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The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any.
Manners are the practiced ways in which one person acknowledges and gives worth to others through their actions
One of the most valued points of training for my children was to teach them to honor others made in God’s image that they would learn how to honor God. Manners, the habit and action of practicing and living out ways to show this worth in practical ways was a very consistent part of our training grounds for our children. Honor requires a heart attitude that says, “There are others I must consider more important than myself, others I with whom I must learn to show respect. There are others to whom I should learn to give allegiance, loyalty because it pleases God.
First, I am asked to honor God. The way I learn this is by practicing giving it to others that there will be a pathway in my brain that is used to thinking of honor as a life core value.
If a child is to learn to worship God, to give Him the worth, the honor and glory he deserves, he learns the value of honor by seeing it lived outin his family and by practicing it as a way of life.
God tells children to "Honor their mother and father" and in this command is a practice of showing respect, giving worth, humbling one's self--in short practicing seeing the value in another person. When people are valued, valuing God and worshipping Him is already a pattern in the heart.
Manners must be modelled, trained, valued, so that that which is sacred may be learned through the life of a home. It is one of the best skills and heart attitudes a parent may give to a child.
From the first days of life, we speak the attitudes of faith into our little babies. When we treat them with gentleness and respond to them with patience and treat them as little infants of great value, we are already training the value of honor and respect into their brain patterns.
Honor is a value that must have precedence in a home, so that a child can understand the importance of people, and to learn to bow their knee before others who deserve respect.
Honor is a heart attitude that is chosen to be a guide to our behavior in life. Honor leads us to choose to act in a way that points to the holiness, the dignity of God. Honor begins with our attitude about God and what we owe to Him out of being His servants.
The beginning of learning to value a fetus, an old, frail or infirm adult, or a person of different race or color begins with the heart attitude of learning to honor and learning to submit oneself to others.
Honoring others in authority is biblical. Honoring the property of others is at the base of not stealing, not disfiguring a place. Sacred places that are of value to others require that we give places a sense of value for what they represent.
Honoring sacred places is a way of moving beyond giving worth personally to people to granting worth to the places that hold sacred meaning, value to them and to our community.
If there is no place in our lives where we must be hushed, out of reverence, when we enter a place; if vulgarity and crudity of language offers no pang of shame; if there is no sense of reverence in the grid of our lives that requires us to bow our own self in the presence of someone greater, then passing on a sense of awe and humility when we are in God's presence will be impossible.
We practice humility and honor with our peers that we may worthily understand God's rightful place in our lives as the sovereign over all.
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