Honor Thy Father ... What does this mean?

“Nutshell Parents Honor” Working Copy

A. Listen to him. B. Share your heart with him. C. Avoid judging him. D. Abide with him.  E. Treat him like a King. F. Recognize Transcendence G. Avoid being suspicious of him. H. Indulge him.     I. Personalize Old Age Care J. Live in your Home   K. Lionize him.   L. Expect to learn from him, as a Veritable Fount of Wisdom, one who has paid the most attention to you, and thought of you throughout life.

A. Maintain open communication. Put him on Speed-Dial! Take to heart all he says and ponder these words later in your heart, expecting wisdom. B. Share all of your dreams, hopes, aspirations, fears, failures, worries, anxieties, disappointments, your thoughts on your walk in faith. C. Ask the Spirit of God to show you how you cannot judge him, being on a hierarchy of time and station. D. Do not abandon him. Stay near him as best you can. If you live for a time in a different country, see if you cannot spend more hours in conversation with him than your siblings. E. Patronize him not! Look up to him, imagining the best of God’s plan for him in his fathering of you. F. Recognize the ineluctable hierarchical transcendence of your differing status son vis-a-vis father-mother. G. Don’t be a busybody. Don’t be nosy. H. Let him keep his habits, like smoking a cigar, playing peeknuckle, Crokonole, blackjack, continuing hobbies you may hold in disdain. Even learn to play a few of those games with him. I. Learn how he would rather have: A) you near him in an humble hut, than B) to live in a posh, luxurious retirement village without spending much time with you. J. Be humble & Sincere... work with your hands. Else, your father will live to see an abject failure despite his efforts to raise you well. K. Do not disdain him. Pray that the LORD shows you regularly how much he must have sacrificed for you, how many thousands of times he prepared food, fed you, woke up to change your diaper and carried you gently until you went back to sleep...helped pack your kindergarten bag, walked you there and home, took you shopping, out to a park, and countless other places. Ask the LORD to make of your father a hero in your heart (which is ideal inasmuch as this builds your character in your ability to recognize the Spirit working in your life and teach you to love God.) L. Do not casually look upon your father as a buffoon who cannot discern truth and cannot possibly serve as God's primary vessel for your growth in wisdom.

“Nutshell Parents Honor” Working Copy

A. Listen to them. (Keep open communication)
B. Share your heart with them.
C. Do not judge them.
D. Abide with him
E. Do not patronize him.
F. Indulge him.
G. Do not abandon him.
H. Make Old Age Care Personal

I. Transcendence: Recognize the ineluctable hierarchical transcendence of your differing status son vis-a-vis father-mother.

J. Live in your Home

K. Treat him like a King.

HINT:
View the family as God's unique Creation for the optimal growth of a human being, one fashioned after the likeness of God, and see his command to honor parents as a precious, inviolate means which we should cherish and hold dear to our hearts.

How can you share your heart if you willingly remove your presence for no good reason but that you would fain be somewhere else, anywhere but at the side of your ageing mother, the one who gave you her mother’s milk, to enflush your body with strength against every sort of calamity or immune difficulties? Is not this the essence of rebellion against the Lord's command to honor her?
Nay, Bro! ... But rather, be ye most wary of self-deception, for this singular cunning is most surely the worst sort of deception ever devised against man. And deprives a man of relation to his Creator, God.

 

What is a father?

A. Watchman
B. Listener of Last Resort
C. Shows Up
D. Provides
E. Sacrifices when nobody else will
F. Never gives up hope in you (even when all others do)
G. Does not judge, but continues to believe the best of you.
H. Trusts God and depends on Him to give what he needs, when he needs it, to get
     the job of fathering done. Even the heathen are endowed with a way of walking
     in this confidence, instinctively knowing that they will be filled with the
     resources and knowledge they will need. "Or what man is there of you, whom if
     his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a
     serpent?" (Matthew 7:9-11)
I.

    A father is not just a titular "head of the family." Though comic books may depict him as a king sitting by a sea with subjects standing beside him with palm fronds to keep off the sun from his delicate skin. 
    Rather, he serves a function, complete with duties:

⁷ So thou, O son of man, I have set thee a watchman unto the house of Israel; therefore thou shalt hear the word at my mouth, and warn them from me. ⁸ When I say unto the wicked, O wicked man, thou shalt surely die; if thou dost not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand. ⁹ Nevertheless, if thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it; if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou hast delivered thy soul. ¹⁰ Therefore, O thou son of man, speak unto the house of Israel; Thus ye speak, saying, If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?

 

 

Western culture has done its best to eclipse, erase the image of the father.  Why? Because God's structure of the family, with the father at the head, prevents ne're-do-wells (demons, scalawags, and bad actors on the stage of life) from thriving in their quest to impair or destroy all that God created.    

 

 Ezekiel 33