Loving the Word with the MudPreacher

Over the last few weeks we have been discovering the value of Honor in finding God’s path for our life, in growing in faith, in seeing the Power of God in a real intimate way, and in realizing our full reward here on earth! God has been dealing with me in learning to honor our political leaders. I have been praying for our National as well as Local leaders. I have been asking God to build honor for them in my heart. In honoring my social authorities, I have been seeking to honor Jesus Christ and seeking how He would pastor our church. God brought a Debate coach into mind that I had failed to honor in high School. I had always honored and respected him until we got political. We got into a big shouting match during a class and I walked out, in fact I think we both walked out. I never went back.

Well, God brought my forensics coach into my life this past week. I was able to thank her and honor her as I probably never really said so when I was in school. She is going to get Tom Cameron’s number for me so I can call him. I look forward to honoring him after I ask his forgiveness.

This is what the Pathway of Blessing series is all about. It is about seeking to know God’s ways and then walking in His path. God’s path is a path of blessing. God’s path is a path of earthly rewards. But God’s pathway is found only as we honor those authorities and leaders God has placed in our life.

This discourse we are going to look at the Value of Honoring our Mother and Father. In looking at honoring our Mother and Father, we will discover some amazing truth about the promises of God. We will also learn a bit about drama queens or kings and why this growing phenomenon will prevent many people from finding God’s Pathway of Blessing.

Honor for our parents is not a recommendation, it is a commandment. Keeping God’s commandments is evidence of our love for Jesus Christ. “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.” John 14:21

We also see: “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it”. 2 John 1:6

With God, it is all about obedience to His word: “ keeping the commandments of God is what matters” 1 Corinthians 7:19 (NKJV)

If you habitually ignore the commandments of God, perhaps you have never had a genuine encounter with the Holy Spirit. God says: “Therefore by their fruits you will know them.” Matthew 7:20 (NKJV)

If the Holy Spirit isn’t producing “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, & self-control, then you need to honest with yourself and say I’ve never been born again. The Spirit of Jesus Christ doesn’t live in me. He who says, “I know Him,” and does not keep His commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. (1 Jn 2:4) If you know Jesus in a real intimate way, you will have a heart drive to follow Him.

Let’s review what HONOR is:

Honor: to value, to esteem, to respect, to treat favorably, to have high regard for. If we view our parents through the eyes of honor we will communicate with them in respect and love. Honor is displayed in deed, word and even thought. But all true honor originates in your heart.

So if a young or old person speak in a flippant, careless or irreverent way on a regular basis toward their parents or grand parents, they are displaying outwardly their lack of true honor for their parents. Jesus told us: “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks”. (Matt 12:34)

You can display dishonor by your behavior, by the tone of your voice, rolling eyes, disgusted look, dragging your feet to carry out a request, complaining and so forth. I’ve mentioned before a time when I was 12 that I have never forgotten. My mom had said something I didn’t want to hear and I looked at my friend and did this: (crazy sign). My mom saw me out of the corner of her eye and she slapped me so hard I thought my head would pop off. She said don’t you ever disrespect your father like that again.

I learned to respect my parents, but I’m well aware that: Dishonoring our parents has become a normal way of life in America.

We have gone from “Father Knows Bes”t to Homer “Doh” Simpson! Or Psycho Dad Al Bundy. It is funny to make fun of your parents. It gets big laughs from the viewing audience, from the kids at school. It is expected. “Well Jim, that’s part of growing up. It’s ok to make fun of your parents” But God doesn’t think it is very funny.

Do you understand how strong a word “cursed” is? It is the word awrar, and it means to bind, hem in with obstacles, render powerless. The serpent was cursed, when he caused Eve to sin. Does your life feel as if you meet one road block after another? Do you have sins that you feel powerless to overcome, they have you bound up? Perhaps you have dishonored your parents. You may expect that God only curses murderers, thieves, sexual perverts, yet God said more than once that the one who dishonors his father or mother is cursed. To dishonor your mom or dad means to treat them as common, ordinary, or menial. At worst it means to treat them shamefully, even humiliate them.

Consequences of Dishonor

Noah became a farmer after the flood. One day he drank some fermented wine and got drunk, took off all his clothes and passed out in his tent. We can only speculate why he did this, or if he did it on other occassions. What happened next is what we need to take note of. His son Ham, went into the tent, saw his dad naked, and went outside and told his brothers. We don’t know exactly what Ham said but I imagine it was something like this: “Hey guys, you are not gonna believe this, Dad is a drunk as a skunk and naked as a jaybird! You gotta see this!”

