Audio Transcript

I love and respect my own parents a lot. But not everyone is blessed with parents like mine. And so we have several related questions in the inbox from adults who are trying to figure out how to honor their parents. For many, this becomes more and more perplexing. As we grow into adulthood, we see our parents’ faults more clearly. And in the late-teen transition to adulthood, parental authority changes; it lessens. The relationship changes. It all leads to various questions, like this one: Can we honor our parents if we don’t respect them? The question was put in particularly clear and brief terms by one listener to the podcast, an anonymous twentysomething listener. “Pastor John, my question is rather simple: How can I honor my parents when I don’t respect them? Or does honoring them assume that you do respect them?” Pastor John, what would you say?

Yes, I don’t think there is a great difference between the terms honor and respect. Respect, I think, refers most often to our inner assessment of someone’s character or achievement, while honor more often refers to our various demonstrations toward them in words or behaviors that express our respect.

So, I think the real question is this: How do we honor or respect parents who, without any repentance, act in dishonorable and blameworthy ways? That’s the question. This is a very crucial question, not only because every Christian has to come to terms with the biblical command of Jesus in Matthew 19:19 to “honor your father and mother” — even though thousands of people have had parents who consistently acted in dishonorable and blameworthy ways — but it’s also a crucial question because the same issue faces all of us in regard to all people, because 1 Peter 2:17 says, “Honor everyone” — not just “honor your parents” but “honor all people” — “Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor.” And there are horrible people in the world who have done despicable things all their lives and have died viciously hating people and rejecting God and seemingly having nothing honorable about them.

Seven Grounds for Honor

Now, what I have found to be most helpful in thinking through this question about how to honor the dishonorable is to discover in the New Testament that there are at least seven overlapping warrants or reasons or grounds for honoring someone. And these different reasons or grounds for honoring people regularly call for different ways of honoring people. If we take all these into account, some of them will apply to honoring parents who have acted in disreputable or criminal ways — and we’re not going to twist any language to make that work. So, here they are — here are the seven overlapping warrants for honoring someone in the New Testament.

1. Image of God

First, there is honor that is owing to human beings simply because they are created in the image of God, and should be treated differently than the animals. For example:

With [the tongue] we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things ought not to be so. (James 3:9–10)

“The sheer existence of a human being in the image of God should call forth from us a kind of honor.”

In other words, the sheer existence of a human being in the image of God, the likeness of God, should call forth from us a kind of honor. So, when my students used to ask me, “How do you honor a child molester, a rapist, a murderer, a leader of a genocide?” one answer that I gave was “You don’t shoot them like a stray ox that gored your neighbor” (Exodus 21:28–32). You give them a trial by jury, just because they are human and not animals. That’s a form of honor, even if the trial is followed by execution.

2. Natural Relationships

There is honor that is simply owing to natural relations as God has established them. And here I’m thinking about “honor your father and mother,” because it is a natural relation that God has established, and gains its honorableness from his ordering of things — not just from the quality of the parents. Or you could add to that the honor that is due to age. Leviticus 19:32: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.”

3. God-Ordained Authority

There is the honor that comes with God-ordained authority. Now, that overlaps with the second point, but this one is not rooted in nature the way that one was. In the secular sphere, Peter says, “Honor the emperor” (1 Peter 2:17). In church, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:12, “Respect those who labor among you and are over you in the Lord.” In other words, there is a God-appointed authority in the world and a God-appointed authority in the church, and there is a kind of honor that we should show just by virtue of the roles of authority that God himself has appointed.

4. Valuable Labor

There is the honor that people should get because of the worth of their work. In 1 Thessalonians 5:13, Paul goes on to say that, in the church, we should “esteem [our leaders] very highly in love because of their work.” In other words, the work itself is valuable and worthy of our respect.

5. Servanthood

It’s interesting that Paul mingles love with honor there in 1 Thessalonians toward the church leaders who do their work well. Here’s verse 13 again: “Esteem [your leaders] very highly in love because of their work.” In other words, there is a kind of respect or an esteem or an honor that is drawn out of us by our love for those who serve us, not just from the quality of their work.

