I Am The Lord Your God

One exhortation to you, just as with the election coming up, I know there's going to be a lot of talk about it, a lot of back and forth about it, a lot of, well, I think this, well, I think that, well, I think if this happens, then the other. My exhortation to you is whenever you want to talk about it, pray first. Pray for those who are going to lead us. Pray that God would be merciful to us. Pray that God would give us faith. This is one way you can exercise and demonstrate your faith in Jesus Christ. Everyone's worried right now. And the worry isn't on one side or the other. Everyone's worried. But God is our hope and our strength and our refuge. And so we ought to turn to him when we're fearful. And we ought to look to him for our guidance. And so, Evan, as you discuss and as you process and as you interact with other people about it, be careful to do it as a Christian and not just as a conservative or an American. So that's my exhortation to you.

And tomorrow, the day before the election, make a point of praying for the elections coming up. Pray for honesty, integrity, faith to accept the results and so many other things. If you're able, make a point of praying throughout the day tomorrow. And if you're able even, tomorrow would be a good day to fast as you pray. It's one of the ways that we do with our bodies. something that confirms what we're doing with our mouths. You know, we kneel when we confess our sins, when we have an earnest prayer request that's very common historically for Christians to fast along with their prayer. So consider that tomorrow, fast in ways, if you're able and in ways that you're able and devote yourselves to prayer instead of worry or whatever else might be on the docket tomorrow. It's good to be back with you guys. It was very sweet to be down in Bloomington last week.

preaching. I looked up as I was preparing to go down there and preach last week, the last time that I had preached down there, and it was before this church was planted. September 27th of 2009 was the last time I preached down in Bloomington. So where were you at the end of September? Many of you would be like, I wasn't here anywhere. I didn't exist. I wasn't born yet. Some of you are like, well, I'm married now with kids, but I was in elementary school. So it was a while ago. It was very sweet to be back with those brothers and sisters down there. They send their greetings and their love.

Some of you know, are more familiar with our connection to Trinity Reformed Church down in Bloomington. Some of you may not know at all, but they are very much our mother church, our sending church. And those of us who've been here for a long time, they have been, and the members of that church and the leadership of that church, have been spiritual fathers and mothers to us. And so we praise God for them. And so as you have, if you hear us talking about it, then know that we're talking about... those who've loved us and equipped us to do the work that we're doing up here. So they have a special place in our heart. Nevertheless, it's good to be back with you guys. I'm going to be reading the first four of the Ten Commandments as they're recorded for us in Deuteronomy this morning. However, Pastor Eric just finished preaching a series through the Ten Commandments, so I'm not going to be going through each one of them one by one the way he did. He just finished that, what, a month ago, six weeks ago, something like that.

Instead, I'm going to take two sermons to preach through the Ten Commandments. One sermon on the first table of the law, that's today, and a sermon the next time I preach, which will be three Sundays from now, on the second table of the law. This talk of tables of the law might be unfamiliar to you. The idea of the tables of the law, Moses came down with two tablets, you know. The first table of the law is Protestant. Christians understand it, is the first four commandments. It has to do with how man is to relate to God. What obligations are we under with regard to our relationship to God? That's the first table of the law. The second table of the law, starting with honoring our father and mother and on down through not murdering, stealing, and the rest, has to do with how we relate to one another. So the first table of the law has to do with how we relate to God. The second table of the law has to do with how we relate to one another.

I hope to accomplish a few things with this sermon this morning. The first is to explain a discrepancy that shows up in the fourth commandment between the passage in Exodus and the passage here in Deuteronomy. I want to explain what that is and why I believe it's there, why Moses did that. The second point is to explain that these laws are for us, the church, first. And finally, we're going to look at how these laws can or should be applied to the world. Our text this morning, as I said, is from Deuteronomy 5, verses 6-15. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol or any likeness of what is in heaven above, or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth.