However, Shem and Japeth showed honor to their drunken father and grabbed a garment, held it up and walked backward into the tent, covering their dad without looking at him. They did not want to see the shame of their father. When Noah wole up the next morning, he realized what happened and said:

This prophetic word from Noah, the only statement of Noah recorded in the Bible, was played out for several generations. The Canaanites, the descendants of Ham, were cursed and eventually overtaken by the Children of Israel at God’s command. Ham dishonored his father and brought a curse upon his descendants. Noah’s behavior brought no such curse. In fact, Hebrews 11:7 says that

Ham is not mentioned in Hebrews 11.

Noah’s moral failure became a test of honor for his three sons; it revealed their true heart. Note: Ham was accurate in his report. His father was drunk and naked, yet Ham was wrong in principle. You could certainly justify his reaction. He was being truthful. Yet the principle of Honor and Kingdom authority says he was wrong. Have you passed God’s Test of Honor for your Life?

Dishonor Grows Over Time

Dishonor for parents is like a disease. If left untreated it grows over time. Case in point: Most of you are familiar with the story of Jacob, how he was tricked into marrying Leah and finally got Rachel after working 14 years for her. Well, what you may not remember is that Rachel and Leah had an ongoing feud over who Jacob loved more. Leah kept having babies. In spite of the babies, Jacob loved Rachel, but Rachel was barren. Leah felt unloved, even though she was the one bearing Jacob all the children. She thought that her children would cause Jacob to love her.

Rachel devised a plan to get back at her sister. She let her handmaid Bilhah bear children for her.

Reuben, being the firstborn, grew up with all this strife. He had to have felt for his mother, and resented the way his dad loved Rachel more than Leah.

He got personally involved one time. He went out into the fields and found some juicy mandrakes. He brought them in for his Mom. Rachel saw her eating these juicy delicious mandrakes, and desired to have some. So Leah made a bargain with Rachel. “I’ll have Reuben get you some mandrakes if I get Jacob for the night”

The fact that Leah had to pay to have Jacob sleep with her meant that most nights he spent with Rachel. Evidently Reuben had a dishonor for Jacob that grew and grew the more he saw him neglect his mom. Finally, when Rachel died in childbirth, Reuben committed the ultimate dishonor to his father, he slept with Rachel’s handmaid Bilhah. Jacob didn’t do anything at that time, but when it came time for Jacob to die, he gave Reuben’s birthright to Joseph’s two sons. Reuben is not even listed in the genealogical records as Jacob’s firstborn son.

Jacob’s actions were wrong, in that he neglected Leah for Rachel. Reuben saw his father accurately. However, the bitterness he had in his heart poisoned his whole outlook on life. He let go of the honor a child naturally has for his parent and embraced an attitude of resentment that fostered dishonor. It grew to the point where he could justify his behavior toward his dad. He lost his birthright. Hannah honored Eli and received her full reward. Reuben dishonored Jacob and lost his reward.

Don’t Allow Someone Else’s Wrong Behavior to Affect You

Moses: Moses had one of the hardest jobs you can imagine. He had to herd Three Million Drama Kings and Queens across a desolate desert.

What is a “Drama Queen or King”?

People (mostly girls – but boys play their part) who like to blow everything

totally out of proportion because they either :

a) Want to seek attention

b) Have some emotional dysfunction and it’s their duty to make life harder for everyone around them

c) Just simple can’t get over it. (Urban Dictionary)

“The term “drama queen,” or less frequently, “drama king” is usually applied to someone who tends to overreact to seemingly minor incidents. A drama queen often views the world in absolutes, and only has two settings on her emotional control button; zero and ten. Psychologists might describe a drama queen or king as a neurotic personality with histrionic tendencies, meaning they tend to become needlessly dramatic whenever order is disrupted.

In literature, the character Scarlett O’Hara from Margaret Mitchel’s “Gone with the Wind” would be considered a drama queen by today’s standards. A drama queen is notoriously self-centered and self-absorbed, often viewing friends and relatives as lesser beings assigned to take care of her personal needs. A drama queen’s worst enemy is solitude, so she tends to be very outgoing and sociable, although many of her friendships tend to remain at surface level. Others who have experienced the drama queen’s sudden outbursts in the past may have a feeling of walking on egg shells around her, not wanting to be the person who delivers upsetting news or offends the drama queen in any way.”