6. Weakness

There is an honor that should be drawn out toward weakness. Peter mentions this in the relationship between husbands and wives in 1 Peter 3:7: “Husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel.” In other words, in Christ, the response toward weakness is not exploitation or mockery or abuse, but honor.

7. Christlike Grace

This may be the most important with regard to what is distinctly Christian. There’s a kind of honor that is freely bestowed without reference to any quality or position or reputation or virtue or rank or demerit in the person honored. In other words, there is a way of honoring that, as it were, doesn’t respond to honorableness but bestows it. It treats a person as though honorable, as though worthy of our service, because we give it to them.

Paul roots this way of honoring people in the very mind of Christ, and in his sacrificial incarnation and sacrifice on the cross.

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. . . . Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant. (Philippians 2:3, 5–7)

“There is a way of honoring that, as it were, doesn’t respond to honorableness but bestows it.”

So, there is a kind of honoring that we freely and graciously bestow on the undeserving. We treat them better than they deserve. We assume the position toward them of servants. And thus, in a way, we exalt them as though they were worthy to be served, when, in fact, they’re not worthy to be served. And thus, we bestow a kind of free honor upon them, which is called grace, the way Christ did to us, the way his sacrifice pours out onto us — honor as though we were honorable when we’re not.

To Whom Honor Is Owed

None of those seven reasons for honoring people, and none of those ways of honoring people, commits us to the hypocrisy of thinking others are honorable when they are dishonorable or praiseworthy when they are blameworthy. The Bible does not ask us to live a lie.

So in summary,

some acts of honoring others are owing to the image of God,
some to natural human relations that God has appointed,
some to authority structures that God has put in place,
some to the worth of the work that others do,
some to the relationship of love that we have,
some to a person’s weakness, and
some is absolutely free, in order to display the freedom of the grace of God to others.

And among those seven, I would say at least four, and possibly as many as six, apply to parents who, at one level, have lived in dishonorable ways. And I’ll let you think through which of those apply to your situation.

Older women . . . are to be reverent in behavior. (Titus 2:3)

Though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, as a young girl I was always watching the older women in our small local church. I remember them — their faces, their names, their lives.

Without being overly serious, they were serious about their walk with God. They weren’t public speakers, but when they spoke, others listened. Though they didn’t draw attention to themselves, my attention was drawn to their grace and beauty, a beauty that transcended current fashion and hair trends. In many ways, they were just ordinary women, but there was something about them, a sense of depth and solidity that I remember to this day. In Titus 2:3, Paul calls this something reverence.

What is reverence? Would you be able to define it for a third grader — or for your neighbor or coworker? I’m guessing that you (like me) might falter, because reverence seems to have gone the way of the wall-mounted telephone. Reverence demands a fitting response to the true nature of things — whether persons, circumstances, or natural wonders. Someone who is reverent respects the respectful, laughs at the laughable, mourns over the mournful, and glorifies the glorious.

In Titus 2, Paul expects of the older women conduct that fits a holy person — conduct that corresponds to reality, to their redemption and sanctification in Christ. In a word, reverence.

Redeemed for Reverence

Such reverence may seem obsolete in our day, in part due to our society’s strong resistance to any sense of givenness — of reality — to which we must conform. Humans claim the right to determine their purpose, their gender, their identity, their authority, their morality. At the heart level, this is the creature’s rebellion against the Creator God, who alone determines reality.

“Reverent behavior is the overflow of a heart that lives in the presence of God.”

Since the fall, humankind has bent toward irreverence: demanding self-rule and autonomy, “seeking to transcend creatureliness and become one’s own origin and one’s own end,” as John Webster puts it (Holiness, 84). Such rebellion is as unfitting to reality as a gold ring in a pig’s snout or a king drunk in the morning (Proverbs 11:22; Ecclesiastes 10:16–17). Restoration to reverent living as a creature in renewed fellowship with the Creator requires nothing less than a work of redemption.

