Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.  ––Exodus 20:12

For some of us, the concept of honoring our mother and father is a tough one. What if you had an abusive mom and absentee dad? Or vice versa? Or perhaps you were raised in a single-parent household and your other parent just wasn’t around for part—or all—of your life.

Yeah. Pause here … I am sincerely sorry that if as a child (and teen, and adult) you did not have that which God would have deeply wanted for you: parents who loved you and honored their duties to raise you in a positive way. I don’t want to skip over such trauma, or seem glib in today’s reading.

What I am talking about—which is a running theme here—is about you grasping ahold of honor as God intended it, and for you to understand two key ideas about this whole “honor your mother and father” thing (which is one of the 10 Commandments, of course).

1. God calls us to extend honor and respect to our father and mother, as well as our elders (those who have gone before us chronologically and in experience and wisdom).
2. We can honor those who never honored us, because it is the Holy Spirit who does the act, rather than anything we need to gin up inside us.

You may say, “So Kenny, how do I honor a Dad who beat my mom, abandoned us kids, and never took any interest in our lives?”

First, by forgiving them. (Don’t quit reading yet. Hear me out.) Very, very tough to do, I know. Don’t do it alone—work through the anger and trauma with a professional (e.g., a psychologist, therapist, or trained counselor) and share the burden of your process with a spouse, pastor, or friend. Why forgive? It will free you from the anger, which subsequently will eradicate any power that parent still has over you. (That’s one dense paragraph—a subject for entire books. Here’s two I recommend: Forgiving Our Fathers and Mothers by Drs. Leslie Leyland and Jill Hubbard, and Forgiving What You Can’t Forget by Lysa TerKeurst).

And whether or not your parents are alive or dead, honor is still active and available. It doesn’t mean you forget what they did to you, or don’t still have a lot of negative emotions. It simply means you invite God into the process and the Holy Spirit is allowed to do His work through you.

This is a big one. I get it. Far be it for me to oversimplify something as complex as the parent-child relationship. I DO know, however (from personal experience), that when we anguish and wrestle with this issue and invite the Holy Spirit into the pain, over time (sometimes a LONG time), the bitterness subsides and we begin to see our parents as God sees them. That’s a miracle for sure.

Lord, You know my feelings toward my parents. I surrender them both to You today—all the good and all the bad—and ask that You help me honor them as You desire.

Every Man Ministries

 Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the king.  ––1 Peter 2:17, NKJV

One of my favorite scenes in Band of Brothers is when Major Winters runs into his old nemesis, Captain Sobel, the man who made Winters’ life miserable during basic training. Both men are now gripped in the intense days following D Day, pressing the advantage against the Nazis. Maj. Winters has now eclipsed Cpt. Sobel in both rank and stature, and for it, Sobel hates him. So much so that when Sobel walks past him, he does not salute him (as he should).

Winters calls out Sobel and says: “Captain Sobel, you salute the rank, not the man.”

Whether it’s your boss, the “inept” ump at your daughter’s softball game, or the police officer who pulls you over for going 30 in a 25 zone, as God’s men we need to remember Major Winters’ words: We salute (i.e., honor, respect) the rank (position) when we struggle to respect the man or woman (in his or her condition).

Look, I get it. There is no shortage of rudeness and disrespect in our culture, which makes it really hard to bite one’s tongue, swallow the saucy comeback, and take the higher position. No, it does not mean we let people roll over us. But for far too long, men have mistaken kindness (born from knowing our position in Christ) for weakness (being misjudged for taking the higher road in a prickly situation).

The beautiful thing about notching decades off your life calendar is that you get time to make mistakes and (the best part!) grow from them. It gets easier to turn the other cheek IF we keep our focus fixed on our position rather than our condition. Don’t let the enemy fool you into thinking that verbal attacks, low blows, and harsh words toward those who have wronged you make you the “stronger” person. Rather than screaming at the men about to stone the woman caught in adultery, Jesus knelt in the sand and doodled (well, we don’t know what he wrote—probably something profound). He then stood up and said, “He among you who is without sin can cast the first stone.” That’s quiet strength. That’s working the situation from position.

Father, it’s really hard for me to not lash out at the “fools in this world.” Please give me patience in my position!

Every Man Ministries

The Lord watches over the foreigner and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. –Psalm 146:9

Ruth was tired. It had been a long night. Heck, it had been a long past few years. It was just her mother-in-law, Naomi, and her sister-in-law, Orpah, now. Their three husbands were dead. There’s famine in Ruth’s native Moab, and it’s time to make a move. After a restless night, they set off for Naomi’s home town: Bethlehem. Then something happens along the road. Naomi changes her mind; her daughters-in-law are better off staying home, in their country, and finding new husbands, she says. Orpah agrees and heads back to Moab.

Ruth’s response, though, changes the trajectory of her life—and lays down the tracks for the lineage of both King David and Jesus Himself. She tells tired and burned out Naomi:

Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me. ––Ruth 1:16-17

Ruth operates from her position as a child of God, while Naomi is operating out of her condition as a poor, tired widow. When we function in position, we gain margin—emotionally, spiritually. Ruth had the margin to see the situation as God saw it: a new pathway to fulfilling His destiny for her. That is why Ruth could choose Naomi despite all the negative conditions. Ruth has zero material prospects: In ancient Israel, to be a widowed, shekel-less foreigner typically meant you were an outcast in society. But Ruth sees through spiritual lenses that focus on her God rather than her goods.

