Exodus 20:1-6

So back to the Ten Commandments.

So exciting, right?

We talked about it last week, and we actually saw that it is much more exciting than we think, and it's much more than just a set of rules, but they actually send us on quite a journey into much deeper things than we originally think when we approach them.

So we're making our way through Exodus, and that's how we ended up at the Ten Commandments.

So we've seen a lot go on, and actually that's what these first couple verses are referring to of what God has already done for these people, that He's He's brought them out of Egypt, He's redeemed them, and He's restoring them, and He's taking them on a journey.

Uh, and they're going through this wilderness, it should only take a couple weeks, it shouldn't take that long.

Um they end up spending about 40 years making their way through this wilderness because they just keep settling down in different places.

So we get all these stories through the book of Exodus.

And eventually they're gonna head into Canaan, where this is what this is Israel, modern-day Israel, this is where they build their cities and their nation, this is where these people, the Hebrews, have their life.

So last week we took that macro-aerial view.

Uh so um tempting for me as a preacher.

I want all of you to know everything from last week, but I know all of you weren't here last week, and I know all of you don't like listen to the podcast religiously all week.

So uh let me give a short review which will help, and it'll help those of you that were here last week.

It's not gonna be so long that you're gonna get bored, but those of you who weren't here, I think it'll catch you up.

So here's what we discovered last week, and what we talked about that the law, when we talk about the law in the Bible, the law is what we talk about as God's standard of righteousness.

Uh it's it's the standard of what we should do, but even more than that, it's it's who we should be.

The law's good.

The law is holy, the law's good.

We're the problem.

The law breaks us because we are imperfect before the law.

And so we have moral law, we have judicial law, we have ceremonial law, we have some crazy laws.

I mean, you read some stuff in the Old Testament, you're like, that's crazy stuff, and it is.

Um, and it was in that culture at that time.

And all of it begins in these Ten Commandments, this moral law.

I mean, this is this is the law that it guides us, but it also breaks us.

And what we said is because it breaks us, we must let it send us on, or else we end up what the New Testament talks about living under the law.

And last week what we talked about is we said, so many of us have had these experiences where uh you've seen a certain church, or you attended a certain church, or you read a book, or you knew a friend, or a person, or even a parent, and uh you you saw their faith and you looked at their faith and you didn't know why, but you knew you wanted nothing to do with that.

You just knew what that was was exhausting.

And you didn't have words for it, you didn't understand it, you didn't have a framework for understanding it, and most of the time in that situation, when it's that exhausting, it's because it's under law and grace is not involved.

I mean, pretty much if you want to find law in your life, you can just if you just contemplatively root around a little bit and find out what areas of your life you're exhausted in, you'll probably find law at work.

Because that's what the law does.

It exhausts us, it breaks us, and it's meant to send us on.

It's meant to send us on to the grace of God known in Christ.

That's where it's meant to send us.

So we get this list.

We get this list, these Ten Commandments.

This is what you should be, this is how we should honor God.

This is perfection.

This is what builds a healthy life, this is what builds a healthy society.

And all we have to do is this list.

This is all we have to do.

We just just do this list, just do these ten things.

If we all just do these ten things, our families, our marriages, our parenting, our friendships, our society, just do these ten things.

And I think we want to.

I do, I do think we want to.

I actually think that we want to be perfect.

I think that that's below a lot of the other stuff that we do.

That's why we drive ourselves so hard.

That's why we react so strongly to failure.

It's because you just wish you could just get it all right.

That's why we run to crazy things for escape.

That's why we beat ourselves up over inadequacies because we just wish we had it all together.

We wish we were able to accomplish that or win that person's approval.

And we do all this because we just want to be perfect.

We want to be able to come to this list of ten things and just be able to do them.

But instead, we're faced with a very different reality.

And that's just each one hammers us.

And we realize, oh, that's great.

That would be great for my life.

I should do that.

I should do it.

And we're gonna look at the first two this week.

And we'll look at them, we'll go, yeah, I that's what I need to do.

This is what I should do.

As a Christian, this is what I should do.

And then you realize at the same time, like, oh, I don't always do that.

So our text this morning, I'll reread some of it as we go.

That's how we like to do things here.

It just helps at least me kind of form thoughts as we go.

So verses one and two, and God spoke all these words.

This is Exodus chapter 20.

Exodus 20 · chapter mention

And God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

So we said it last week, I'll say it again.

Uh grace comes before the law.

And so before he gives these ten laws, we see him reminding the people, hey, remember?

Remember what I did?

Like, I graciously rescued you.

The Mosaic law was given after the Lord saved them out of Egypt.

So he's saying, this is what he's saying, this is what this means to us.

You already belong to me.

Before you start into your performance thing of like the Christian living thing, before you start into that, you already belong to me.

The acceptance, the redemption, it's already sealed, it's already done.

