I Am The Lord Your God #2

Well, it's good to be back with you. I've been here the last couple of weeks, but I haven't been preaching, and it's been a nice break and a strange break, and it's nice to be back preaching to you. This morning, we're going to be studying the second table of the law, Commandments 5 through 10. Last time I preached, we looked at the first table of the law, the first four commandments, and this week we're going to do the second table. We're taking such a big chunk because Eric recently preached through the Ten Commandments one by one. And so I didn't want to redo that work, but I want to take them as a whole and discuss them. So the things I'm going to be trying to, the question really that I'm going to try to answer this morning is what is the purpose of the second table of the law? Why do we need these laws? And my hope is that God will help us as we consider the purpose of the law and why we need them, that he'll help us to fulfill his law in our interactions with one another because that's what the laws are about. It's how we interact with one another. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord?

from Deuteronomy chapter 5, verses 16 to 21. This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Honor your father and your mother as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be prolonged and that it may go well with you on the land which the Lord your God gives you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife. And you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field or his male servant or his female servant, his ox or his donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, we have a few observations about these laws, okay? When we often think about the law of God, you may think it's really big. It's really intricate. It's really confusing. It's really strange.

But these laws here are short. And they're simple. There's just a few of them. And these few commandments are meant to govern all of our interactions with one another. You know how complex relationships are? You know how to make them much more simple? By these few laws. If we would understand deeply and put into practice these few commandments, our interactions with each other would be greatly improved. As you go to Thanksgiving with your family this week, this is what you should remember, these simple laws. We often think of the law as being very cumbersome or burdensome or heavy or difficult. But listen to these words that Jesus spoke in Matthew 11, verses 28 to 30. He says, come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden, those who've worked them yourself to exhaustion. You ever worked yourself to exhaustion in a relationship?

So when we interact with other people, we're often trying to figure out how... how to say it or how not to say it or what their expectations are or what they're thinking or what we want them to think about us or what we want to convince them is true. There's just this three-dimensional chess that's going on in everyone's heads about how to relate. Unless you're one of those people who's too dense to know that all that stuff is going on in other people and your relationships are just exceedingly simple. What I tend to find about people like that is that they actually have very few relationships because they don't care about it. But to those of you who realize you care about your relationships with people and you want to have good relationships with them and you want to honor God in those relationships with them, it can become very intimidating, very difficult to know what to say and if I should say it again or if I should say it another way or if I should not go because I said it and they didn't listen and all these sorts of things. God comes to us with these

Few commandments. And then Jesus describes them in Matthew as being easy and light. And so one of the things we have to realize is that we're the source of the conflicts many times. We or our other people. We're the ones who cause all of this complexity in our relationships. And we're always wondering, how do I fix it? How do I, what do I say? What do I do? How do I interact? How do I make my unbelieving child or my unbelieving parent stop being so doggone obnoxious to me and offensive? You could go on Amazon and you could ask for books about this and you'd find a whole section about relationships and how psychologists describe our mental health and whether it's good for us or bad for us to be in this situation or that situation or the other situation. What I want to say to you from the very beginning is that is what makes you weary and heavy laden.

That's exhausting work. Okay? These commandments that God's given us here are just a few. Six. They're understandable. They're relatable. And as God's people, they're for us to conform to. Now you might be thinking, no, the law is, these commandments are not easy and these commandments are not burdens. They're not light. They're not the way you're describing them. And I say, well, there is a sense in which the law of God is an unbearable burden. See, even scripture talks about it being this way, that it would crush us. But you have to realize that the point of the law is not to crush us, but to make us feel the weight of our disobedience so that we come to the one who said, come to me, you who are weary and heavy laden, and you'll find rest. When we come to Jesus, and we understand his law in light of our faith in him, it changes our relationship with the law and our perspective of it. It no longer is this unbearable burden that just sits on our back of all the things you're supposed to do. That weight is lifted. Our salvation doesn't depend on our ability or our desire to keep the law. It rests on our faith in the one who did keep the law perfectly without any failure at all. And so it changes how the law...

interacts with us or how we interact with the law. It goes from being this thing that says to us, you haven't done righteousness. And it becomes this thing that says, it adds to that statement, you're the one who hasn't done righteousness. It then says, but there's one who has. Look to him. And having looked to him, it then comes back to us and says, this is what he's like. Become like him. It becomes a guide to us. Psalm 119 is all about the law of God. It's the longest psalm in the Bible. It's 176 verses. And every bit of it's about the law of God and how much David loves the law of God, delights in the law of God. And one of the things he says about the law is that your word, O Lord, is a light unto my path and a lamp unto my feet. And that's what the law becomes to those who love God and who've put their faith in Jesus Christ. It becomes a guide.