You shall not worship them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing loving kindness to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes his name in vain. Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it, you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant or your ox or your donkey or any of your cattle or your sojourner who stays with you so that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So a bit of a test to start. How many of you know what the discrepancy in the fourth commandment is between Exodus and Deuteronomy? Show of hands. Abram does. I didn't know it. Someone pointed it out to me. I hope I think I would have caught it. Someone was like, are you going to talk about that? And I was like, yeah, I'm going to talk about that. It's before I was preparing. The difference between in the fourth commandment. comes at the very end where we're told why we should observe the Sabbath. In Exodus chapter 20, verse 11, it says, And so the reason that we're to observe the Sabbath according to Exodus, is rooted in creation. And in the fact that God rested on the seventh day, he worked six days creating, creating, creating. And then at the end of those six days on the seventh day, he rested. And so we are to emulate him. We're to be like him in that we're supposed to work six days and to do all of our work. But on the seventh day, we're to rest from all of our work as God did in creation. God made us to work and to cultivate the world, but not exclusively. And this idea of

Work and rest shows up in Deuteronomy here in a little bit. One of the questions surrounding the Sabbath that I think is worth answering is, what does it mean to rest from our labor? It's a concept that's sort of eroding away in our society. I think many of us don't have a concept of what we're resting from. We tend to think of rest in our society tends to go along these lines. We work. five days a week and maybe we work 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week or 60 hours a week, depending on what we're doing. If you're a mother, you might think there's no concept of rest in my life, especially when you have little ones. But generally speaking, as a society, we think of Monday through Friday as being the work week and that Saturday and Sunday are the rest days. What do we do on those days? Well, generally on those days, we do whatever we want. If you're a Christian, then on one of those days, we make it to church.

In our common life, we don't have six days of work and one day of rest set aside for worshiping God. What we have are five days of work and two days of satisfying our desires or our lusts, depending on the season of the year or what we're interested in. We go and we do that. We play in soccer tournaments or we go fishing at the lake or we go sit in the woods and hunt deer or we go to concerts. We see it as a time of fun, a time of unburdening ourselves. The Lord tells us rather we should work six days and that we should rest on one day. And that that rest is not for us to be lazy or selfish with, but rather to worship and to fellowship with him and with his people. The rest that God gives us is a kindness to us. He's not holding us back by saying you ought not to work seven days a week. He's blessing us. He's also training us in our desires, you know.

Being a pastor, there aren't many Sundays. I can't remember the last Sunday where I wasn't at church somewhere. I'm always at church. We go on vacation. We go to church. We do our best not to travel on Sundays. I'm sure we've missed church as a family at some point. It's just I don't remember the last time. But we really have this cycle in our lives that I think God has written into us and into creation that our week and our lives ought to revolve on this regular, where worship of God is a regular part of it. And so we ought to be very careful. I'm not going to, as I said, I'm not going to preach today a ton about the Sabbath, what it is, what it means to keep it, what the Westminster teaches, and these types of things, what's permissible and what's not on the Sabbath. What I do want to do is exhort you that the Lord's Day has been set aside, and it's meant to rise above.

whatever else you do during the rest of the week, whatever else you do throughout the week is less important than what you're doing right now. It's less important. And so it means you have to be very careful not to let the things that are of lesser importance rise up and supplant the thing of supreme importance. Your work can wait. Your work can wait, okay? If you have an ox in a ditch in the way the Old Testament talks about it, then you can go do works of necessity and of mercy on the Lord's day. But as a general rule, you should be able to say, we go to church on Sunday. That's what we do. We organize our family gatherings and we organize our vacations and we organize our sports schedules and we organize our lives around this thing, which means we say no to things. And we say no so that we can come to church and worship. God rested from his work on the seventh day in creation. This is what Exodus teaches us.

He rested from his work and he marveled at it and declared it very good. We gather together to worship the one who did all that work. And we do it every week. So don't forsake the gathering together as some have been. known to do. So Exodus teaches us that from creation, we're to rest on the seventh day. But Deuteronomy gives us a different reason. At the very end of our text, in verse 15, after telling us that we should observe the Sabbath, keep it holy, and that we should work six days, and the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord, and we're not supposed to work, and our family's not supposed to work, and our animals aren't supposed to work, and our servants aren't supposed to work, and no one's supposed to work, that our sojourner is not supposed to work. He gives us this reason. He says, you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.

And the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm. Therefore, the Lord your God commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. This is a different reason to observe the Sabbath. It's not rooted in creation. It's rooted in their slavery in Egypt. And throughout the beginning chapters of Deuteronomy, this idea of slavery, even though at the time Deuteronomy was originally given to the people was 40 years in the past. And many of the people who were there hearing this weren't in Egypt. He's reminding them, you were a slave and God brought you out of there. And so you ought to observe the Sabbath. Now, as they were getting ready to leave Egypt, life was very difficult. When Joseph and then his family after him came into Egypt and they settled there in the land of Goshen and they were a very small group of people, a family.

