Wednesday 4 Jul 2012

Wednesday Reading: Ephesians 6:1-4

Key Verse: Ephesians 6:1
1  Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.

Devotion:
This is one of those verses that many parents have great delight in showing their children! But oh how often we do forget that we need to obey God because He is our heavenly Father; and if your parents are not such a good example then you still have absolutely no excuse when it comes to obeying God because there is no fault ever found in God!

If we have ever learned anything then it should be that God is truth and that His Word is not to be trifled with in any manner whatsoever. If we are not going to obey our own parents then what is ever going to stop you from doing exactly the same to God Himself? If we do go round breaking laws then we will probably find it easy to break God’s laws without thinking too much about it. So when God reminds us that we need to obey our parents, it is not just so that our parents can have their own way but rather that we learn the proper way of doing things in the beginning.

Obeying your parents is not just about being seen to do the right thing because if we are not following them in our hearts it will pretty quickly show through to everything we do and not just our actions toward them. God wants our inner being to follow Him and to worship Him. He wants us to know Him from our hearts and not just to know Him because that is what it says in a bible somewhere. God wants us to form a relationship with Him and not just to be automatons. That means believing in Him and wanting to obey Him so that we can please Him; what use is doing something unless you are actually going to believe in what you are doing?

As Gill puts it, they are not just to be feared “but they are to be honoured in thought, word, and gesture”. In other words we have to respect them as well as all that they stand for. But respecting them and obeying them we then begin to know what is required of us to live in unity with them. Just the way that we speak to our parents can tell them a lot about how you think of them (or not). When they give us ‘that look’ it is because they know what we should be doing and they can see what we are actually doing. If the two things do not quite meet up then we are not doing things right! We need to obey all those people who are in authority and we need to do it with the right attitude in the way we look at them, speak to them and even lift them up!

Points to Ponder:
How do you go about obeying people in charge?

Are you allowing your feelings to get the better of you?