Honor Your Mother

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” -Exodus 20:12 (ESV)

The fifth commandment is often termed “the first commandment with a promise.” Indeed, it is the only one of the Ten Commandments with a specific promise attached. Those who respect and honor their earthly father and mother are promised long life in the land the Lord gives them. Remember that Moses received the Ten Commandments not long after the Israelites escaped Egyptian bondage. They were looking forward to soon settling in the Promised Land.

God commanded them to honor parents. “Honor” is a word meaning to treat with respect and dignity, love and deference, and to provide for parents’ needs and look after them in their old age. Both parents are to receive this preferential and loving treatment. Today, when we observe a day set aside to honor mothers, we will consider ways in which we can honor mothers.

Studying the history of Mother’s Day, we learn that the ancient Greek and Roman culture had a specified time to honor mothers. In America, a movement was begun in 1905, led by Miss Anna Jarvis of West Virginia, to honor mothers in general by honoring her own mother who had just died and who had cared for wounded soldiers, both Union and Southern, during the Civil War. In 1908, Miss Jarvis set a day of celebration in the St. Andrew’s Methodist Church in Grafton, Virginia, a church now noted as the one starting the International Mother’s Day. Even though a proposal to have an annual Mother’s Day lost in both Senate and House in 1908, by 1911 enough interest had been generated so that observances were held in most all the states. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation declaring the second Sunday in May as a national day to honor mothers. The day has been observed since that date throughout the United States.

Paul the Apostle repeated the fifth commandment in Ephesians 6:2. Also, the Apostle, writing to his ‘son in the gospel,’ Timothy, had these words about honoring mothers: “But if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household, and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God.”

When a mother is given honor and respect, Proverbs 31:28 states that “Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.”

Love of children for the mother and love of the mother for her children is a vital concept in God’s plan for families. In this modern day, we have seen a wide departure from biblical admonitions to honor mother and for a mother to love and rear children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The words written by Dr. B. B. McKinney (1886-1952) and put to “The Christian Home’ tune also composed by Dr. McKinney is a prayer. May we pray it sincerely and earnestly for a return to God’s ways for the home and for honoring mothers:

“God give us Christian homes!

Homes where the mother, in caring quest,

Strives to show others Your way is best,

Homes where the Lord is an honored guest;

God give us Christian homes;

God give us Christian homes.”

-Ethelene Dyer Jones 05.14.2017

Thoughts on Marriage

“An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm all the days of her life.” –Proverbs 31:10-12. “Let marriage be held in honor among all.” –Hebrews 13:4a (ESV).

I enjoy weddings—the beauty, sacredness and promise of love that surrounds them. God ordained that “man should not be alone” and so He “made an helpmeet for him.” (See Genesis 2:18). The family was the first institution God ordained following the creation.

In the beautiful Garden of Eden the first marriage ceremony was presided over by God Himself. When Adam beheld Eve, the wife God had created for him, he exclaimed:
 

This at last is bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

She shall be called Woman,

because she was taken out of man.” (Genesis 2:23).

“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” (Genesis 2:24).

Saturday, October 3, 2015 was the wedding of my eldest grandson, Brian David Jones to his beautiful bride, Amanda Owens. The wedding was the sacred, solemn, beautiful ceremony one likes to attend and to witness. I remembered how Brian David had come, the first grandchild of seven, and from the beginning had been a winsome, bright, engaging little boy, beloved and loveable. Here he stood, a handsome man, mature in years, pledging to “love, honor and cherish” Amanda his bride, “as long as they both should live.” As I enjoyed the solemnity of the vows spoken and the beauty of the ceremony’s setting, I prayed that God would bless the union of Brian David and Amanda and give them love deep enough to transcend challenges and strength strong enough to meet whatever life brought their way.

The lines of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet kept hammering at the edges of my mind and I made the poem a part of my prayer for this newly-wed couple, my beloved grandson and his bride:

           Let me not to the marriage of true minds

           Admit impediments. Love is not love

           Which alters when alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove;

O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks to tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error, and upon me prov’d

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d. –William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

May God’s graciousness and love guide and secure this marriage. –Ethelene Dyer Jones 10.04.2015