+I. Children are to obey and honour their parents.+--1. _Children owe
to their parents an inward affection and regard._ Their obedience
should flow from love, gratitude, and esteem. The love parents bear
to their children entitles them to reciprocal affection. 2. _They are
to honour their parents by external tokens of respect._ 3. _They are
to obey the just commands of their parents._ 4. _They are to receive
with decent and humble regard the instructions, counsels, and
reproofs of their parents._ 5. _They should remunerate the favours
received from their parents._ 6. _They are encouraged in their
obedience by the Divine promise._
+II. The duties of parents to children.+--1. _To instruct their
children in the doctrines and duties of religion._ 2. _To endeavour
by arguments, exhortations, and reproofs to form their lives
according to those instructions._ 3. _To regulate the diversions of
their children._ 4. _To maintain the worship of God in their houses._
5. _To let their conversation be exemplary._ 6. _To train up their
children with diligence in some honest business._ 7. _To commend
their children to God and the word of His grace.--Lathrop._
Vers. 1, 2. _Obedience._--The dutiful obedience of children is
declared by God in the fifth commandment to be the foundation of all
social happiness and of every social virtue.
+I. The behaviour of a child to its parents is no such trifle as too
many perverse children and too many foolish parents are prone to
fancy it.+--How often we hear mothers saying, "It is only the poor
child's way; it is a little pettish and fractious at times, but it
means no harm by it. To be sure it does not mind me quite so well as
it ought to do; but children will be children." So the child goes on
uncorrected, and grows up disobedient and undutiful--with habits and
dispositions so evil that God has classed them with the very worst
crimes, with false swearing, theft, adultery, and ever murder. If
undutifulness in children had been a mere trifle, would God have put
it into this black list?
+II. Observe the reasonableness and justice of the duty of children
to obey their parents.+--The child is helpless and entirely dependent
on its parents' care and kindness. So strong and lasting is a
mother's love that, while other animals drive their young away as
soon as they can feed themselves, the love of human parents descends
and prolongs itself even to their offspring's offspring. Think of
their fears, their wishes, their prayers for your souls' welfare.
Your love to them should be dutiful love, showing itself in acts of
gentleness, respect, and kindness, and in the strictest and readiest
obedience. Children are bound to obey, not from constraint, nor from
fear of blows, but readily, willingly, cheerfully. The obedience paid
for fear of stripes is the obedience of a mule, not of a son. What
can a child know save what its parents teach it? Its parents for a
time stand in the place of God to it; as such, it must believe them
and obey them. You may be the better for their experience, you may
profit by their warnings, you may learn from their lessons.
+III. Observe the use and benefit of obedience in forming the
character of the child.+--It is in the school of home, amid the
little hardships, restraints, crosses, and disappointments which
every child must needs meet with, that the great lesson of obedience
is best learnt. There is a root of self-will born in every man, and
out of this root grow two evil and misshapen stems--pride and
disobedience. You may as well expect water to burn and fire to wet,
you may as well expect a barren common that has never been ploughed
and sown to produce a crop of wheat, as that a child, which has gone
on year after year in pride, self-will, and disobedience to its
parents, will readily or easily tear off its habits and its nature,
to walk humbly and obediently before God. We must cultivate obedience
in the child that it may outgrow, overtop, and stifle, or at least
keep under, the evil stem of disobedience. We must cultivate humility
in him, that it may keep under the evil of pride. We must train and
accustom him to habits of steady self-denial, which our Lord has
recommended to us as the best yokes for our headstrong and else
unmanageable self-will. Thus the fifth commandment is a kind of
practical school where the child, in obeying its parents, learns to
obey all to whom it owes obedience.--_A. W. Hare._