"Outdo One Another in Showing Honor:" Romans 12:10
Does that sound like a challenge to anyone else? There are not many things that the Bible encourages us to outdo each other in – but Honor is one of them. This is how different translations emphasize the instruction to honor:
Romans 12:10
“Love each other as brothers and sisters and honor others more than you do yourself.” (CEV)
“…Honor one another above yourselves.” (NIV)
“…Outdo one another in showing honor.” (ESV)
“…practice playing second fiddle.” (MSG)
Honor vs Respect
Honor is different to respect. Respect is something that is earned. Honor is something you give.
Honor is based on what I decide not what you deserve.
It is something that is hard to define but it is unmistakable when we experience it. It reminds us of who we are, who God is and how much he cares for the people in our lives.
The challenge is that it is much easier to be critical than it is to honor. However, unless we are able to correct our perspective, we can often see work, people and life through a negative lens. Some of us grew up in homes where put-downs set the tone. I have found that in leadership we need to set the tone rather than allow bad habits to establish a culture.
"I was their leader, establishing the mood and setting the pace by which they lived."
Case Study
Years ago, I felt like we as a company had fallen into a culture that was dishonoring. It is fairly common that people in our industry will not always speak well about their customers, clients, or supervisors. It’s an accepted pattern to bad mouth the people you work for. I started to see that our company was doing that, and we made a stand. Our standard needed to move out of negative, through neutral and into Honor.
Honor is not something that happens passively. It must be chosen and initiated. We decided that we were only going to speak well about our clients and customers.
This is not always easy because not every client is created the same – some clients are much more difficult to work with and some clients make it more difficult for us to do our job. Some clients don’t honor us, but we made the decision that regardless we were going to speak well about our clients.
Once we started to do this from a leadership point, the managers underneath us followed suit and began speaking well about the clients and appreciating them. It was the jobs that they were giving us that allowed us to continue to work as a company. This specific application of honor completely changed the atmosphere of our company and on the job sites.
You can feel a change in the atmosphere when honor takes place.
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