Today we are going to have a little heart-to-heart talk
regarding the Fifth Commandment.
And I am sure that if ever you went to Sunday school in your life,
you know what the Fifth Commandment is.
I shall wait just a second while you get out your Bibles.
Read the Scripture with me.
That's Exodus, the 20th chapter.
And the Fifth Commandment is found in that 12th verse.
Honor thy father and thy mother,
that in thy days may belong upon the land
which the Lord thy God giveth thee.
Now if you've been following me in these little heart-to-heart talks
regarding the Ten Commandments,
you will know that God gave us these ten rules to live by.
The first four of these ten rules deal with our relationship to Him,
man's relationship with his God.
The last five deal with our relationship with other people,
our relationship with our fellow man.
Somebody says, all right, Miss Coon, that only makes nine.
I know.
And I'm going to show you that this commandment,
the Fifth Commandment, is one of the most important,
if we can say that one commandment is more important than the other.
Or in other words, I might say this Fifth Commandment bridges the gap
between the Fourth Commandment and the remaining five.
The fifth rule has been called the centerpiece of God's law.
Honor thy father and thy mother involves both our relationship with God
and with our fellow men.
When God made man, he also set up the pattern by which men must live together.
First, a man and a woman come together in marriage.
Out of the union come children.
The parents provide love and care and control for the child
and in reality see something.
The parent is to the child its first God.
And as the child learns to love and respect its parents,
so later does it love and respect God.
Oh, before I finish our little heart to heart talk regarding this Fifth Commandment,
you will see how important it is to be a parent, a good parent.
You who are parents listening to me just now, a mother, a father,
I dare say that you have never really fully realized
the responsibility that is yours as a parent.
I mean that.
Great is your responsibility.
Before you take on this responsibility,
be sure that you can offer your child everything
that God expects you to give that child as a parent.
You have no right to parenthood if you cannot provide for that child.
God expects you as a parent to love that child, to be the lawgiver,
to be the provider for that child.
That's the reason God says in the Word,
any father who does not provide for his own, any father who does not provide
for his offspring, for his child is worse than an infidel.
That's right.
There's a tremendous responsibility that goes with parenthood.
That's the reason this fifth commandment is profound.
This commandment is most closely linked in thought and intention
to those that have preceded it, the four commandments that
have preceded this fifth.
For here in this fifth commandment,
the parent is viewed as being in the place of God to the child.
The first contact that a baby has with human life,
with the outside world, with humanity, is with its mother and its father.
That's the first contact.
When that little baby makes his first cry,
remember, its first contact with humanity is with its mother
and then with its father.
That little baby has no conception whatsoever of God,
a deity, of divinity.
When they become, oh, maybe four, five, six years of age,
they begin to ask questions regarding God about heaven,
questions regarding creation.
But their little minds have no conception whatsoever
of the bigness of God.
You could talk to a little child about God,
but when it comes to the spiritual things,
God as the mighty creator.
When you talk to them about Jesus Christ,
the son of a living God, deity and divinity,
the little mind has not developed to the place
where it can comprehend the spiritual.
Therefore, until that child reaches the place of adulthood
or reaches the place where they have
come to the age of accountability,
the parent is that child's God.
That's why here in this Fifth Commandment,
we see that the parent is viewed as being in the place of God
to that child.
Now, that throws a great responsibility on any parent.
In the early days of human life, while as yet the mind
is unable to grasp the most elementary ideas of God,
the supreme facts concerning him are
to be impressed upon the child by the revelation of them
in its parents.
And then in the procession of human life, the child
owes its being to its parents.
And one of the most evident and most remarkable facts
of human nature is the attitude of the opening mind,
the affection of the little one toward them,
an attitude absolutely differing from that entertained
toward any other parent.
An attitude absolutely differing from that entertained
toward any other person.
In other words, it's this simple.
What God is to the adult, parents are to the child.
The lover, the provider, the controller, and that's exactly
what the heavenly father is to the adult when that one has
accepted Jesus Christ as their Savior.
I am an adult.
God is more to me than just the Creator.
He is my heavenly Father.
And as my heavenly Father, He is my lawgiver.
He is the controller of my life.
I am surrounded by His love.
I can depend on His love.
I have confidence in His love for me.
I depend on His every provision.
And so it is with a child before that child has reached
the age of accountability.
The parent is to be all these things to that child.
And when a parent has been a good parent and has been all
of these things to that child, it is easy for that child then
to make that transition from being an adolescent to go into
that of being an adult.
And the easiest thing in the world then is for that child to
accept God, not merely as a creator, but as a heavenly
Father.
