God’s Sovereign Choice of My Parents

In my last post I laid the foundation of accepting the parents God sovereignly chose for me. This is a bitter pill because even the best of these representatives of God are still sinful. It is impossible to escape the sin of the fathers. Just by being born of them, I inherit their generational sins and sinful propensities. While I can’t blame anyone for my sinful choices, our parents gift us with their fallenness. But there is a deep purpose hidden in everyone, God’s unfathomable and perfect plan in His choice of my parents.

God’s Sovereign Hand Over the Choice of My Parents

My reaction to God’s choice of my parents exposes my response to Him. While He doesn’t expect an unsaved child to manifest the regenerate Life, my heart is revealed through my very response to my parents. If my choice is bitterness, hatred, contempt, and reviling, it reveals my ultimate response to God and His Lordship. The purpose of our fallible parents is to lead us to our desperate need for a Savior. Inevitably, my heart will burst forth with my response to His choice.

Think about it, why is honoring parents in the “Big 10” of God’s Law? Because it is impossible to honor God without honoring the vessels He has chosen to rear us. Regardless of who they were or were not, we have to bow to His choice of our making. The fact will always remain that I will never be who I was destined to be without receiving the vessels of my making—my parents.

Struggling with His Choice

I can’t tell you how many people I know who struggle daily with this original resistance to God and the resulting bitterness. They walk out a path of strife with all the world because this first opportunity to bow was not adhered to. These individuals carry throughout their lives the struggle and conflict, and inflict it on most everyone they encounter. It is a wearying path.

And I am not allowed to simply abandon them in an attempt to avoid His sovereign choice. I have to do the work in my heart to accept His choice first and foremost. In some cases the parents simply abandon the child never to be heard from again. But their absence doesn’t give me the right to not face it with God. Or perhaps the other side of the coin is true. Maybe my parent abusively rode me like a beast of burden. Regardless of my experience, and I know some of them are simply heinous, there is a deep purpose seeded in each choice. It is my job to discover with Him the deep meaning. Again, even if I had the best of parents I am still required to do this work.

My Parents

And if I didn’t do this work as a child, it doesn’t preclude me from being able to do it now. For each of us, this is a living process and an inescapable reality. At any point in my life I can engage the work of bowing to God’s purpose, plan and choice of my parents. And by doing so I can unlock a deep mystery contained in His choice.

Here’s the good news to all this, it is possible to live a limitless life! If I resist my parents, I will be imprisoned, but if I do the work with God I can enter His freedom and liberty which is amazing. First, if I want to live a limitless life I have to receive the Lord’s limitations on my life. All the constraints on my life are intended to lead me into an encounter with my Sovereign God. Parents, with all their frailty and failings, ultimately can corral me to the God who is over every ruler on this earth. Yielding to Him, His choice, and His authoring of my life will lead me into the realm of His Omni-possibilities.

Again this doesn’t issue a pass for the abuse or mistreatment of a child, but I promise, there is a purpose beyond the seeing. Sovereignty is a deep mystery, but for those who do the work, their path can not only be redeemed but lead to a glory and resurrection. We can live in an unexplainable Peace, the peace we have so fervently sought within the years of strife.

The Word

This is the only one of the ten commandments with a promise:

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”
Exodus 20:12

There is a generation (class of people) that curses its father and does not bless its mother. 

There’s a generation (class of people) that is pure in its own eyes, yet is not washed from its filthiness.

 There is a generation (class of people)—oh, how lofty are their eyes! And their eyelids are raised in arrogance.

There is a generation (class of people) whose teeth are like swords and whose jaw teeth are like knives, to devour the afflicted from the earth and the needy from among men.

The leech has two daughters, “Give, give!” There are three things that are never satisfied, four that do not say, “It is enough”:

Sheol, and the barren womb, Earth that is never satisfied with water, and fire that never says, “It is enough.”

The eye that mocks a father and scorns a mother, the ravens of the valley will pick it out, and the young vultures will devour it.
Proverbs 30:11-17 AMP