Vers. 1–4. The Mutual Duties of Children and Parents.
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.
Ver. 4. A Father’s Charge.
I. The duties parents owe to their children.—1. Children are weak and helpless and totally incapable of caring for themselves—hence arises the first duty which parents owe them, that of feeding and clothing them. 2. Are ignorant and without understanding—hence they should not only be fed but taught. 3. Are unruly, and therefore must be governed. 4. Are prone to evil, and therefore must be restrained.
II. The obligations parents are under to practise these duties.—1. They should do it for their own sakes. 2. For their children’s sake. 3. For society’s sake. 4. For God’s sake.