And that is exactly the reason Paul gives for the reverent behavior of older women in Titus 2. Reverence is in accord with sound doctrine (2:1) — in other words, with the gospel. “The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people” (2:11), and the right response is that we “renounce ungodliness” and “live . . . godly lives in the present age” (2:12). Reverence fits redemption like laughter fits a good joke, or lemonade fits a humid summer afternoon, or books fit a library. It is as beautiful as expensive ointment poured out on Jesus’s feet (Matthew 26:10).

What sets godly women apart, then, is that their lives correspond to the reality that Jesus reigns and that he is their saving Lord. They trust the Trustworthy One. They serve the Sovereign One. Their lives are increasingly a testimony to the way life was meant to be. No longer curved in on themselves, they are oriented toward Jesus in all things.

Alive to God’s Reality

Reverent behavior is the overflow of a heart that lives in the presence of God. A godly woman doesn’t “temporarily disable” his holy presence, even for five minutes. Her speech is not slanderous (Titus 2:3) because she speaks the truth about others, even in the privacy of her own thoughts. Because Christ is her sovereign Master, she isn’t enslaved to anything (2:3), whether wine or working out, appearance or attention, envy or anxiety, fears or fantasies.

She loves her husband (2:4), because God has given her this one man to bless, serve, care for, and help in every way possible, so that he might be the man God has called him to be. She gives of herself to bless her children (2:4), even when she least feels like it, because Christ gave himself for her when she least deserved it. She is not controlled by her emotions (2:5), because her emotions are properly ordered under Christ. She is, as John Calvin writes, “consecrated and dedicated to God in order that [she] may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory” (Institutes, 3.6.1).

Maybe we should read that again. “Think, speak, meditate, and do nothing except to God’s glory”? Nothing? The sobering (and inspiring) answer is “Yes — nothing.” The call is inspiring because it gives us a glimpse of the beauty of gospel obedience. It is sobering because it leaves no part of our heart or life outside of the loving reign of Jesus.

Growing up, one of my cousins often refused to let me play with a handful of her toys on the grounds that they were “special to her.” (That was a long time ago. Today she is one of the most reverent women I know!) In our flesh, sometimes we hope for a similar loophole. We want just a little tucked-away corner, a junk drawer where we can stash our most “special” idols that we would prefer Jesus not touch, a small realm where we can keep our self-rule. But that little junk drawer is a place of irreverence, of absurdity, where we still try to live in unreality, sitting on an imaginary throne in a personal insurrection against God.

Housekeeping of the Heart

A life of reverence is a life of increasing surrender to God’s will. Even our reverence comes to us on God’s terms, not ours. We do not instantaneously become creatures who “do nothing except to God’s glory.” He made us creatures who grow — slowly, with intentionality, over time.

The pursuit of reverence is less like a clean house before guests arrive, and more like a perpetual cleaning day. It is like housekeeping our heart: turning on every light, opening every cupboard, and chasing away every remnant of rebellious self-rule, every stronghold of the world, the flesh, and the devil (1 John 2:15–17). This is the work of every day, not a one-and-done affair. To be reverent is to regularly repent of irreverence and always trust in the gospel reality of our forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ.

This steady drumbeat of repentance and faith is the means by which the reverent woman opens up her whole life in obedience to God, no exceptions, and the fruit of such reverence is stunning. By her reverent speech, appetites, affections, emotions, attitudes, actions, and submission (Titus 2:3–5), the gospel is magnified, not maligned (2:5), and the reality of the glorious reign of Jesus is adorned before an irreverent world (2:10).

Road to Reverence

What other means has God given us to cultivate godly reverence today? He has given us his word as his revelation of reality and of his will. We cannot merely consult it. We need to read and read and read it again, until we find God’s word “reading” us. He has also given us his ear. We go to God in prayer, asking of him the growth that he has already promised to give. God delights to answer such prayers.

He has given us his Spirit, who convicts us of our own false living, prompts us to specific surrender and obedience, and guides us into all truth (John 16:13). Finally, he has given us examples to follow. Besides the reverent women in our own lives, we have biographies of seasoned saints that both encourage and challenge us on the road to reverence.