And we'll just automatically accept Him as the lawgiver, as
the controller of their lives.
They can understand the love of Jesus, the love of a heavenly
Father is very easy to understand.
And the transition is easy when they have received all of that
in their own home.
Sure.
Upon the child's response to the first facts and relationship
will depend its response to the higher facts to be revealed in
the process of the years.
And happy are those children who pass by a natural and
beautiful sequence from the honoring of their parents to
the hallowing of the name of their God.
And happy are those parents who so hallow the name of their
God that it becomes easy for the children entrusted to
their care to honor them.
It's like that.
Oh, that fifth commandment has deep and
wonderful significance.
Again, I repeat, in this fifth commandment, the parent is
viewed as being in the place of God to the child.
I'll never forget it, never.
Little Audrey Dolan.
I'll never so long as I live.
And it did something to me.
It put me on my guard, believe me, because I know just how
human I really am.
And little Audrey Dolan, oh, I don't suppose she was more
than seven years of age when her father and mother accepted
Christ as their savior, their beautiful conversion.
Audrey was their only child.
Audrey had really never known what it meant to have a home
life, a daddy who didn't come home without being drunk, a
mother who was there.
No.
For both Red and Ann Dolan lived their own lives.
And Grandma, of course, kind of took care of Audrey.
And then Red and Ann Dolan accepted the
Christ as their savior.
And for the first time, little Audrey had a Christian dad, a
Christian mother, a beautiful home life.
And she knew that it was Jesus who had done all of this, who
had made the great change in the life of her parents.
Little Audrey could never come into my presence, but she
started to bawl.
I mean that.
Those great big beautiful eyes would fill up with tears.
And Audrey knew I'd loved her, and I knew
she wasn't afraid of me.
I knew it was in fear.
But no matter where I was, little Audrey, when she would
see me, would begin to cry.
I'd put my arms around her, and when I would do so, she'd
even weep hard.
One day I said to Ann, Ann, tell me something.
Why is it that Audrey always cries when she comes into my
presence, when she sees me?
She said, Pastor, I'll tell you.
Jesus has done so much for Audrey's dad and for me.
And she loves Jesus with all of her heart, but she's never
seen him.
And you represent Jesus to her.
She can't see Jesus, but she can see you.
And she said in her childish way, it's sort of as though
she's seeing Jesus when she comes into your presence.
And her heart that's filled with love for him just
overflows in great big tears, and she begins to cry.
That put me on my honor, believe me.
There's never a day of my life that I don't think of that.
And years have passed since then.
Audrey has gone to college.
She's a big girl now.
She's an adult now, but believe me, those words are
still holding me.
Parents, you have a responsibility that God has
given you that you can't get away from.
You are to represent him to that child of yours.
Know that.
My friend, believe me.
You have an influence over that child.
They have no conception of what God is like.
They have no conception of spiritual things.
But you as a mother, you are their first introduction to
God.
You are their first contact with the spiritual things.
Dad, you are that child's first contact that they have with
God.
You introduce them to the spiritual things of their life.
That's right.
How about your own life?
Are you setting an example?
Once a mother took her little boy to the zoo.
And he was asking a thousand questions about the animals in
that zoo.
Oh, he was just intrigued by all of them.
And then he saw something in a cage he didn't quite
understand.
And he said, oh, mama, mama, what are those?
What are those things?
And the mother said, well, honey, they're little wild cats.
Wild cats?
Why are they wild cats?
Well, the mother was stumped for just a minute.
And then this was her answer.
She says, you know, they're wild cats because their mamas
and their papas were wild cats.
Do you want to know why you have a little wild cat at your
house stopping the ground?
Maybe it's because a youngster has wild cats for parents.
Many a youngster is a wild cat because its mother is a wild
cat.
Oh, sure.
We have the problem of delinquency, juvenile
delinquency in our nation.
But sometimes I think it's not the kids that are the wild cats
as much as the parents.
When we take care of our adult delinquency, we'll not have
the problem of juvenile delinquents.
Do you know why?
Because it's the most natural thing in the world for a child
to pattern its life after the life of its parent.
It's like this.
Oh, my goodness, life.
I look up here at the clock.
Time has gone so quickly.
And I've only started this little heart to heart talk
about a commandment that is one of the greatest of the 10.
It's one of the greatest of God's 10 rules for living.
This fifth commandment, the commandment
that links the first four of the 10 commandments
with the remaining sign.
In our next little heart to heart talk,
we're going to take up that word honor.
What does it mean to honor thy father and thy mother?
Father, I pray that you will have made the words real
to hearts for Jesus' sake.
Amen.