The Fifth Commandment is, "Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” Exodus 20:12.
Honoring your parents is the responsibility of children of any age. This will look different depending on age. A five year old has a different relationship with his or her parents than does a fifteen year old, or forty, or fifty year old. Regardless of your stage in life, the underlying attitude is to honor your parents.
Circumstances can also make the application of the Fifth Commandment more challenging. Multiple marriages create difficulty for children, parents, and step-parents on how to appropriately respond to each other. Mixed faiths or lack of faith can also make this challenging.
Unfortunately, we can see this verse misapplied. Telling a child who has been a victim of parental abuse, that they must honor their parents, is not realistic or appropriate.
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Parents who try to control their grown children by using the Fifth Commandment as a stick is another abuse of its meaning and intent. Honor comes primarily from within a person, rather than a mandated behavior.
For minor children, they should remember that their parents are responsible for them and ultimately parents make the final decision. This is true whether parents are believers or not. Respect and obedience blend together. However, we should remember that God never commands us to obey parents when it mean disobeying Him.
If your parents tell you to rob a bank, you don’t have to do it. And teenagers should remember that just because a parent may be annoying, it doesn’t mean that he or she is wrong. My father did not make sense to me when I was fifteen; however, by the time I turned twenty-five I was amazed at how much smarter he had become.
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For adult children, honor and respecting our parents is our responsibility. That doesn’t mean they run our lives, but it is appropriate to approach them as advisors and value their thoughts and insights. When it is within our ability we should help them. In a marriage relationship we should honor both sets of parents.
For all of us, we should all remember that none of us had perfect parents and none of us will ever be perfect parents. That is not an excuse to ignore the command to honor our father and mother. Wisdom and grace are needed when dealing with our families. We all need the attitude of forgiveness toward each other in our families as expressed by the Apostle Paul in Ephesians 4:32, “Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.”
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