As we grow increasingly reverent, we become more of who we truly are: children of light (Ephesians 5:8–10). With our gaze fixed on our Savior, we may wake up to find that a younger generation is watching us, learning to treasure the beauty of godly reverence.

“Well, Doctor, what have we got — a republic or a monarchy?”

So asked a curious lady on the streets of Philadelphia in September 1787, giving voice to the question of her fellow citizens. The “Doctor” to whom she directed her query was none other than the aging Benjamin Franklin, who was emerging from the Constitutional Convention. Delegates from across the colonies had met all summer in their city. Beyond Pennsylvania, twelve other colonies waited to hear from the Franklins, Washingtons, Madisons, and Hamiltons, What is it?

“A Republic,” Franklin replied, and then, with his typical wit, added, “if you can keep it.”

For almost 240 years, the collective American psyche has often suspected — sometimes mildly, other times more acutely — that the republic was fragile, and someday soon, an ascendant Caesar would take it away, as happened with Rome’s republic. Frequently, left- and right-leaning parties have suspected the other side. Franklin’s memorable condition “if you can keep it” has been explained against an array of looming threats.

No Christian Founding

Such suspicions played out ferociously in the 1790s, the Constitution’s first full decade. Some suspected Washington; more suspected Hamilton, his de facto prime minister. By 1800, the Federalists suspected Jefferson. Long had Jefferson and Hamilton suspected each other, and now both suspected Aaron Burr. Hamilton and Burr would soon suspect each other — even after both had fallen from power — and take it to the dueling grounds.

Those early administrations in the new republic were not idyllic, peaceful, and pristine, like we might presume from elementary history lessons. Nor were the 1790s as culturally Christian as many today might assume. An early form of what we might now call “secularism” was on the rise, and it was widespread, particularly in the halls of influence. (Conservative evangelicals at the time would have called it “infidelity,” their watchword for Deism and progressive, Enlightenment Christianity.)

The Declaration of July 4, 1776, had mentioned “Nature’s God” and “Creator,” but that is a far cry from any distinctively Christian notion. A decade later, in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution found no need to mention the divine at all. Jefferson, of course, made his own Bible of what he was willing to accept (and not) in the Gospels, and Washington, despite his public mentions of Providence, was conspicuously reticent to say the name of Jesus. Formally, the founding of the United States was not distinctively Christian. In fact, at the time, perhaps as few as 10 percent of Americans were church members.

That is strikingly low compared to almost 40 percent in 1860, on the cusp of the Civil War, and more than 60 percent in the post-WWII era of the 1950s and 1960s. So, what happened that made America feel so culturally Christian from the Civil War until Civil Rights?

God’s Surprising Work

Given the acute sense of decline that U.S. Christians today have lived through — from the heights of church membership and attendance in the 50s and 60s, to the subsequent dip in the 70s and 80s, the small uptick in the early 90s, and now the rapid decline of the last two decades — we should not be surprised that many alive today assume a simple declension narrative. That is, they observe the decline of the last twenty years, or the decline of the last seventy years, and project that trajectory back onto the full 250 years of the nation, presuming the founding to be the height from which we’ve fallen. But such is fiction.

For many, the present sense of alarm stems from a recency bias, comparing their own sense of the state of our union to what’s been mediated to them in their own lifetime — whether in school, in conversation, through television, or now through social media. But the 1950s proves to be a very different standard of comparison than the 1790s.

As for Christianity and the church, American history has been far less a smooth downward trajectory and far more a story punctuated by the surprising work of God. Some historians talk of third and fourth “great awakenings” in the late nineteenth century and in the 1960s and 70s. But most fundamentally, the Second Great Awakening significantly altered the landscape of American life in the early 1800s and produced a nation that felt different, more Christian, than the founding.

How was it that this Second Great Awakening made America feel more Christian? The answer isn’t government power. Neither the Apostles’ Creed nor even God was added to the Constitution. Governments at the national, state, and local levels did not newly mandate Christian professions or church membership, or censor free speech by those deemed heretical.