And while they were there over the next 400 or so years, they multiply into this great nation such that the Egyptians are afraid of them. They didn't come as slaves, but they left as slaves. They left as fugitives. As they transitioned from just being a nation within a nation into a group of slaves within a nation, their work got much harder. This idea that we would rest from our work is a thoroughly Christian idea. It doesn't exist in places where Christianity hasn't sown its seed. Egypt was one of those places. It's not the kind of place where they would have had rest from their work. The idea of having slaves and giving them rest, we might think in America back to a couple of hundred years ago when there was slavery in America. We think, well, those slaves, were they given rest or were they not? But the idea of giving rest to people from their work is...

something we take for granted, but historically would never have been taken for granted in other societies, certainly not in Egypt. The Egyptians had tasked the Israelites with making bricks. And up to that point, the Egyptians would bring them straw. You know, they'd take their mud and their clay, and they'd take the water, and then they'd put straw or stubble, plant material, into the mud. And the whole purpose of that was to function like rebar or reinforcements now, okay? Concrete. has metal or fiberglass, depending on the type of concrete and what it's for, put into it now to give it integrity. If you just poured a bunch of concrete and there was no rebar reinforcements inside of there, it would crack and it would shift and it would not remain level. And so you put reinforcements in it, you put rebar in it. That's what the straw was supposed to do in the brick. It was supposed to give them integrity so that they were able to hold together.

And so the Israelites would make these bricks. That was their task. That was their work. But as they were saying to the Egyptians, as Moses was saying to Pharaoh, we need to go three days journey out into the wilderness so that we can worship and sacrifice. You should understand that to be a form of rest, a Sabbath. Okay? Pharaoh said, no, you may not. Time and again, he said, no, you may not go. No, you may not go. And then he increases their work. And he says, not only are you going to continue to make bricks, you're going to continue to make the same number of bricks, but you're going to gather your own straw. We're not going to give it to you anymore. So there was an increase in the workload, a maintaining of the output, and there was a reason that Pharaoh did this to them. This is what it says. Pharaoh had called them lazy, the Israelites, because they were wanting to have a Sabbath. He called them lazy. Now I'll ask you for just one second. If you were to leave,

or to go to your boss and say, I can't work this Sunday. Do you think he'd be tempted to call you lazy? Well, everyone else is doing it. Everyone else is making sacrifices. Why are you so lazy? Why won't you? One of the accusations that will come is that you're lazy. You don't work as hard as everyone else. So Pharaoh called them lazy. He also had them beaten. And this is why. It says, so that they will pay no attention to false words. That's what it says back in Exodus. So they'll pay no attention to false words. What were those false words? Well, those false words were that they needed a Sabbath, that they needed to go out into the wilderness and they needed to sacrifice to their God. And so my point in bringing all this up to you is to say, the thing that we take for granted, the ability to set our labor aside for two days even instead of one, was a completely foreign concept at this time. They were worked and worked and worked and worked and worked and never given rest. And when they wanted rest,

They were told they were lazy and they were beaten and their workload was increased. You know the old saying that the beatings will continue until the morale improves? Pharaoh was trying to grind them into the ground. He was afraid of them, so he tried to weaken them. He took away their rest. He took away their worship. He wouldn't allow them to do it. And so what we take for granted, they earnestly desired. They wanted. They needed. And so we would be fools not to realize the blessing of God in giving us a rest from our work. Work has its place in our life. But God didn't make you only to work. And if work supplants and earning money supplants all of the other responsibilities you have, including the Lord's Day and primarily the Lord's Day, then you're in sin. That's sinful. This is more important than your work. You know when the Lord's Day is. Get your work done ahead of time.

