Two Principles that Release the Best in People

Mike Connell

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Where did you learn that? Well you learnt that disrespect for authorities in the realm of home and family with parents, so God says specifically: there's a promise with respecting and honouring, and placing value on your parents, and their opinions, and their counsel, and their advice. When you do that, there is a blessing will follow through your life, and it'll affect your choice of marriage, it will affect your relationship with God, it will affect your relationship with your teachers, it will affect your relationship with your boss, in fact it is going to affect every major authority relationship right through your life. It will either release protection and wisdom for you, or it will shut it down.

I was at a point in my life as a young Christian, and I just was inexperienced, and felt that something was a leading from God. I made a decision I was going to quit my job and go up to Whangarei, and going to go up to a ministry up there, and we were going to be involved with him, and blah blah blah. So I got the whole process even rolling, and then my Pastor came to talk to me. We had a talk, and I realised that I had disrespected his counsel in my life, and disrespected him by not at least sharing with him such a major decision - not that he would tell me what to do, but that actually, he would have a part in me making such a big decision. When I realised God spoke to me that I had done that, I became dismayed in my heart, and he challenged me whether I'd done the right thing, and pointed out one or two things. After he'd left I was just left in shock, and I was faced with a choice: will I respect what he has in his life, and receive it; or will I actually follow what I'd determined to do?

I went into some shock for a few days over that one, and I made a decision I would honour and respect the gift on his life. Now there were many reasons why I could have not respected him. You notice in the story with Jesus, there are two reasons that people disrespected Him. The first one was familiarity. Isn't this the carpenter's son? What would the carpenter know about God? I mean, what would a carpenter have to do? In other words, familiarity - they were so familiar with Him, He'd grown up in their area, in their town. They knew Him, and they become familiar with Him, and when you become familiar with a person, it's easy to lose sight of what God has in them to give to you, and through disrespect, familiarity breeds disrespect, and disrespect shuts down the gifts that God has in people for you. Ask yourself this: is there any person in my life that God has made as a gift to me, and I have disrespected them, because I've become familiar? I've taken them for granted? I've taken the person for granted, what they have to give me for granted, and I've treated it lightly. That's what it means is to place little value on it.

This certainly shuts down what they could give to you, so I made the decision at that time - you notice with Jesus it said: they were offended at Him, so the first thing is familiarity; the second thing is offences. We become offended when people don't meet our expectations. We become offended when things don't work out like we expect them to work out, and we can become offended with God very easily, when He doesn't answer things the way we want. We can become offended with God, we can start to dishonour God and disrespect God. Now here's the other thing the Bible tells us clearly" not only has He put a promise that honouring your parents things will go well for you, here's a second thing. He explains specifically, in two places in the Bible, that to access His presence you must come with honour and appreciation and gratitude, you know, enter His gates with thanksgiving, enter His courts with praise. Honour is the doorway into His presence; and dishonour, Romans 1:21, takes you out of His presence, and causes you to not see what He's trying to do in your life. This is a very, very important principle.