It becomes one who takes us by the hand and shows us where to go and what to become and what to avoid and what the consequences of disobedience are. It becomes a help to us. And it makes us more like Jesus as we seek to conform to it. It becomes a gracious gift. These few laws are a gift to us from God. And we should receive them as such. Now, what are these? They're an explanation of how we ought to relate to one another. Real simply, the first table of the law tells man how to relate to God. The second table of law tells man how to relate to one another. These commandments here, this second table of the law, I think of them as a table of contents, okay? It's a bit of an analogy here. When you come to the law, what you come to is like the title of a book.

Right? It's the law. That's the title. And then you open up to the table of contents and in it you've got ten chapters. Titles. Okay? And there are the ten commandments. And then when you go into all of the rest of the law in the rest of the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Numbers and all of that, what you're finding is the actual content of the book. And so we should be able to move from the details of the law. back to which chapter is this in or which chapters does it show up in, back to does this have to do with me relating to God or me relating to man or in what way does it affect those two things? When they asked Jesus what is the greatest commandment, he said, to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That is a summary of the first table of the law. Those four commandments tell us this is how you love the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. These four things, simple things.

Simple headings. And then as we go into the law further, into the book of Deuteronomy and Leviticus and these, they tell us what does that actually look like? What does a Sabbath observance look like? What does keeping the Lord's name holy look like? And these sorts of things. And then Jesus said, the second commandment is just like the first commandment. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That is the summary, the heading of the second table of the law. All of these things have to do with how to love your neighbor as yourself. And so when you go into the details, into the body of the law, you should be thinking which of the commandments, and there's often more than one that's in view here, which of the commandments is this related back to? It's sort of like the framework to make sense of chapters and chapters and chapters of sometimes very specific instructions about how to relate to each other, what to do. The first time they do this, do that. The second time this bull gets out, do this. The third time.

And if he was a jerk and didn't want to fix his fence, then this is how you handle it. There's these very specific instructions. I'm just using an example of if your neighbor's bull gets out and if he gores a man and what are you supposed to do about it? The law is very specific. What's that have to do with anything? We don't have bulls, right? What's that have to do with? Well, that has to do with loving your neighbor. It has to do with taking care of him. It has to do with protecting the people whom that bull might gore. It's a little manifestation of...

These commandments, that one would be related to you shall not murder, you shall not kill. One of the applications of that would be is you should maintain your fences so that your bull doesn't get out and kill somebody because it's your bull. You see how we can work from a very specific command in scripture back to like its context and then back to whether it has to do with whether we're relating to God or whether we're relating to man. These commandments have to do with how we relate to one another. If you read the Westminster Confession on the Ten Commandments, what you're going to find, there will be two questions at least under every question. And it will say, what does this commandment require? And there will be this big long list. And then there will be, what does this commandment forbid? And there will be a big long list. And you might wonder, where do these big long lists come from? Like who made up all these applications of this law? Well, the Word of God did.

If you look at those lists and you look at the proof texts, you're going to find all these places in Scripture where not murdering someone means that you're required to protect their life. And then here are the manifold ways that protecting life actually works itself out. Okay? You remember when Jesus was preaching in the Sermon on the Mount and he says, you've heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery, but I say to you that any man, and they're like, yeah, we didn't do that one thing as we've defined it. He says, no, no. Let me explain to you the details of this. Let me give you the context in which you actually may be committing adultery. It was much more tangible. You could get your hand on it. How could the rich young ruler, when he says, you know, what do I have to do to be saved? And Jesus says to him, well, how do the commandments read to you? And he lists off the commandments. And he says, I've kept these from my youth up. What was wrong with that man? He had no understanding of what those laws actually required of him. I've never, with my hands,

in malice, unjustly taken someone's life. Okay, so you're not a murderer then. But Jesus says to us that that's not the definition of murder. It's one gross, like extreme example of murder, but violation of that commandment can be traced way back simply to cursing someone in your heart. And so all of these commandments are an exposition, sort of a framework for understanding this second greatest commandment as Jesus told us, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. These commandments are meant to govern our relationships with one another. And one of the things I want to clarify with regard to laws, because this book of Deuteronomy is the second giving of the law, is that these laws are moral laws. They're not just civil laws. They're not just good for the general well-being of society. At least not in the first place. These are moral laws. And these laws belong to the people of God.

They're our laws, okay? And I'm afraid that there's a lot of pressure, a lot of thought today about God's law and its intersection with society and how we need to, as Christians, implement God's laws in society. But I want to say to you first, these laws were given to the church. Why do church people need to be told not to commit adultery? We're Christians after all, right? Why do we need to be told not to lie or steal or covet? Because we lie and steal and covet and commit adultery and murder and dishonor our parents. These are moral laws that were given to us. And by moral, what I mean is that they are meant to communicate what's good and appropriate behavior with regard to your interactions with other people. It's good morality. Laws are inescapably moral. Laws are always communicating the morality of their source.