So, thus, what this means is that the motivation for obedience is not like I'm gonna pay it back or I'm gonna earn it or I'm gonna earn some favor with God or I'm gonna need to maintain it.

The motivation is just gratitude.

Because I'm already accepted, it's already over, it's already done.

So now let's look at these two commandments.

A few points as we go will help.

Uh, point number one is this our supreme loyalty should be to God alone.

Our supreme loyalty should be to God alone.

It's pretty clear in the text.

Verse 3, you shall have no other gods before me.

I didn't have to get creative here.

I mean, it was just it was so easy to outline this passage.

Just our supreme loyalty should be to God alone.

Your loyalty and your love should be to him.

Now, that's easy to say.

It's really hard to do when you consider that gods are stuff like work and, or it can be, stuff like work and family and finances and stuff and a lottery worth$800 million.

Last night,$1.3 billion from now on.

Not sure if you're aware of that one.

I'm aware of it.

Shows you where my heart can be on Sunday morning that I checked, hello.

As I reviewed from the sermon, I checked to see if anybody had won.

So we say things like God's number one in my uh in my life, right?

Like, God's number one, number two's like family, like we look we like to like give the list.

And I get that, like I understand that.

That's good, it's good stuff, good stuff.

Uh for me, it's just me, maybe that's the way for you to view priorities.

It helps you.

For me, it's always helped to think more in terms of like I'm a being, like I'm a living being.

And so for me, it helps to think more like the core of my being.

God is holds supreme loyalty.

And out of that core uh fuels all these other uh things in life: family and work and friends and different things.

But I but there's a core to my life and being, and that's where God holds supreme loyalty.

And what this verse is talking about, this commandment is saying, don't take like one of the other things and put it into the core of your being where you hold supreme loyalty for something.

And that's what we tend to do.

Even though he should be the starting point for all the other things in our lives, we don't always do that.

We don't perfectly hold him as supreme loyalty and love.

Uh we often make the other little gods into supreme loyalty and we let them drive us to some extent.

So his call for us to love him for supreme loyalty in the core of our beings, uh it demands us to go past like surface love.

And yet, surface love is the easier way to go.

It's just so much easier because you can just pretend and you don't, well, you don't have to you don't have to face a lot of things.

You would never have to face the fact that you actually had work in the core of your being.

Or family, or uh approval, or achievement, or the lottery, or whatever.

But when you have to go under the surface and you have to go like a little bit deeper to where supreme loyalty is held, you see some really beautiful things about yourself and you see some really dark things about yourself.

And now all of a sudden the law crushes you because you realize that you have not lived up to it.

And so, unless you let it send you on, you will stay under the law, and you will feel exhausted and you will be in despair.

So, to know joy and freedom, we must go deeper, but when we go deeper, we see something we don't necessarily want to see, and yet that's where the law is revealing to us, like, hey, hey, you don't do this perfectly, and so we must let it send us on.

And that's how we get free from the life of pretending that we can move into confession and the full acceptance that we already have in the grace of God, and there we begin life.

So, point number one, our support supreme loyalty should be to God alone.

Point number two, uh, this comes around the second commandment.

You receive God, you don't form God.

Verse 4, you shall not make for yourselves a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, I am a jealous God.

So, no substitutions.

So he's saying, no substitutions.

Don't take a lesser God and make him the supreme loyalty of your life.

Don't substitute, but also, and I was reading this week, this is new to me, no manipulations.

So no substitutions, but also like don't carve him up and like reform him to be what you want him to be versus the revelation of who he is in the scriptures for us.

And we do that a lot.

Like maybe, okay, maybe the substitution thing, maybe you don't do that too much, maybe you go, I got a handle on that.

But we can do the manipulation thing pretty easily.

And really, at the end of that, you're you're worshiping yourself.

You're deifying your own idea of who God is versus receiving who God actually is.

That's why we come to the scriptures to receive who God is.

We don't just like self-create it out of our own desires.

And then you're just really worshiping yourself.

So the irony to all of this, especially these first two commandments, is this is that uh chapter 32, 12 chapters from here, Moses is like on the mountain, there's more, a lot more to come.

We're gonna dig into all this content.

He comes down the mountain.

It, you know, we're not that far off from like, hey, don't have another God.

Like, don't create another God.

He comes down the mountain.

Do you remember what happens?

The people have gone and like made a golden calf.

Like they went and they're like worshiping a golden calf that they made.

And it's just so ironic.

I mean, it's so incredible.

They just right away, like he hadn't even been off the mountain very long, and they've already failed.

They just so badly wanted something to grasp and cling to, something to love.

So, I mean, so for us, here's what we see.

We see, okay, point number one, our supreme loyalty should be to God alone.

Got it.

Commandment number one, point number two, commandment number two.

You receive God, you don't form God, got it, okay?