Or wait to do it until Monday. Don't let work cause you to pay no attention to the words of God. So Moses tells them that this is why they ought to observe the Sabbath. Because you were a slave in the land of Egypt. You have to realize to them, they're only one generation. And some of them are of the generation still that had come from Egypt. This idea of having no rest was real to them. It was real to them. In a way that it's not so palpable and real to us. And so he says, remember what life was like when all you did was work. Remember what life was like when you had no rest. Remember what life was like when you couldn't worship. And don't take it for granted, these things you have. There's so many things in our society that we take for granted as just always being this way. We all have Bibles in our pockets, in our phones. But our knowledge of Scripture is much lower, I would argue.

than it's been among God's people historically. How much of it we have memorized, how much of it we know, how much of it we can recite, we just think it will always be there. So why this discrepancy between Exodus and Deuteronomy? Well, the simple answer is there's easily more than one reason to that we ought to observe the Sabbath. One is God rested on the seventh day and the other is We, like Egypt, like the Israelites, have been slaves to our work, slaves to our sin, and that we've been delivered from it by God. And as a result of his deliverance, we ought to set aside time every single week to thank him for it, to praise him for it, and to worship him for it. And our work can just wait, just needs to wait. Both creation and God's deliverance are good reasons for us to observe a Sabbath.

And if you think about your own lives and you think about how merciful God's been to you, what he's delivered you from, where you'd be if he hadn't saved you, you'll find other reasons to observe the Sabbath, to not neglect the gathering together. How would your life be different if you couldn't go worship for three months or six months or a year or five years? What would your life be like? It's hard for us to even imagine. The closest we've gotten to it was when COVID shut us down for a few weeks. And many of us will testify to that not being good for us, our souls, to have been shut down. And that an online video or a video of Dave sitting at the table doing a little Bible study wasn't the same. It didn't nourish us in the same way. So we ought to thank God and praise God for the gift of being able to worship every week. And we ought not to take it for granted. This is the discrepancy that we see here.

And my exhortation to us is that we ought to observe the Sabbath. We ought to, at the very least, make a priority of being at church. And by at church, I don't mean just the worship service. I know many of you go along and say, yeah, yeah, the worship service. I really do mean Sunday school and home groups as well. These things are a part of our Sabbath observance that we do at our church. Different churches do different things, but these are the things that we do. And you really ought to make a priority of being at them. You have to ask yourself, how come I can make it to worship, but I can't make it to Sunday school? Or how come I can make it to worship, but I can't stay for the fellowship meal afterwards? Do you observe a day or do you just observe two hours? Or do you just observe an hour and a half? How much time does God get in your life on the day that he gave for this observation? Many times when people come to church, they'll say Sundays are long days and are tiring days. And that's the truth. Do it with 11 kids and then tell me about.

How tiring it is. Or to my wife, she probably could tell, you know, would feel it even more than I do. You're right. But God is worthy. And so we're not ashamed of saying it's a long day. It's a good day. It's a blessed day. It is tiring. But honestly, what were you going to do instead? Watch football? I mean, shame on you. And I mean it. Shame on you. If that's what you would do with your time instead of fellowshipping with God's people, shame on you. Go to the Indy 500. You really ought to have a priority of worshiping God and being with his people and giving a day to it each week. In addition to it being a very tiring day and a very long day, you often come away with it being a very blessed day. While you're tired, you're filled up. Now, how do we explain that to someone who's like, but I just got so much other stuff to do? It's like, I don't know how to explain it to you. Just do it for six months. And you'll understand something I can't explain to you with words. God will bless it.

He'll build your relationships with God's people. You'll find a family. You'll find brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and help raising your kids and sorting out your marriage and whatever other problems you've got. There's a blessing, but it takes time. If you don't commit the time to it, you won't reap the blessing. He who sows sparingly will reap sparingly, but he who sows abundantly will reap abundantly. Now, that's it for the Sabbath. I'm going to move on to my second point. My second point was that these laws were for the church. Now, I realize from the very beginning that we want to jump right to Romans and say, no, no, no, the law was given not just to the church, but it was given to all of creation. It's binding on all of creation. And I'm just going to hit the brakes real hard to where we come to a stop and say, we'll talk about that. I'm not here to tell you that there's no application to the world, but we actually need to stop for a minute and consider what these laws have to do with us as Christians. Okay?

These laws were given to the Old Testament church, to the Israelites. All of the things that it says in there. I brought you out of Egypt. Who was brought out of Egypt? All the nations? No. That one nation. The Israelites. The people of God. Who had God revealed himself to? To all the nations? No. To Abraham and to his descendants after him. Who stood there at the mountain? With the lightning and with the thunder and with the quaking and with the voice of God, who stood there? The Israelites did. And who received these commandments? The Israelites did. And so we need to be careful at passing over the necessity of these laws being for us first and simply won't be concerning ourselves with what place they have in the world. If they have no place with us, Or if we are no different than the world in our interaction with them, then we're no better off than the world. As God's people, we should be the ones most interested in these laws and in keeping them. I've asked this question before. I'm going to ask it again, and I've asked it in previous sermons. Today, our text is the first four commandments of the Ten Commandments. Do you know them? Do you know them in order?

