Forgiving Your Parents
Honor your father and other, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. Exodus 20:20
If you’ve read my books, you will see that one of my consistent themes is the importance of forgiving our parents for all the ways that they might have failed us. Let’s look at why this is so important!
Honor brings blessing.
Over years in ministry, I’ve learned that honor is a facet of the character of God by which God desires us to operate. Honor is the conduit through which “blessing” is passed to another. When we honor our parents, we open up the pipes to receive all the good that God has done in them to be multiplied in our lives. This is the same for any authority that God has put in our lives.
But no parents are perfect. Even really great parents mess up.
The opposite of honor, of course, is dishonor, which can have a myriad of expressions! For one to deliberately withhold honor another indicates their heart may be closed toward that person. This can be overt or hidden and can happen with our parents, spouse, boss, pastor—all kinds of people in our lives. Having an attitude of dishonor toward someone is typically a response to being wronged or wounded in the relationship. It can come from feeling a lack of value from that person, or it can be from jealousy. We tend to justify ourselves in our dishonor because, after all, the other person has caused it or deserved it, right? (And maybe they did.)
Enter judgments.
The problem is that dishonor is frequently accompanied by judgments that we have made against that person. Making a judgment against another person is code for having bitterness against them. Sadly, ignorance, protectiveness, and pride keep people locked up in this bondage. Bondage? Yes, having a dishonoring heart is bondage, because this is not how God intends for us to live! Plus, you forfeit the blessing that God wants to give you! The people of Nazareth did not honor Jesus. To him, he was a regular guy who just grew up in the village. Consequently, they missed out!
“And he did not do many miracles there
because of their lack of faith.”
Perhaps you think there’s not much good that could be transferred to you from your parents (boss, pastor, etc.). Well, stay with me. I want to go back to our early childhood for a moment.
When we are growing up, our parents (or earliest caregivers) are the first ones to teach us about life. From our parents we learn how relationships work, we learn about the world around us, and we learn about God (whether our parents believed in God or not). As our first authorities in life, our parents represent God to us. And since God is the Ultimate Authority over all other authorities, our foundational experiences with our parents and what they instruct us about him (or fail to instruct us) often reflects how we view and relate to God and others as we grow up and go through life.
Much of maturing as a believer in Jesus Christ is learning to identify falsehoods about God that we have adopted as part of our lives. A “lie about God” is anything that is contrary to what God’s Word says about who God is and what he is like. The Bible says that God loves us and cares deeply for his children, but a lie implanted will cause us to doubt God’s love. All kinds of questions about God can circulate in our minds: Will God meet my needs? Does he hear my prayers? Does he really see me? Does he care? Will he protect me from harm? Is he angry with me? Has he abandoned me? Is he punishing me? It’s important to learn what the Bible says about those issues. When we are dissecting lies that we have believed about God, they can often be traced back to our relationships with the primary authorities in our life. It’s like the root system of a huge tree.
Similarly, in our formative years, we learn how to respond to being hurt, wronged, or disappointed by our authorities (our parents first of all). A healthy response to being hurt/wronged/disappointed by our parents would be to process the pain, forgive, and want to be restored to relationship. Oh, that life could be that simple! Yet depending on the situation or the personalities involved, children learn to take on behaviors to protect themselves. Walls go up as trust is damaged. Rejection (or perceived rejection) works itself out in negative behaviors. Down the road, perhaps a grandparent or a teacher wrongs/hurts/disappoints us in the same way, sadly “proving” that we are unloved, rejected, unworthy, etc.
When the same hurt comes around enough times, we begin to expect it! And we begin to expect it from certain people. We’ve made subtle judgments in our hearts. As we grow, we begin to project our negative experiences onto others—onto bosses, teachers, law enforcement, etc. All the way into our adulthood! But we need to be careful, for the Bible says in Romans 2:1 that whenever we judge someone, we do the same thing!
I have shared this story before: One time my husband and I were in a big argument, the subject of which I do not even remember. We went back and forth heatedly. I was so upset with him, and out of the blue I blurted: “I feel like you talk to me like my dad used to—like you’re belittling me. Like I can never do things good enough for you!” Just like that, the light went on. I suddenly realized that in that argument, I was really reacting to my father, not my husband! Later, in time alone, I was able to—in the words of my character Kyla Watkins—forgive my father for his faults and wrongdoings. Another layer of healing in my life. And what do you know—in my marriage too!
Forgiveness was the first step. Then I could honor freely.
What about you?
Do you have difficulty in relationships? Do you have difficulty with your authorities? Is it hard for you to show honor to certain people in your life? Do you have to fake honor or do you truly honor from your heart? Are there any areas of bitterness that you are holding onto? Have you made judgments against others? Do those judgments stem from negative experiences with other people? It’s worth taking the time to do some soul searching, for living in that bondage stops us up from receiving all kinds of good the Lord wants to pour out on us!
“But from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children—with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts.”
Photo credit: Images by Unsplash.com