The Marque of Maturity // How to Get More Out of Your Parents, Part 4

One of the things I did when I was a teenager is that I wanted to act like a child and yet, to be treated like an adult. So what are parents looking for in their teenagers as key indicators that they’re actually growing up?

Can I ask you a question? How would you define maturity? I mean, you look at two people, similar ages, similar backgrounds and you think that one, well she definitely has it but that other one over there, he just needs to grow up. So what’s the difference between the two? What sets them apart? What makes one person mature and the other one immature? Interesting.

We often think of maturity as a real issue amongst teenagers and to be sure, they're in a natural transition from the immaturity of childhood to the maturity of adulthood. What about amongst adults? Aren't they all mature? What sets a person apart as being mature? When we look at someone, what are we looking for as the indicators of maturity?

This week on the program we're doing a little series that I've called, “How to get More out of your Parents”. The idea kind of spawned out of a situation when I was asked to speak to a gathering of high school students and I just wanted to talk about something that they'd be interested in rather boring their socks off.

Now I operate on this basic premise that 99.9% of parents are hard wired to bless their children. We want to see them happy and healthy and well adjusted but there's this one thing that stops the flow of blessing from parents to children. It's like a cork in the line that completely blocks the blessing and that thing is rebellion.

Rebellion is something that happens, well it happens at all ages, but it particularly happens in the teenage years. You know when teenagers kind of roll their eyes and ignore their parents and disobey their parents and that in the end robs the teenager of the blessing that the parents wanted to give them.

I've been there as a parent, you make a silent decision, you take your teenage kids out for a meal, it's a nice meal and you get an attitude problem. You know, you get one of these moods from them and you sit there and think, "Well you know, the next time we got out for a nice meal I'm not bringing a teenager with attitude with us." So you wait until they're off doing something else and then you go out for dinner without them.

Now without even knowing it, their failure to honour their parents has robbed them of blessing. It happens a thousand times a day in some households. That's because there's a natural order that God has put in place. We looked at it yesterday on the program.

Honour your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land that the Lord has given you.

It's the 5th commandment, you go to the Ten Commandments, the first four are about our relationship with God and that's fair enough, the very next one is:

Honour your father and your mother ...

And it comes before:

Don't murder; don't commit adultery; don't lie; don't steal.

Obviously God takes this as really important and the struggle for teenagers is that they want to be grown up, they so much want to be grown up. I remember I did. I wanted to shed this whole childhood thing once and for all and be done with it and be an adult and yet, you're not really, you don't have independence from your parents and it's so frustrating and so our natural reaction, as teenagers is to rebel and when we rebel, instead of setting us free our parents would close us down.

When we rebelled it didn't have the desired affect, it actually made things worse and there’s this downward spiral. Why is that? Well because parents are looking for signs of maturity in their children before they'll remove some of the boundaries. Let me say that again, parents are looking for signs of maturity in their children before they'll remove some of the boundaries. You see it with young children; you don't let a young child use a sharp knife until you know that they're not going to hurt themselves with it.

Now if you're a teenager, I'm going to share with you the top three signs, the marks of maturity, the things that your parents are looking for and to make it easier to remember they all begin with an "A". The three are acceptance, appreciation and anticipation. It's one thing to say you should honour your parents, bottom line is we all know that we should but the question is how do you honour your parents? Well if you're looking for some really practical advice on the "how" front here it is, this is my top three list of "hows" if you like.

Let’s start with the 1st one: Acceptance. Acceptance just means that while we live under our parents roof we accept their authority over us, it's a heart decision, you flick a switch inside, “They are my parents; they've done ev