What changed the social landscape was widespread revival and Christian mission. It was the growing and bearing fruit of the Christian gospel — the power of God, not government, through the movement of his Spirit, making much of his crucified and risen Son. From around 1810 to 1840, the tenor of American life changed, in a way Franklin and Jefferson never would have foreseen, through a Second Great Awakening that lasted far longer and had a far greater impact than the First of the 1730s and 40s.

Religion Indispensable?

Whatever lay behind Franklin’s sly “if you can keep it,” Washington, through the pen of Hamilton, expressed his concerns for the republic in his 1797 farewell address. Framed as “the disinterested warnings of a parting friend,” he warned first of the destructive forces of partisanship, and he praised “religion and morality” as “indispensable” to the prosperity of the republic. And note again that the “religion and morality” in view is not expressly Christian.

“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” he wrote, “religion and morality are indispensable supports.” Moreover, “let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles.”

Now, on the one hand, from a Christian point of view, these are surprisingly measured commendations of “religion and morality.” Our Scriptures, from beginning to end, aren’t the least bit affirming of paganism so long as it’s religious and moral. So too, Washington’s frame honors and appreciates religion not as true and valuable in itself, but in terms of its usefulness for the life and prosperity of the republic.

But on the other hand, in our increasingly secular climate, with immorality or amorality seemingly on the rise, Washington’s affirmation of “religion and morality” is met with enthusiasm by many Christians. Oh, for a return to virtue and order, for more men and women of principle, for a moral citizenry — the kind that Washington and Franklin believed would be necessary to keep a republic.

‘We Need to Work’

In a recent interview with Kevin DeYoung, Allen Guelzo (who, according to George F. Will, is “today’s most profound interpreter of this nation’s history and significance”) calls American Christians to remember the heart, and hands, of that Second Great Awakening that so transformed the nation’s life. When DeYoung asks, What can we do if it seems like interest in virtue, and the Christian foundations for that societal virtue, have almost disappeared? Guelzo answers, “We need to work.” He explains,

When I hear people say today, “Oh, if we could only get back to a Christian America,” my response is, Then we need to work as hard as the people who created the Second Great Awakening. We need to dedicate ourselves that way, rather than sitting on our hands complaining about it, whining about the situation we find ourselves in, and then imagining, as I’m afraid some of our friends do, that all we need to do is to put some kind of authoritarian regime in place that will enforce the Ten Commandments.

No, that’s the lazy way. If you really want to transform the culture, then you have to take on the culture itself, and you have to meet it on its own terms, and you’re going to have to arm wrestle with it. And my recommendation is that we take a serious leaf out of the book of the Second Great Awakening. If what we want are the recovery of those mores, then my recommendation is that this is a signal that some very hard work has to get done, and we are not going to accomplish it simply by waving our hands and introducing some kind of authoritarian solution.

To the degree that we would like American life to feel more Christian, or at least less anti-Christian, the lesson to take away — both from the New Testament and from our own history — is that of the Second Great Awakening and the power of God through conversion to Christ and spiritual revival and renewal. American life was first transformed not through any seizure of political power nor through the ballot box. Rather, it was transformed through Christian awakening, through the constant preaching of the gospel, through Christian disciple-making, through the widespread movement of the Holy Spirit to grant new birth and spiritual growth, and through Christian initiative and energy and hard work to plant new churches, and build Christian institutions, and establish gospel witness and vibrancy in new places.

Hands to Prayer and the Plough

Here on this 248th Fourth of July, we remember not only the nation’s markedly unevangelical founding, but also the remarkable societal changes brought about by Christian revival — and the prodigious evangelistic efforts and Spirit-blessed industry that served as kindling for that awakening.

On this anniversary of the Declaration, American Christians concerned for the state of the republic will do well not to settle for wish-dreams about seizing power but, like the evangelists and missionaries of the early nineteenth century, put their faith and hands to the plough, believing, in the Spirit, we need to work.

Revival and its lasting ripples has changed the social feel of this nation before. It remains to be seen how long we might “keep” this republic. I don’t presume it will endure until Christ’s return. But being real, rather than nostalgic, about our history, and God’s surprising work, might feed fresh hope that he could work the same remarkable changes in the days ahead, beginning in us.