Do you know the long version, like the version I read, not just the short version, no other gods before me, no worshiping or I making or worshiping idols, no taking the Lord's name in vain, observe the Sabbath. That's the short version. But I read a lot more than that, didn't I? And there were reasons given in some of them as to why we're to do these things. Do you know them? If someone asked you, why don't you do this thing? And you said, well, because God said that we're to make the Sabbath holy. And they're like, what's a Sabbath? And what are you talking about? Why? I had a conversation with a friend in passing. I was like, yeah, travel soccer is just not a thing our kids can do. We can't afford it. He's like, oh, don't worry about the money. And I was like, nah, it's not so much the money. It's the time. My kids aren't playing soccer on Sundays. So they're going to miss half the game. They would miss half the games. And we're not interested in giving our Saturdays to traveling all over the Midwest so they can play soccer. If you think about these commands, the first table of the law particularly,

The rationale for them is completely different than the second table of the law. The second table of law, you can say, you know, it makes sense not to kill people. Stealing is bad. Adultery is destructive. Lying is not good. You know, you don't have to be a Christian to realize those things. But having no other gods, being careful how you use his name, that doesn't make any common sense. So can you name those commandments? Can you explain them in detail to someone who doesn't understand them? Can you say how you work to keep them? Do you catch yourself when you're angry and you want to curse and use God's name as a part of it? We all say Christians aren't tempted by that. We don't do that. And I'm like, that's just silly. That's not true. Yes, you do. Yes, I do. You catch yourself. Can you say of what you've done, how you've repented?

To observe these commandments. What have you said no to? These are the things that we as the people of God. Whom this law was originally given to. Need to concern ourselves with. What are our idols? And how have they supplanted the Lord in our lives? We could go on for days about the idols of the nations. And there's a place for that. But what about our idols? We were the ones who were warned about it. The people of God. What has God delivered you from? Like he delivered the Israelites from Egypt. What's the Egypt in your life? How have you fashioned or made idols? How have you worshipped them? What have you hoped in? What have you worried about? What have you longed for deliverance? Where is it supposed to come from? By whose strength and whose wisdom? Do you discipline your speech? Do you discipline your thoughts to treat God's name as holy? Do you feel the yank of the chain when he says, I will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain? Does it slow you down? However upset or angry or in pain you are,

Are you comfortable standing before a holy God with the rationale for why you weren't at church? We had family in town from far away and they wanted to go out for... I understand it. I feel it. But I'm not confident to stand before God and give that as the answer. If we as God's people won't keep these laws and prioritize them ourselves, why would we ever want our government to reinstitute them? For our good? Perhaps. But what I'd argue to you is... There's nothing keeping you from obeying these laws right now. You don't need the government to codify it in the legal code for you to do it. You're free to do it now and ought to do it now. For our neighbor's good, that's why we would like to see these brought into the legal code, sure. But we shouldn't expect our neighbors to desire to obey God's laws more than we do as his people, should we? Here's a question about the law of God.

When you think of the law of God, do you think of it generally as like a restraint? Or do you think of it as a blessing? I'm afraid that many of us think of the law of God simply as a restraint. And that we live our lives thinking that restraint is the only purpose or the primary purpose of the law. That it's meant to just keep us from doing things. It is one of the purposes of the law to restrain evil. But if you live your life thinking that restraint is the path to holiness, you've missed it. You're asking the law to do something that it is incapable of doing. It's meant to restrain evil. It's meant to lay out the punishments for offenses against it, but it can't make holy a sinful man or woman. It can't make you holy. It can expose your unholiness, but it can't make you holy. If you had a child, a teenager, who wanted to...

sneak out and go and party. You'd want to restrain them, right? Lock the door. Take away the car keys. Take away the cell phone. You'd do all these things to restrain them. But finally, would it work? Or is that all that you want to do? Is duct tape them to a chair in a locked room so they can't go out and do whatever it is they want? Does that accomplish the goal that you have for them as a parent? Are you happy with that? Of course not. What do you want from them? You want them not to want to go do the thing that's destructive to them, right? And you realize that as much constraint that you can put on them, in the end, you can't keep them from doing what they're going to do. If nothing else, they will age out of your house and be free at some point from your constraints to do what they want. And you won't be able to stop them anymore.