If you were to go to a different country, they would have very different laws, especially if it wasn't a Western country. They'd have a whole different ways of governing and ruling themselves. And what do those laws communicate? They communicate the morality of the people or of the hierarchy. Whoever gets to say these are the laws we want or these are the people who we want to make the laws, different governments function differently, right? Those laws communicate the morality of the people who've made them. This is good and therefore you shall do it. This is bad, therefore you shall not do it. And so laws are always a reflection of the heart of the people that they govern. They always are. And that's true of laws in America. That's true of our laws. They reflect our hearts. And you might say, well, they don't reflect my heart. And I'm like, but they reflect your neighbor's heart. They reflect our nation's hearts. And what are we going to do about that?

What are you going to think about that? We're going to say, well, they need to have God's laws in their place. We need to go back to these things. And that's true, and we need to get to it, and I agree. But first, what must happen is these laws have to be taken back up by Christians. The law of God is something that we can't leave dusty in the closet, except for as it relates to the world. These laws are moral. They belong to us. They communicate morality. And so we ought to be the first people who take them up and adhere to them. It should never be heard of a Christian saying, it's bad for my spiritual journey to be married to my spouse. Now, that may sound crazy to you, but I've heard more than one person say it. My spouse is a hindrance to my spiritual growth. Oh, really? I had a really smart guy tell me that one time. Way smarter than I am. And I just laughed at him. I was like, that's simply not true. And then what I told him is, do you remember when you wanted to marry her and we said you shouldn't marry her and you didn't listen?

But now you're married and you're having a real hard time? Sorry, she's your wife now. You can't think that anymore. There is such a thing as a difficult Christian marriage. That's why Paul deals with what believers marry to unbelievers, how they should position themselves or how they should conduct themselves in those relationships. Because their marriage is a real marriage in that their ability to honor God is not hindered by their unbelieving spouse. It's made more difficult by their unbelieving spouse many times, but it's not hindered by it. So if you have family that you're going to run into this coming week and they're divorced or they're living together but not married, how hard will you work to suppress your thoughts, let alone your words, concerning their life? Now, am I advocating that you should go and you should just be the obnoxious jerk around the table that's just like, well, you know, I'm actually not. But what I do think you should consider is whether or not you've ever said it.

directly to them in love. And if you never have, you shouldn't embarrass them at the dining room table. You should take them aside and say, you know what, I think I haven't loved you. I haven't told you what I think. These laws are important to me because I'm a Christian. And God says these things and they're true because he said them. It's not my opinion. I'm not the one here telling you these things because I think they're important. I'm here telling you these things because God said they're important. And he said that the things you're doing lead to destruction and death. But there's both forgiveness and healing in Jesus Christ. He tells us that his burdens are light, and I wish that you'd come to him. And I'm going to pray that you'll come to him. And they may get mad at you. They might storm off. You may not even get all that out before they're out running their mouth to the family about how awful and how Bible-thumping and how fundamental and how legalistic you are. But until we take these laws up,

and we believe in them, and we think they should be honored and promoted and obeyed, how in the world can we expect other people to do it? It's kind of silly, isn't it? But we do it. If we're willing to do those things, and if we have done those things, then we can begin to consider what will be good for the society. But you do have to realize that society is not going to pass godly laws until society becomes godly. Laws are a reflection of the people. They're not the thing that changes the people. At least a majority of the people have to believe in the goodness of a law for it to be worthwhile. So these laws belong to us. They're moral laws. They're supposed to govern us. And if we're not governed by them, then they won't govern our society as much as we may want them to.

if we've rejected them in our hearts. And by rejection, I don't mean that we went out and got a divorce necessarily or that we went out and committed adultery or that we went out and we killed somebody. I just mean that we can't bring ourselves to speak about them or confess our own failures with regard to them. If we bury them like a light under a bushel, how can we expect other people to see the light shining? How easy is your marriage? Here's an example. How easy is your marriage? You fight with your spouse. Have you ever been sick and tired of your spouse and said, you know, I wish I didn't marry them? Lucas and Courtney are the only people who haven't felt that way yet because they've only been married for a few weeks. But you will feel this way. You'll think, I screwed up. Now I realize as Christians, nobody's supposed to say that. You're not supposed to say, I don't like my spouse. They're everything that's wrong with my life. But when you're angry, that's exactly what you think. And it's an adulterous thought. So when you go out, having had those adulterous thoughts,

