What is the Spirit saying to the churches? Jesus. It is always about Jesus. As our friend Peter Lord used to say, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” and the main thing is Jesus.
The main thing the Spirit wants to do with each of us is to conform us to the image of the Son. If we want to understand the things that are happening to us in the light of God’s purpose, it is that He is using everything in our lives for this one thing above all other purposes—to conform us to the image of His Son.
“God is love,” and Jesus is the most powerful and clear revelation of the love of God and always will be. The driving force of the One who is the love of God is to honor His Father God. There is a connection here we must understand. This is why the only commandment with a promise is that if we will honor our fathers and mothers, it to go well with us and we will have longevity (see Deuteronomy 5:16). Are there any who would not like these?
We might be tempted to think that it was easy for Jesus to honor His Father since He was a perfect man, and He had a perfect Father. The promise does not specify that we honor our perfect fathers and mothers or even good ones. Neither does it say that our honoring has to be perfect, but it should be a basic devotion that we have because it also honors our Father in heaven. This is basic to us becoming like Jesus. The worse our parents were, the more power our honoring has.
So how do we honor parents that may not have been honorable? We can begin by forgiving their failures and shortcomings. Since we know that all things work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose, regardless of what we went through when we were young, it will work for our good, so we should be thankful for it.
Many have been through some awful things, and no doubt this is hard, but just as it is through Jesus’ stripes that we are healed, meaning He received authority for healing by the things that He suffered, the same is true for us. Every bad, unjust thing that has happened to us can become authority for healing others, once we have been healed through forgiveness. Remember that in the Old Testament the priests could not have scabs or unhealed wounds. Neither can we serve in the priesthood we are called to until we have been healed of our wounds, which comes by forgiving those who did things to us.
The fundamental teaching of the New Covenant is that even if we have spent a life of dishonoring, but repent and begin to honor our parents, then all of the dishonoring is erased from our record, and we are deemed obedient. We can start over again right now with a clean slate by repentance. God is not into keeping score as much as He desires to get our hearts right.
One of the primary things that the Lord honors is when we honor our fathers and mothers, because this keeps us as a family and not just an organization. The church is called first to be a family. When we start becoming more of an organization than a family we lose the essence of who we are. A family must have fathers and mothers. This is one of the great needs of our times.
We see in Scripture, even hundreds of years after King David, when Israel appealed to God for help He would frequently say that He would help them for the sake of His servant David! David had been gone for centuries, and yet God still so honored his memory that He would help his descendents for his sake.
When I pray for our country, I usually appeal to God on behalf of our Founding Fathers. They, and many after them, paid a dear price for us to have what we do. Regardless of how secularists have tried to revise history, almost all of the Founders were seeking to do the will of God, and they were seeking to build a Christian nation. This is confirmed many times in their writings. They risked everything for freedom, and many paid the price. They had flaws like all other human beings, but they deserve to be honored.
Last year when I walked through the American cemeteries in Normandy, I was deeply touched by so many thousands of eighteen-year- olds who never had the chance to become fathers. They did not have this chance because they laid down their lives so that we could have families and we could have freedom. When I pray for our country, I appeal to God on their behalf. To me, they too are worthy to be honored as fathers of our nation.
Several years ago, I was shown in a dream that one of the gates of hell into our nation was opened by the dishonoring of fathers and fatherhood. I was told in the dream that if we would honor fathers again, God would bring revival to our country. Without revival, we are not likely to survive much longer. Will you resolve with me that this year we will do this? Let us honor our natural and our spiritual, our national and our personal fathers. By this, we will honor our Father in heaven, and He will be moved on our behalf as we become more like His Son.