And then we go, okay, so where's this story going?

We see Exodus 32, we know our own human hearts.

Point number three, we're not real good at point number one and point number two.

Maybe we're good at some moments, but we're not perfectly good at these things.

Eventually we're not good at them.

Our love is imperfect.

We made a golden calf like the day the guy came off the mountain receiving all this stuff.

And this is how we see that the law both guides us, but it also breaks us.

And that this list, Ten Commandments.

Ten Commandments, this list fails us.

It fails us in terms of being able to create righteousness inside of us.

To create new life in you.

It can't create new life in you.

You can't even live up to it.

The law fails at that, but it succeeds so wonderfully in showing you and showing me that we cannot be our own saviors, that we desperately need an outside savior.

Listen to this, Romans 7, it's in your handout there in the bullets.

In Romans 7, verses 7 through 11, then we'll jump down to verses 24 and 25.

Romans 7:7–11

And I when I make this jump, it's a painful jump because there's a lot of like fantastic stuff in there that you should go back and read.

What then shall we say that the law is sin?

By no means.

Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin.

See what he's saying?

He's going, okay, only by the law, this holy good principle that I should live up to, only by it do I realize that I'm messed up.

For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said you should not covet.

But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness.

For apart from the law, sin lies dead.

I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died.

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.

See, if you live under the law, if you live under principles and striving to be more righteous in your own work and how you're going to achieve an achievement and standard.

If that's the way you live, you live what Paul says is death.

Because you'll never get there, and it'll always be over you, and it'll always crush you.

You have to let it send you on.

For sin seizing opportunity through the commandment deceived me, and through it killed me.

Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death.

Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

So he's saying, It sent me on.

The law sent me on to the grace of God which we know in Jesus.

There's this interesting passage in Jeremiah chapter 31, and this prophet tells the story of a husband and a wife, and the metaphor here is that God is the husband, and we're the wife, us as the church, we're the wife, as people, we're the wife, and says that the Lord was the faithful husband to them, to us, but we on the other hand are not faithful back.

Jeremiah 31 · chapter mention

Here's what it says, verses uh 33 and 34.

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord.

I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people, and no longer shall each one teach his neighbor, and each his brother, saying, Know the Lord, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

Now I was reading commentary on this this week.

Let me read that paragraph.

You got it in front of you, because I wanted you to hang with me.

It's a bit of reading, but it's worth it.

Here's what J.A.

Motyr says in his uh commentary in Exodus, and he's talking about this Jeremiah passage, and here's the goodness.

Here's the good stuff right here.

When the Lord's people cannot rise to his requirements.

Hello?

Amen?

Anybody?

Anybody not rising to the requirement?

Okay.

A little honesty, it'll be okay.

When the Lord's people cannot rise to his requirements, he does not lower his standards, but rather he lifts his people.

In this case, the law remains the same, but now it is written on their hearts.

This is another way of expressing the truth of regeneration.

God's gift of a new nature, and in particular, a new heart, a whole personality.

Fashioned to match the precepts of his law.

The inner true reality of the Christian believer is that our new nature has been fashioned for obedience.

Thirdly, there is the way in which all this is accomplished.

Sin is dealt with so completely and finally that all memory of our sinfulness has been blotted out, even from the mind of God.

So the way this happens, so the way that transformation, sanctification, the way of obedience, whatever word you want to put on it, the Christian life, the way all of this happens, it's fueled by this idea that God's scorecard on you is gone.

That it's not even, but that's not how he regards you.

That one and that one and that one.

You're gonna have to work that one off.

It's it's through Christ, he sees you as his forever beloved.

He doesn't even remember that you're a mess.

Isn't that fantastic?

We remember it, right?

And we bring it back up and bring it back up.

He doesn't remember it.

And this works so wonderfully because it relieves us of having to pretend and having to perform.

It frees us to be able to confess and to begin to transform into his likeness.

So there's no scorecard of being kept by God on you today or yesterday or tomorrow.

You are redeemed, you're accepted based on his work and not your work.

Christ crucified for you.

And because of this, we should love him, supreme loyalty.

Because of this, we should grasp and cling to no one except him.

That's what Martin Luther, that's how what he called it meant, to love God.

He said this.

Martin Luther, great reformer, theologian in the 1500s, he said, to have a God is to trust and believe, and that one with your whole heart.

You lay hold of God when your heart grasps and clings to him.

So to love God means to cling to him.

So as soon as I read it, I had a flashback.

And this is what my flashback was too.

Cling wrap.

Anybody kicking the cling?

I mean, it was immediate.

I read it and I was just like, cling wrap.

Like that, I mean, and this, I don't know if you remember the cling wrap or or uh saran wrap.

I think I guess saran wrap was the original, and then Glad probably ripped it off or something, changed the formula a little bit and be able to do that.

