Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.
Exodus: 20:12

This is the first commandment in the list of the ten commandments about loving others. And not only is it the first commandment about loving others but it's the first commandment with a promise. Honour your parents "so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you".

God wants to bless his people. After generations of slavery in Egypt, He is giving them their own land, a beautiful garden land. And if God’s people want things to go well in the land It starts with correctly ordered family relationships.

We the church can live in a way where we are a sign of restored familial relationship that showcase God’s faithfulness and point to the hope of fully restored human relationships. I pray that is particularly hopeful for you if you come from a family of origin where your parents have not honoured you as they should and that maybe it has become the case that the way to honour them best is to have boundaries so that no one is dishonoured.

You have a new family and God will call us all to honour our earthly parents in a way that is safe and appropriate. But we can receive from God, our good Father, all that we need to be able to do that. The healing and transformation we encounter today points in hope to when one day God fully dwells with his people and all broken family relationships are fully restored.

To give us a clearer idea of what lies behind the idea of “the name of the Lord” in the bible, fast forward to the dedication of the temple. In 1 Kings 8 King Solomon dedicates the temple with a prayer. He prays: As for the foreigner … will hear of your great name and your mighty hand and your outstretched arm—when they come and pray toward this temple. ‘The name’ is completely linked to the actions and intentions and reputation of the owner of the name. The point was that anyone should be able to look to the temple and learn of the character of God and respond in loyalty.

The verb before “the name” is actually two words and it literally means ‘to lift up (or carry)’ - ‘in vain’. In Exodus 28 the robes of the high priest are described. On his chest he was to wear 12 precious stones each with the name of a tribe engraved on it. It says he was to lift up or carry (same verb) these stones as he went before Yahweh. As the priest went into the holy place of the temple he would carry the names of the tribes. He would represent all the 12 tribes to God.

To bear the name of someone in vain is to be a bad representative of that person. It means to misrepresent someone, to give a misleading idea of the character of the person or organisation we are claiming to represent. God was saying to his people that others should be able to tell just by looking at us who we belong to. To carry the name in vain is to claim we are in a covenant relationship with him but for that claim to make no difference to how we live.

At Sinai, Yahweh claimed a nation as his very own and released them to live out their calling. Our calling is to bear Yahweh’s name among the nations, to represent him well. At Sinai, he warns the people not to bear his name in vain. Keeping this command, then, involves much more than not saying gosh or OMG. Keeping the command not to bear Yahweh’s name in vain changes everything about how we live."

Jesus answered, ‘Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, “You must be born again.” The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.’
- John 3:5-8

When people hear the words “born again,” a lot of us think of that as something for other Christians. Maybe for the ones who’ve really messed up—people with addiction stories, people who hit rock bottom, and then found got religion. But if we actually look at John 3, the very first person Jesus says “you must be born again” to is Nicodemus.

Now Nicodemus isn’t a failure. He’s not on the margins. He’s a respected leader, a teacher of Israel, educated, stable, religious, moral. In other words, if anyone didn’t need to start over, it would have been him. And yet Jesus looks him in the eye and says: “Amen, amen… no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.”

That’s what baptism is all about. Not just a symbol, not just a ritual. It’s death and resurrection. It’s saying: the old life is gone, and a whole new life begins. When we watched Dami, Ren, Abraham, Solomon and Jennifer go down into the water at their baptisms, that wasn’t just a nice ceremony. That was them dying with Christ and being raised into new life.

The image is shocking—because it is meant to be. Think of that Mission Impossible moment when Ethan Hunt has a bomb in his head, and the only way to save him is for his wife to stop his heart and shock him back to life. It looks like death, but it’s the only way to live. That’s baptism. The only way to live is to die.

Why does Jesus make it so drastic? Because small tweaks won’t cut it. You can’t just polish up your life and hope it’s enough. An apple tree can’t grow oranges no matter how much you prune or fertilise it. To bear different fruit, you need a new root. That’s why Jesus says, “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.”

Here’s the best part: you don’t make yourself born again. Babies don’t give birth to themselves! Birth is the work of another. And in our case, it’s the work of Christ—lifted up on the cross, suffering so that we could have life.

So whether you’ve been in church for decades or you’re just exploring faith, the call of Jesus is the same: you must be born again. Not just reformed, not just improved—renewed.