So the laws that you institute in your house, if your whole goal is just oriented towards we are going to restrain you from doing the things you want without ever addressing why you want them or what you should want, you'll fail. The law is not capable of doing it. Your rules are not capable of doing it. And so the law of God is not simply a restraint to keep us from our sinful desires. The law instead is a blessing or is first a blessing to us. to show us something about our hearts, to show us something about our desires, to expose our need for repentance, to set a standard for what we ought to be and become. We're made in God's image, and God's desire and intention with us is to make us more like him. There's nothing in the law that God is ashamed of. There's nothing in the law that he says, meh, that's not important to me. There's nothing in the law that's,

Every bit of it reflects his character and his nature and what we're supposed to become. And so these laws are for us first. And this is especially true of this first table of the law because we can't rationalize why taking a day off of work is important. Like, why does Chick-fil-A close on Sunday? Does that make any business sense? I don't know. Their chicken's more expensive than other people's chicken. They seem to do pretty well. But one of the days, one of the days of seven that is most heavily trafficked, where people are most free, they say, yeah, we're closed. It doesn't make any sense. And yet, they have the longest lines any other day of the week. And their food's more expensive than other places. And for some reason, God's blessed them. It's a pleasant place to go get food. The atmosphere is nice.

The people are courteous. They seem to work hard. If you had a kid and you want him to go work in fast food, you'd probably put Chick-fil-A at the top of the list of places you'd want your kid to go work. Why is that? How do you explain it? The explanation is that they've sought in that small way to honor God. And God's blessed them for it. They said, hey, we're a Christian company. We're going to do Christian stuff. And we're going to do the Christian stuff that doesn't make sense to the world. But we're going to do it because we're Christians. And God's blessed them for it. We need that kind of faith. Does anyone say, I'm not going to Chick-fil-A because they're not open on Sundays when I leave church and I want to go pick up their waffle fries and their chicken sandwich or whatever. I'm not going to go there anymore because they've inconvenienced me. No. I drive by and think, good for them. I'm glad that their employees are free to go worship or do what they're going to go do. I think it's sweet. Would that we had faith.

to obey God's laws, especially these first four, the way the Chick-fil-A's done. Our priority with regard to the law of God has to be first our own observance of it, that we would do what God says. We're so concerned about the world. We're so concerned about our nation. We're so concerned about the trajectory that it's on and what's going to be like for our children and what's going to be like for our finances or our retirement or our home values or will we ever be able to afford a home and all these sorts of things. I'm sorry, guys. If that's all you think about, you're just thinking like a worldling. Just think like a worldling. Like an unbeliever. Like someone who doesn't know Jesus. Something more important than your work. More important than your finances. More important than your pleasures. And if you won't observe those things in your own life, then I want to say to you, shut up about how the world should care. Because you yourself don't care.

Demonstrate that you care. Demonstrate that when you talk to other people, that these are the things you care about. We would speak so freely and so openly about the importance of God's laws and the benefits of it on society, but will we ever tell them, why weren't you at church? What were you doing instead? And when they're like, oh, well, I such and such, do we have a follow-up that says, you shouldn't have done that. You should have come to church. You should be at church. These laws were given to us first. And we ought to care about our obedience to them. And by our obedience, I mean our personal obedience and other Christians' obedience to it. Okay? Laws are an interesting thing in a democracy, in our society. I'm going to come to talk about this in a little bit more. But what I want to say to you is, in a democracy, laws are only as good as the people who are supposed to observe them. And you might think, no, you're supposed to say the people who will enforce them. And I'm like, well, they can only enforce them if the people are willing to have them enforced.

If the people are not willing to have them enforced, they're not going to get enforced. If you've got a bunch of kids at home and they decide that they're going to all have trouble, I don't care how much authority you think you have as a father or as a husband, they're going to overrun you. What are you saying, Daniel? I hear you murmuring. What did you say? You can only sit on so many of them at a time. This is the thing that we don't understand. When we think about laws, we think about authority. When we think about laws being enacted and enforced, we think about top-down authority and forcing people against their will to do things that they are not inclined to do. The only way, only places that that sort of structure functions well is in jail and in the military. This is the only places where you can have that level of control and that sort of top-down.