So uh this is what I grew up with.

It was cling wrap.

And I'd put all, you know, put all my leftover spaghetti, you know, put it in that guy right there, and then you know, you pull off your cling wrap, and uh always the story.

I didn't even have to pretend to do that.

We all know that one right there.

And you put it on there because you couldn't find the cover to the Tupperware.

I mean, right?

You tried, and you got so mad at that drawer Tupperware, you just like you cussed at Tupperware, and you knew that you had to give that up.

So you went for the cling wrap, and the cling wrap, if to be honest, I'm it's just okay.

I mean, really, it's it's kind of and that's what I that's what I remembered when I was like grasping cling to God, cling wrap, and I'm having these flashbacks of like how horrible of a product uh cling wrap is.

Sorry if you're still using it.

I have some better news for you coming in just like like a minute and a half.

Um because I would put this in the fridge and like the other bowl of something would fall on it, you know, and then my spaghetti would be down in the fridge.

Now, fortunately, I wasn't the only one who the who uh was having these issues.

A guy named Peter Hamilton and Kenneth McGuire, they they were they were solving this problem for all of us.

And so in 1996 they patented the formula.

Anyone know this guy?

Right?

Press and seal.

I mean, I don't know what's going on here, but this is the miracle stuff right here.

So uh Glad press and seal.

Is what this product is, and this is this is what you want because this stuff, I don't know what how it does it, I don't know the magic, but you get this stuff on here, and it is locked down.

I mean, unbelievable clean factor.

I mean, the picture, I'm not kidding, I didn't test it.

The picture is like orange juice coming out like upside down.

But I know this.

When I put my spaghetti in here and I clean I cling wrap it here with press and seal, and I can put another bowl on top of this, it can it could fall over.

Spaghetti staying in the bowl.

It's not all over the fridge.

It has unbelievable cling factors.

Is anybody using the press and seal?

Anybody still using the cling wrap?

Just you want to convert okay.

Everybody who's used it just afterwards, come up, give it a test, test drive.

We'll convert you over.

It might be the best thing that happens at our church this morning as we convert people from cling wrap to press and seal.

I so I press it.

Here's the point, silly point, but here's the point.

Here's the point.

Unbelievable loyalty, press and seal.

Saran wrap, cling wrap.

It's horrible.

It's horrible.

Give it up.

Like, don't ever buy it again.

Not when this is available right next to it.

I mean, this has unbelievable loyalty.

This is what we should be.

We should be able to cling like this.

It's what we should be.

And here's what we know from the scriptures.

What we know from the scriptures as we cling to him, that he redeems us and restores us, and he holds our beings together.

Our shame doesn't become our prison, our addictions to merit and to perfection and to anything.

It doesn't become our masters.

Those things don't become our masters.

But we still have a problem.

That we don't even do that perfectly.

It just keeps coming back to point number three that we don't, we don't perfectly cling, even when we know we should.

And the scriptures call this the fallenness of man, our fragility, our sin.

So we have this commandment to love God.

And this commandment is good and it's healthy, it's holy, it's what we should be.

And it's not just here, it's all over the scriptures, right?

In Deuteronomy and in the New Testament, and love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, cling to him, is what it's saying.

And here's what we find the commandment for us to cling to him is so true and it is good for us, and yet it is that calling that helps us to see that none of this, the salvation, the spirituality, the wholeness, none of this works unless He is clinging to us.

That's the great truth here.

That's why verses 1 and 2 come before the commandments.

Because you've got to remember that the grace precedes the law.

That he has supreme loyalty to his beloved.

He has supreme loyalty to you.

Even on your bad days.

So, my brothers and sisters, may you in the core of your being rest in the reality and the truth that he has already redeemed you.

And he is clinging to you.

And in your imperfection, may you love him deeply out of your forever belovedness.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that you cling to us even though we imperfectly cling to you.

And you love us perfectly while we imperfectly love you.

That you just keep dealing with us.

That we let our hearts wander off to all sorts of idols, gods, messes, sins, junk.

And that you graciously keep pursuing us and loving us because we are your beloved.

And you have chosen us, and you have saved us, you have redeemed us, you have called us holy.

Because you came and lived the life of righteousness we can't live, and you died the death we deserve, and based on work that was done outside of us on a cross a long time ago, that we have this great gift of being your children.

Help us to live more deeply in the core of our beings, to have open eyes to see the great beauty of the image that we've been created in, but also to see the way in which our hearts deceive us.

That we would see the way that the law crushes us and exhausts us.

Would you help some of us here this morning to see that this morning?

The way in which we're allowing the law to crush us, to send us into weariness and in despair.

Would we begin to let it send us on?

Into the great reality that you regard us with no scorecard.

And that we are your redeemed, perfect and holy, even while we're greatly imperfect before you.

Thank you for the gift of Jesus.

Amen.