Ruth teaches us how to honor those who perhaps have not honored us. How? By seeing them positionally as God sees them, rather than seeing them conditionally through our emotional/human lenses. David did it with Saul. Jesus did it with Peter.

Is it tough to take the actions of honor—respect, patience, deference? It can be, especially when there’s zero reciprocity. So we take a deep breath, surrender the situation to God, and then choose the “high road” of honor. That’s God’s way. What the world see as conditional weakness, the Father deems positional strength.

Father, help me accept people for who they are in You, rather than how I see them.

Every Man Ministries

When David finished saying this, Saul asked, “Is that your voice, David my son?” And he wept aloud. “You are more righteous than I,” he said. “You have treated me well, but I have treated you badly. You have just now told me about the good you did to me; the Lord delivered me into your hands, but you did not kill me. … May the Lord reward you well for the way you treated me today.   ––1 Samuel 24:16-19

So David gets harassed, chased, terrorized, and threatened by Saul for years, hiding in caves and forests, even taking refuge in the Philistine city of Ziklag. Yeah, those same Philistines who have been the sworn enemies of Israel for a good bit of time. (That’s like a Spartan fleeing to Persia for protection.)

So when Saul finally meets his violent end, what is David’s reaction? A party? Huge festival? Dancing along with the killing and eating of the fatted calf?

Nope. Take a look at what actually happened.

Then David and all the men with him took hold of their clothes and tore them. They mourned and wept and fasted till evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for the army of the Lord and for the nation of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword.

––2 Samuel 1:11-12

And there’s more. David actually hears the news from an escaped enemy prisoner—an Amalekite—who came upon a mortally wounded Saul, and finished him off at Saul’s pleading. Put him out of his misery, so to speak. So a reward for this guy for bringing David the news?

Nope. Here’s what David says:

David asked [the escaped Amalekite], “Why weren’t you afraid to lift your hand to destroy the Lord’s anointed?”

Then David called one of his men and said, “Go, strike him down!” So he struck him down, and he died. For David had said to him, “Your blood be on your own head. Your own mouth testified against you when you said, ‘I killed the Lord’s anointed.’”  ––2 Samuel 1:14-16

David isn’t seeing these circumstances through worldly eyes, but through the Lord’s. Remember, position over condition: Despite all the misery and mistreatment Saul directed at David, his immediate response to his king’s death is to honor him.

As God’s men, does this mean we let an abusive boss roll over us? No. And that’s not the message here with David. It means that God wants us to always see the world as He sees it, not as we see it. Why? Because looks can be deceiving. David saw Saul’s position as king more than he saw Saul’s very flawed condition. As David did, so we should do too. Choose position—pray that you can see even the negative people in your life just as God sees them. When you start to see them as the Father sees them, honor is possible.

Father, give me the ability to give honor where You see it warranted, not where I see the need for it.

Every Man Ministries

In fact, some parts of the body that seem weakest and least important are actually the most necessary. And the parts we regard as less honorable are those we clothe with the greatest care. So we carefully protect those parts that should not be seen, while the more honorable parts do not require this special care.  ––1 Corinthians 12:22-24, NLT

hon·​or ˈä-nər

1 a : good name or public esteem : REPUTATION

b : a showing of usually merited respect : RECOGNITION

pay honor to our founder

The cliché is that when things dissipate or disappear in our culture, they’ve “gone the way of the dodo bird.” According to the American Museum of Natural History, “The dodo is a lesson in extinction. Found by Dutch soldiers around 1600 on the island [of Mauritius] in the Indian Ocean, the Dodo became extinct less than 80 years later because of deforestation, hunting, and destruction of their nests by animals brought to the island by the Dutch.”

“Survival of the fittest” aside, we can all learn a lesson from the dodo’s demise: When the natural order is disturbed, things often go afoul. I was just reading this morning that the snow crab population in Alaska plummeted by billions in 2022 due to warmer water, which kicked the crabs’ metabolism into overdrive. Basically, there simply wasn’t enough food to support their amped up appetites and they starved to death.

What does this have to do with honor, the topic of the next few days’ readings? A lot, actually. Consider your social sphere, news cycle, and the basic tone of our nation today. Do you see a lot of honor taking place? Oh, it’s there if you dig for it, but you have to jackhammer through several layers of vitriol, name-calling, one-upmanship, and dirty dealing.

As God’s men, we need to consciously fight for honor—the honor of those under our protection, starting with our families—and give honor often and freely. Compliment those you love; talk up your fellow employees at work; give a kind word to the elderly gentleman you see on your daily walk, and a particularly good tip to your favorite barista.

Honor doesn’t happen by accident—in a world where honor is endangered, God’s men are called to bring the biblical precept back from the brink of modern cultural extinction.

Lord, help me honor at least one person today with a compliment or kind word or action.