I wish I could remember all the advice my dad has ever given me. I’m sure not all of it has been good, but the amount that has been good far outweighs any bad advice he may have let get through.

The advice that your parents give you directly effects the person that you become. Whether you listen to their advice or not, you choose to be the person you are based on that advice. Sometimes we have a natural aversion to what our parents tell us. Especially in the teenage years, it’s easy to think that we know everything and the best thing for our life, but similarly to how infatuation effects the human mind’s ability to think clearly, the teenage years do this to all of our minds.

Some people may follow everything their parents ever tell them and never even question it. These people may get a cruel awakening when they get to the world and start having to think critically for themselves. There is no one-size-fits-all. The Bible says to obey your parents and it also says to honor your parents. If you combine those two together, you can usually decipher what God wants you to do based on the advice your parents give you.

I was thinking back to one memory in particular tonight. When I was in about 5th or 6th grade, I was in a sports program at my church called Upward Sports. I played soccer in my 5th and 6th grade year and loved it. I was athletically inclined as a kid, so I loved any chance I got to be able to play.

One of the activities, while you play this sports program, was that you had practices once a week, and in these practices, you had a devotion and you went over a memory verse for the week. When I was in 1st and 2nd grade, I was all over this. Every week I came back with the verse memorized, and I felt so proud of myself. But somewhere along my second year playing, I realized that no one else put the effort I did into memorizing the verse and I not only felt like it was pointless what I was doing, but I also felt a bit awkward being the only one who knew it every week.

As I continued playing the next couple of years, I put the same amount of effort all the other kids did into memorizing the verse…zero effort. The time would come around to say the verse and there would be a kid or two who could barely say it, but no one could do it too well.

Well, fast forward to one of the weeks that my dad happened to come to the practice and he was there when we were all going over the verses and he saw that I couldn’t say what the verse was just like the rest of the kids. Having had each of us kids memorizing Bible verses since we were young, I am sure that he was quite surprised that I didn’t know it.

As we drove back, he asked me about if I knew the verse and I admitted (because I had to) that I didn’t. For the remainder of the season, dad and I got together at least once a week to review that verse before I went to practice. All of a sudden, I could do the verse each week. It didn’t matter if other kids could do it, I could.

This is a long story to prove a somewhat small point, but it just goes to show how putting just a little effort in will put you completely over all of your competition. People just don’t try anymore, and that, for better or worse, is a huge advantage to those of us who are willing to work a little harder.