How Does An Adult Child Honor Their Parents?

The bible teaches us how children are to respond to their parents: to obey and to honor. As children, we are to obey. I like The Remedy’s translation of Ephesians 6:1, “Children obey the Christlike leadership of your parents”. Ideally, parents would train their children in godly wisdom, and it is right for children to obey instruction that comes from healthy, godly mothers and fathers who are doing their best to parent their children as God leads them. However, this is not every family’s experience. Some children are raised by parents who do not love and serve God. They live in service to themselves and make decisions according to the flesh. In such cases, what if there is no “Christlike leadership” to follow? The letter of the law would say to obey all instruction from parents, even if it’s unhealthy and sinful. The spirit of the law would say there are limits to obedience that would cause physical, emotional, or spiritual injury to a child. 

As adult children, we are to honor our parents. This is different from obedience. Honoring our mother and father once we are grown looks more like managing differences with grace. For many families, any disagreement between the two generations’ values, lifestyles, and decisions results in a severance of the relationship. Such families have not learned how to navigate differences and still maintain connection. In my own family, my mother so rejected my decision to quit my job to stay at home with my firstborn child that she did not speak to me for a year. Do you have a similar story of rejection or judgement? 

In other families, grown children yearn for their parents’ approval, and arrange their lives in ways that strive to meet parental expectations rather than following the plan God has for them. This yearning and striving often continues even after a parent’s death. Dr. Henry Wright theorizes that chronic fatigue syndrome is a performance disorder, resulting from drivenness to meet the expectation of a parent in order to receive love and acceptance. God can fill the void left from parents who missed the mark (Psalm 27:10). A shift from getting a parent to love us to receiving God’s unconditional love brings healing. 

A healthy balance between the two extremes of rejection and overconnection would be to live our own lives while respecting our parents and allowing them to be how they are going to be. While this may not be what we want, giving something permission creates more tolerance for what we cannot change. You cannot make another person be different than they are, but you can control how to respond to them. We can celebrate the truth that in His love, God gives every person the freedom to choose Him and His ways or not. Every mother and father is free to accept Christ or reject Him. Shifting our focus upward may lessen the pain of the natural experience. 

What expectations, losses, disappointments, or downright sinful behavior needs to be grieved so that you can heal from mother or father issues? The older generation of Israel had to die off so the younger generation could rise up in faith and take the land God promised them (Numbers 14). As New Covenant believers, we do not have to wait for a anyone’s absence in order to believe and follow God for ourselves. Instead of asking “what would my mother/father want me to do?”, how about asking, “God, what do YOU want me to do?”. 

Break soul ties of guilt, shame, control, and disappointment if you are stuck in the wilderness of old cycles with your parents that inhibit your ability to honor them from a place of wisdom and grace versus a place of manipulation or dependency. Have a funeral over what needs to be grieved so that you can love, honor, or remember your parents while having the freedom to live your own life. 

-April Chapel, MA, ALC

Spiritual Warfare, step one

 

SPIRITUAL WARFARE, step one

-April Chapel, MA, ALC

 

"Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." James 4:7

 

This is the formula for spiritual warfare. If satan is eating your lunch, then there is a problem with either step 1, submitting to God, or step 2, resisting the devil.

What has not been surrendered to God? Pain? Offense? Relationships? Trust? Fear? The past? Control? Trauma? Guilt? Unrealized expectations?

 

Whatever emotion or experience you have little tolerance for, most likely is rooted in woundedness. Sin and trauma wound the soul. If we refuse to submit those wounds to God for healing, we allow the enemy of our souls a legal right to traffic in our thinking, our emotions, and our lives. We come OUT of agreement with the slimy snake who uses our pain as a weapon against us by surrendering our wounds to the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ and the healing work of his Holy Spirit.

 

 

“Father God, right now I come to you in the midst of my pain and brokenness. I submit __________________ to you and invite you into my thoughts and feelings. This is an opportunity to more fully surrender my emotions to You, therefore, I will respond to this trigger with hope. I open myself up to Your love and grace. By faith, I take captive every memory and every fear that is causing me distress and submit them to the authority of the Holy Spirit. Reveal, Lord, every way of thinking that is in opposition to Your truth. I trust Your Spirit to guide me into truth. I will not allow the enemy of my soul to use my trauma as a weapon against me. Expose any lies related to my trauma that I have come into agreement with. Show me, Jesus, how You protect and defend me. Let me feel Your presence and Your love now, God. Your love conquers all fear. You give perfect peace to those whose minds are set on You, so I now shift my thinking from what has triggered me to how much You love me. You are my Refuge and my Hiding Place. Restore my sense of safety, Lord. I echo the prayer of Jabez, that “Your hand would be on me”, healing and protecting me from evil. I trust you to redeem my traumatic experience for a purpose You call good. I receive Your healing and comfort from this present moment all the way back to my original trauma. In the mighty name of Jesus, AMEN.”