But the thing that's true about both of those places, both jail and the military, is there's no freedom in those places. There's no freedom in the military. If they tell you you're going somewhere, you don't get to say, no, I don't want to. I don't want to has no place. It just has no place. James Brown, the pastor of Holy Trinity Church, his son's in the Marines. He got married, I think, almost a year ago. Do you know that his wife still is not on base with him? And they got married so that they would have hope of her getting there within a couple of years. They're married apart from each other. Because if they hadn't gotten married, then there would have been no hope that it would have happened until after he was out of the military. The military isn't like, oh, you're married. Let us pump you to the top of the list. They looked at him and said, hey, when housing opens up, you're in line. When housing opens up and it's your turn, you'll get housing. Until then, sorry about you. You're a Marine. I don't want to be with my wife. Yeah, you're a Marine. That's not freedom.

And so if we conceive of laws and the force of laws always coming top down and being impressed upon the people in such a way that they have no choice but to obey them, then what we are desiring and what we are wanting is not freedom, but slavery. That's what the Israelites had in Egypt. And I'm afraid that too many Christians want their laws enforced like that on people who don't have the will or the desire to listen to them. In fact, the Christians don't have the will or the desire. to listen to them. So how can and should these laws be applied to society? Is there any place for first table laws in a broader society? Sure. What they've been called historically are blue laws. You know what a blue law is? What's a blue law? You ever wonder why you can't buy alcohol in Indiana on Sunday? Well, you can now in some places in some ways, but you didn't used to be able to. You know why you can't buy cars on Sundays?

You know why the banks closed on Sundays? Do you know that most, except for emergency services, it used to be that all businesses were closed on Sundays? You couldn't go out to eat after church. You couldn't go get your car washed. You couldn't go get your oil changed. You couldn't go get new tires. You couldn't go buy the stuff for you to finish up your home project. They were just closed. You couldn't do it. No one was there. Why did we used to have laws like that? Where'd they come from? What was true? Because all those laws I've mentioned are examples of the fourth commandment being enforced in society. The reason they were enacted was because the people as a whole thought, that's a good thing, and let's do that. They were willing to have it. So why have they gone away? Because the people are not willing to have it anymore.

And so we get the laws and we get the rulers or the presidents or the governors or the senators or the state representatives or the mayors or the city councilmen or whoever you want to talk about. We get them, the ones that, as a collective group, that we want. The trouble with Americans is that we say, well, I don't want them. Well, who cares? That's not how America works. America doesn't prioritize you because you're a Christian. You're just an American. And the group of us are getting what we want. We have laws now also that take second table violations. Divorce, for instance. It used to be really hard to divorce somebody. You used to have to show how and why you were divorced. And it was adjudicated in a courtroom whether you were allowed to get divorced. This is what he did. This is what she did. This is what happened. This is how we seek to remedy it. They used to just say, okay, fine. But now we have no-fault divorce.

Adultery doesn't matter. Do what you want. Why is it that we have no-fault divorce? We're not talking about the second table of the law, but just as an example of another blue law that's gone away, why do we have no-fault divorce now? Because we as a people don't care if people stay married. We're sympathetic to their plight. And you say, no, no, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. And I'm like, well, as you get older and as you have friends that get divorced, what you say to them as they're in process, it'll testify to whether you believe in these things or not. I remember a conversation I had with a dear sister years ago. She called and she said, I'm going to divorce my husband. He's just unbearable. I can't live with him. He's miserable, and I'm just fed up to here with it. And to be fair, her husband is a piece of work, and I couldn't imagine living with him. And I said to her, I listened to her and listened to her and listened to her, and I said, you know, I'm not your pastor.

But I'm going to tell you what I think and then I'm going to tell you something. I said, there's what I think. I don't think you have biblical grounds to divorce your husband. And I said, I think you need to be especially careful. And this is a particular temptation for you because your daughter just divorced her husband. And what we know and unbelievers can tell us is that if you hang out with people who are divorced, you're much more likely to get divorced. So don't hang out with people. If you want to protect your marriage, don't hang out with a bunch of people who are divorced because they already failed to maintain the thing that you say you want to maintain.

