Table of Duties
CERTAIN PASSAGES OF SCRIPTURE FOR VARIOUS HOLY ORDERS AND POSITIONS, ADMONISHING THEM ABOUT THEIR DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
To Children
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” [Eph. 6:1-3]
Pastor’s Commentary
Parents are to direct their strength and efforts, guided by heartfelt love, to seek to awaken in their children a proper fear, love, and trust in God: “…Bring them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.” This fear, love, and trust in God instills deep love for others. Christian parents point beyond themselves and raise those entrusted to their care to trust and know the Lord they share in common.
Christian children so raised by Christian parents learn to live in the civil realm without a debilitating fear of human beings, seeing others as God’s gift and blessing to them, and especially their parents and other authorities. For children, to love and honor others (following the second table of the Law) is the boundary within which God promises, “…it may go well with you… that you may live long in the land.” Such children also learn how to live in the spiritual realm, with a happy conscience that knows that in their Baptism they have been adopted as children of their heavenly Father, and have been joined to the death and resurrection of Him who loves them without condition, who died and rose to forgive and justify them forever.
