Now, parents are your first authority figures in your life to represent God in our lives. They represent the nature of God and they're to represent to us the various aspects of God's character, so when parents fail and we choose to disrespect, dishonour, harbour bitterness and judge them then we move away from them, but more than moving away from them there is a darkness comes in our heart that begins to affect all other relationships. I want to show you a couple more scriptures related to this and then we'll just finish with a story in the Bible that shows you exactly in one couple how they both faced an abusive authority figure and both responded differently. One responded with judgement, the other responded with grace and the one who responded with grace became lifted up and the other one who responded with judgement actually ended up in darkness. So these are principles in the Bible. You can't break them. You just prove that they exist. See, you just prove that they're there, that's all.
So notice then it says to honour. If we will place value on our parents - now if you're going to honour someone there are three primary reasons you pay honour to someone. Not necessarily in order of importance but one, we honour people who achieve greatly, so if someone makes a great achievement we honour them, we'll place value on them. They were great, they did well, it was a great achievement. Today we honoured someone for his achievement in serving and the honour was due him because he did something, see? Okay then, so the second reason we honour people is because of their character, so someone who's been courageous, someone who's shown bravery and a great character, we honour them because of who they are, the kind of person and what character they have demonstrated.
Then finally there's another area we honour people. We honour people just because of the positioning they hold so for example people in America honour the office of the president. Now regardless of their personal opinions or feelings about the president and about his performance, nevertheless there's an honour comes on the office and therefore the person and its right to do that. So okay then, so having got that - so it may be in a family often things don't work out kind of like what we expect and because of inequity parents tend to repeat the sins of their parents. There are often strife and conflict, sometimes the foundations of the marriage are not good. We're living in a age which has lost fatherhood, it's lost the whole dimension of how families need to be and so we have multitudes of people coming and perhaps you're one, that come from a family where it wasn't loving. It broke down, there was violence, there was abuse, father abandoned the family, all kinds of things have happened and gone on. So of course children get hurt. Children get deeply hurt by this. Their whole world blows up when the parents divorce. Their whole world that should be supportive and foster their growth to maturity is wrecked, so the children suffer and this is often what people don't realise is that that action of the parents now has got a generational impact.
So you may have come from great parents, a great family, or you may have come from a family where it was extremely painful - could've been a harsh abusive father, a passive shut down father. In my case my father came back from the war, Second World War and his emotions were shattered by the experiences he'd been through. He'd been on the frontline for four and a half years. In the end seeing all his friends killed and blown apart, it just in the end was overwhelming for him. He came back and he was a different man from the man that went over there - very difficult for my mother. They'd only been married one year, but how it worked out for me was that he could never express love in a verbal way or a physical way. He was unable to do it. It wasn't that he wasn't loving, just he couldn't express because he was shattered in his soul, his family background and through his war experience. But for me it felt like he could never express love and affirmation to me, so as a young person it was quite hurtful to find no matter how hard I worked it was never good enough, so there was a constant - it seemed like I could never do enough, it was never good enough and it bored in me a driving to try and perform so I could get affirmed in love and never was it ever good enough. So it had quite some major issues inside me out of hurt and rejection. I actually became quite bitter inside, just put a wall in my heart and so what happens, the Bible tells us in Hebrews 12:15, beware lest a - it says let any man fall from the grace of God and a root of bitterness spring up and defile many. So when we are hurt or offended or for whatever reason we have offence in our heart and we let it grow and a root of bitterness comes, it has the capacity to defile all the relationships that you live in.