Honor not Honored

As we have made our way through these sermons on the family, it is becoming increasingly clear that God uses family to teach us His ways and we find that His ways, while good, are not necessarily the way we would choose. In our families, we learn to serve one another, to put others first, to honor father and mother, to view our brothers and sisters of more worthy of praise than ourselves. And we do not have to feel like little despised worms in order to think or feel this way.

In fact, all we really have to do is to learn to love, to love God, to love our parents, to love our brothers and sisters. We do not have to annihilate ourselves in order to build up others.

Some great men have this gift. They can be truly great but when they speak to lowly ones, they seem to have a true sense of love for their fellow. They do not patronize them or belittle themselves. They simply choose to love the one they are speaking to and their love towards their lowly fellow honors him and lifts him up.

So, in your homes, you do not have to grovel to put yourself below others. You simply have to love them in a way that truly seeks their good. You become less concerned with yourself, how you look, what others think of you, how honored you are, and more concerned with what you can do to encourage, please, and honor them.

This sort of message calls us all up short, not because we are so bad but because we have not loved as fully as we should, seeking to lift up and honor instead of seeking to be lifted up and honored.