IBS Application for Ephesians 6:1 & Colossians 3:20

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.”

I can’t talk about these passages without immediately thinking about all the ways in which this command has been abused in my own life. God’s command here has never been a hard one for me to follow. But it has led to some instances of strife in my life. Sometimes intense strife.

Don’t get me wrong; neither of my parents have ever told me to do something that was outright and obviously morally compromising. But there was a time of my life when being obedient was actually the wrong thing to do. Not because the act of obedience was bad in itself; rather, it was because both I and the parent in question were refusing to be obedient to our Heavenly Father.

I imagine that the part about how me acting in obedience to my parent was sinful doesn’t make much sense. Essentially, my parent was put in a situation in which they could not function normally on their own and do things for themselves on a daily basis. They asked me to honor them in the way Scripture asks people to honor their father and mother by helping them when they require help. In this case, they asked that I stay with them to help take care of them. The problem was that I was about to graduate high school and go to college, and move on with my life onto the next thing God had planned for me.

My obedience to this request ultimately kept me from answering God’s call in my life. I felt like I was meant to do something more than take care of my parent, but I did it anyway in disobedience to my Heavenly Father’s call. The truth was that there were other people who could have helped my parent, and they were simply making up an excuse to get me to help them. And in the end, my decision to do so for as long as I did enabled a great deal of disobedience to the Father’s will on both my part and theirs.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t honor our parents or obey them. However, speaking from experience, it is possible to choose sinful obedience to our parents over obedience to our Father in Heaven. In the end, our Father’s will is always the most important will we have to obey. And I feel as though living in such a sinful manner is ultimately dishonoring to our parents. I certainly failed to honor mine when I enabled sin in their life as well as my own. Again, obedience to our parents is a good thing, but obedience to them over the Father isn’t, because it doesn’t honor Him or our parents.


For my application this week, I’ll spend some time in prayer each day asking that God would make clear to me all the ways in which I fail to be obedient to Him, so that I might honor Him as my Heavenly Father this week in obedience to Him above anyone else.

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