse 2 tells us of our attitude. We ought to honor them. This is the motive behind the physical actions of obedience. We should treat them in high respect, esteem. There is a chinese saying that when a young bird starts to have its wings hardened, it will fly away. 

We naturally treat our parents in awe during our young age. But when we grow up, and grow decreasingly reliant on them and increasing independent, we tend to decrease our respect and esteem of them.

Our respect and esteem for them should be the same. You may realize some short comings of your parents, but don’t you have them too? Your abilities may exceed theirs, but don’t your abilities come from God and are for His glory, not for your pride?

This is a stern reminder to adults especially, when they are at their peak performance age and everything seems under control. They start to view their older parents as a liability, as a time waster, as a money waster. Treat them as dementia incapacitated. Put them in old folks home. This is a great sin. We have to HONOR our parents no matter what condition they are in.

Obey our Parents because they are Wiser than Us.

 As the chinese saying goes, they cross more bridges than we cross roads, they eat more salt then we do rice. Youths often become impatient and quickly brush off advices/recommendations from parents, most of the time, to the detriment of themselves. Reflect how in the past when you have not listened to your parents, you ended up in trouble?

Read for yourselves what the wisdom in proverbs say.

Proverbs 1:8-9 “Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction, and don’t reject your mother’s teaching, for they will be a garland of grace on your head and a gold chain around your neck.”

4:1-2 “Listen, my sons, to a father’s discipline, and pay attention so that you may gain understanding, for I am giving you good instruction. Don’t abandon my teaching”

4:10 “Listen, my son. Accept my words, and you will live many years. I am teaching you the way of wisdom; I am guiding you on straight paths.”

Obey our Parents because it is a Source of Blessing. Disobedience brings about Judgement.

“so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”

Although submission to our parents should first of all be for the Lord’s sake, He has graciously added the promise of special blessing for those who obey this command. When we obey our parents, God’s promises are that first, it will go well for us, and second, we will enjoy long life on earth. Consider the case if we do not obey.

30:17 “As for the eye that ridicule a father and despises obedience to a mother, may ravens of the valley pluck it out and young vultures eat it.”

But what about when our parents have not done their duty as parents?

The bible recognizes that parents themselves have shortcomings. Hence in Eph 6:4 it Paul exhorts to fathers, “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”

To put it simply, no matter what, we are to honor our parents. When we honor our parents in obedience to the Lord, we manifest the testimony of Christ which WILL bring about a God-transforming change to the entire family.

But what about when we are told to obey something contrary to the bible?

In the NIV, the verse writes, “Obey your parents, in the Lord.” It simply means that we are to obey our parents as long as it is in accordance to biblical principles. We should study hard, not be a slacker, not come home too late/stayover at night, not watch too much tv/internet at the expense of not doing housework, homework, use vulgar language, have modest dressing, watch the pool of friends we are mixing around with.

But what about not being allowed to come to church, to serve, to be baptized, other spiritual matters etc.? 

These exist because there is first a gap between our parents and God. We have to pray that this gap be bridged through faith in Jesus Christ just as it has bridged our gap between us and God. As long as this gap exists, there will be conflicts when we seek to obey our Lord and at the same time, try to obey our parents.

In Summary

There are times when you just feel inpatient, feel having little time for yourself, feel that you have enough worries as it is already and often, we vent it out on the people we love most. Our parents. We treat outside people so warmly yet do not give the same kind of treatment to our parents. It is a God given gift to have parents. They love us, brought us into this world, brought us up. We have to obey them. Honor them. Love them.