When I was growing up we didn’t call people “Drama Queen’s”. We called them spoiled brats. If I acted like a spoiled brat my Dad would take the board of education and deal directly with my seat of knowledge. Now I don’t mean to make fun of what happened to the Hebrew Children, but Moses must have felt like he was dealing with a bunch of spoiled brats. Or “Drama Queens” in modern language. Because of their fear about going into the Promised Land, He was forced to wander in the desert for 40 years. For 40 years he had to babysit all those Drama Queens.

They were always complaining about this about that. The slightest thing would get them going. Nothing was ever good enough for them. God would do something to stop their complaining, part the red sea, drown Pharoah and his army, make manna fall from heaven, send quails, make a pillar of fire, but nothing God did ever satisfied them. They went from one big drama to another. Moses left them for just a few days and you would have thought the whole world was coming to an end. The made a golden calf and startted having a worship orgy around their new “god”.

You could tell Moses was starting to crack even then because when he came down from the mountain, he saw what was going on and he threw the tablets of stone down, breaking them in pieces. Another time they were complaining because there was no fresh spring water. All the bottles of Evian were gone and they simply knew they would all die of thirst. So God told Moses to speak to a rock and then water would gush out of it. But at this point, Moses was so fed up with these “Drama Queens” that he gathered them together and said:

Now Moses let their bad behavior affect his good judgment. He struck the rock twice. God told him:

Psalms 106 explains what happened:

We cannot blame our wrong behavior on the bad behavior of others.

Reuben’s father was not honorable toward his mother, but that did not justify Reuben’s dishonorable attitude and behavior toward his father. God says to honor your father and mother, regardless of how good or bad they are in our eyes. Or how honorable of dishonorable their behavior is. Jacob had a terrible unloving attitude toward Reuben’s mother. But that did not justify Reuben’s dishonorable attitude and behavior toward Jacob. Noah did a terribly stupid thing, but that did not justify Ham’s disrespect toward his father.

I know most of you are thinking “What about when they…?” There may be times when you have to take a stand. But you never take a stand against your parents unless it is from aplace of Honor and Rspect. While you are to honor them, you may decide that to obey would be contrary to God. It could be asking you to lie to a teacher, or something much worse, involving some kind of abuse. Respectfully you must decline and make them aware that you mean no disrespect, but you will not violate God’s law in such and such. You may have to get your civil authorities involved if the situation of abuse or drugs is destroying your life. Many teenagers disobey their parents in the name of Jesus, when there is an underlying attitude of disrespect and even rebellion. Disobedience in the name of God is only powerful if it is done from a deep seated sense of respect and honor for your parents.

Believe me, they know the difference.

I have known youth directors who encouraged their youth to disobey their parents and come to youth meeting when the parents have grounded them. But what the yout pastor doesn’t realize is that dis-respect and disobedience is probably the reason they were grounded in the first place. Having them disobey to come to church is going to drive a wedge further into the relationship.

TWO FOLD REWARD

Ephesians 6 said that there are TWO rewards when we honor our mom and dad. First, that things would go well with you. You will experience success in life the way God values success, peace, joy, love, self control. Your path will be clear. Second, you can live a long life.

You may be saying, “But I know someone who honored his parents and … Why didn’t this promise apply to them?”

The Power of Praying the Promises of God

Who found a wife for Isaac?

God brought Rebekah forward that day. Isaac was promised many descendants because he was the son of Abraham. But Rebekah was barren. What was God up to? What about the Promise? Isaac had to pray the promise. “Now Isaac pleaded with the Lord for his wife, because she was barren; and the Lord granted his plea, and Rebekah his wife conceived”. Genesis 25:21 (NKJV)

Spiritual Truth: We Must DECLARE It!

Simply because God has given us a promise in His Word does not mean it has become OUR promise. We must claim it for our own! Scripture says God’s Word is established in Heaven, but Jesus says we must pray that God’s WIll is established on Earth as it is in Heaven! Our prayers are the Track that our powerful God moves upon!

You don’t have to chose death, it is already working. But You DO Have to Chose Life

This command is the word “(t)sawa”. It pictures the enjoining of one with another in order to carry out a charge. It also pictures says that the one giving the command provides the power and the means to accomplish the charge.

God has placed His Commands in this BOOK. They are the Commands that will bring Life. He is looking for people to join with him and declaring those commands and promises, and thereby seeing them come to pass. Thee is this giant Locomotive loaded with all kinds of power and provisions, and we are the track upon which this Locomotive travels. We speak it, We pray it and God does it, when we enjoin ourselves with Him!

Have you honored your mother and father? It is never too late. If they have passed on, you can repent before God and honor them in your hearts.

Have you claimed the promise of a “well” and long life? Go ahead, provide the track for God’s Power. Speak it and it will be so, for God has commanded it!