Now, an unbeliever could tell you that, and you might be like, well, okay. But if a pastor tells you that on Sunday morning, is that offensive? Am I allowed to say that? So I said, you know, I think you should not spend time with your daughter who just got a divorce because I think she's a corrupting influence on you, and I don't think you have a biblical grounds for a divorce. Now, here's what I want you to do. I don't know your pastor, and he's your pastor, and he knows the situation better than I do. You called me out of the blue. I haven't seen you in years. And I'll stand by whatever he says because he's the one who's involved in this. Go and ask him this simple question.

and ask for a yes or no answer and say, do you think I have biblical grounds to divorce my husband? And just ask him and then don't say anything else. And if he says yes, then I'll stand with him because he knows the situation. If he says no, then listen to what he says. And she's still married today. I don't know if she ever went and asked her pastor that, but I'll tell you, it was awfully costly for me to be saying that to someone I hadn't talked to in years, whom I love like a sister. I was very tempted to sympathize with her plight and her difficulty and the miserable life that she had made for herself. The question is, do we value and prioritize our obedience to God's laws? And if we do, then we need to then look to society and say, what's possible? Like, what's reasonable? Realizing that people don't do what they don't want to do. Laws don't change that. Laws don't change that. They can punish it. They can warn.

They can't change hearts. Laws that honor God, especially these first table laws, will only exist, can only exist in a predominantly Christian society. Therefore, the goal is not to get Christians at the top to force these things through. It will not work. It will not work, especially because we don't live in that sort of a governmental structure. And it will not work because you can't change people's hearts by laws. You can't force them to do things. What we need to do is work and pray and speak to the end that people's hearts would be changed and inclined toward God. And particularly toward his law. When I asked earlier, do you know the Ten Commandments? I suspect that if we had a show of hands in this room, more of us would know as a percentage.

the Ten Commandments than if we went to, took a countywide poll of Christians or statewide or nationwide. How many Christians in America know the Ten Commandments in order? I think we'd be embarrassed at how low it is. Embarrassed. So what should we do? Despair? Grab after positions of power and government so we can protect our way of life? I think we should teach Christians the law of God. That's what I think we should do. That's why I'm preaching through the book of Deuteronomy. It's one thing to desire obedience to the law and to see it enacted in society. It's another thing even to acknowledge the goodness of it. But we are expecting far too much if we think that there will be any meaningful movement in the direction of obeying God's law, particularly the first table of the law, until the hearts of the people change. And so if you have energy and desire for this, then your work is not primarily political. It's relational and with the people that you know.

and have influence over. The church needs to reinstitute these laws before we expect the government to. Now, you might think, well, this whole discussion is fine, but these first table laws are not the ones I'm really concerned about. I'm more concerned about the second table laws. And what I want you to understand is what comes first is man's relationship to God. And man's relationship to one another cannot be established and maintained in a way that honors God if their relationship to God is not first dealt with and addressed. We need these sorts of things first. Otherwise, we're building a house on sand. Now, it may be easier to build a house on sand. It may be easier to pass a law about murder or about divorce or about adultery. But without a Christian foundation underneath it, it will not stand. And if you think that it will, I'm sorry. We've had abortion in our land for 50 years.

We're not losing any sleep over it as a nation. It doesn't matter. And so if we say, but I think that we're going to make some good headway here, I want to say, stop for a minute, look at how things actually are so that you're not whitewashing over the top of cancerous mold and rot. We've got work to do. And the work is in the hearts and the minds of our neighbors before it's in the halls of... of Congress. We as Christians ought to care about what God said first for ourselves and then for our brothers, speaking to them about why we ought to do this or not do that. There'll be a cost associated with it. But in speaking of these things, we'll have become salt and light. The primary purpose of the law is to lead us to Christ. That's the primary purpose of the law. If you've got a rebellious teenager, You can put up all the constraints you want. You can take away all the privileges you want. What that child needs and what you really want for them is a change of heart. That's what they need. No amount of constraints going to attain to that level of help. That child needs a change of heart. Our country needs a change of heart. And as ambassadors of Christ, we're the surgeons. And we do our work by what we say and how we live.

What we prioritize. So give yourself to that work first. In your homes. In your families. And pray that God would give you success in that area first. And if it's his will to give you a ministry or a voice outside of those places. This is the way things ought to be. Otherwise, we're building our house on sand. When the storms come, that house falls. And I don't want your house to fall. I want it to stand. Because it's rooted on the rock, Jesus Christ. And you've got your family, your wife and your husband and your children, your grandchildren standing on that rock with you, stemming the tide and saying, no, God says, God says. And for our good, God says. And for our blessing, God says. And for our protection, God says. And what he says, we'll make it our aim to do. Lord, help us. Let's pray.