Do you ever tell people you've had them? Or is your marriage the good, clean, all put together marriage? What do you tell people? By your actions, by your words. Well, you shouldn't do this. Can you sympathize with how hard being married is? Can you understand why they'd want to throw in the towel? And can you tell them of God's grace and mercy in the midst of that sort of difficulty? And that you face those same temptations and that by God's grace you haven't succumbed to them and you don't want them to either. This is one example of how these laws ought to govern us. That we would have them on our hearts and in our mouths when we're interacting with other people. This is what it means to love our neighbors. It's not to have all of these thoughts and all of these commitments and all of these convictions in our own heads that never make it out our mouths. But we really do have a problem when it comes to the law of God in American Christianity. Between dispensationalism,

And this cheap grace movement, the law of God really has been buried away like it was in Josiah's day. You know, it's just rolled up, it's in the corner, it's buried under the stuff, and it's just covered in dust. We don't know it. I've asked you a few times before, as we've been leading up to this about the law of God, I said, do you know the Ten Commandments? Do you know them in order? And do you know them in long form? Not just the short form. Good if you know the short form. But do you know them in order? And can you recite them to yourself? Do you know them? But here's the thing. I bet if I asked you to raise your hands, the kids would probably outdo the adults, but they'd be able to tell us. But listen, that's not enough. That's like saying, I have a foundation built. That's not a house.

Are you conversant with the rest of the law of God? This is just the title page. This is just the table of contents about the law of God. Can we get those into us? And then can we begin to study the chapters? For us to be able to do that, the law has to have meaning in our lives. But we've grown up on this sort of antinomian. either antinomian or dispensational idea that the law has been done away with in a way that's very harmful to our souls. Because we get saved, but what are we saved to? What's supposed to happen once we get saved? Once we come to faith in Jesus, what's life supposed to look like then? We're supposed to become more like Jesus. How do we know what being more like Jesus is?

Where do we figure that out? Do we just rely on our own sense of our closeness to God? Whether we get warm fuzzies and whether we have a pretty Bible? How do we know if we're actually conforming to the image of God, having our minds renewed? Where do we learn that stuff? You can learn it in the New Testament for sure. You can look at the things that Paul says and that Jesus says and the things that they do and you can say, whoa, that was intense. And you think, Then you just have to ask yourself, why did he say that? Like, where did he get the idea that that was the thing to do, to go into the temple and flip over all the tables and drive everybody out with a bullwhip? Where did that come from? Did that have anything to do with the first table of the law? Did that have anything to do with the name of God? Did that have anything to do with idolatry? Why would he go do something like that? I will tell you.

the vast majority of people would never do something like that unless they were compelled by the word of God that it was necessary. That's not a normal behavior. It's just not normal behavior. For all the tensions that we have at our family gatherings and our get-togethers and all this sorts of stuff, there are precious few blowouts around the Thanksgiving table. There's lots of like simmering tension and scowls and dirty looks and leaving early and that kind of stuff. But the type of like flip over the table conflict, It never happens. People don't do that kind of stuff. I remember sitting in a men's group one time, years ago, over at this little building we used to meet at in Kiwanis, or not Kiwanis, over in Speedway. And we were sitting around these two, they're like the conference table over here. You know what story I'm going to tell. And we're sitting there, and there's like, what, 10 guys? 12 guys, maybe? And we're sitting, these two tables are end to end, and I'm sitting at this end, and all the men are just down the sides. And there's this guy who,

was sleeping in a little room with a few guys and he's just, he's sleeping. Now, this man was not particularly godly. Certainly not at that point of his life. He had real sins in his life. And another guy sitting on the opposite side of the table was so frustrated by what he was doing and everyone knew he was sleeping. He took the table and flipped it at him. Big heavy conference table and slammed his fist on the table and yelled at him about sleeping during Bible study and cursed at him. and told him, why don't you just get the hell out of here if you're not going to pay attention? And the whole room, all the air was gone out of the room then. I'm leading a Bible study, and this happens down at the other end of the table. He's like, well, I guess we're all awake now. It's serious stuff. Now, why did the guy flip the table? Why did he pound his fist? Why did he curse? Because he knew what that man's life was like, and he was unwilling for him to sit there in a Bible study and sleep through it. I think what he did was right, and I think he shamed everyone else in the room, including me, for not addressing the problem.

I think he loved that man. Not now, Levi. You can tell the story of something later. It was super intense. That was loving his neighbor. My point is, unless the law of God and the fear of God and obedience to God and conformity to Jesus Christ have a place in our lives, we'll never do anything helpful. Now, that's an extreme example. But the other examples I've been giving around the Thanksgiving table or with family are much lower. Intensity. A private conversation. Hey, you want to go for a walk? Let's go outside and throw the football. Would you help me wash the dishes type of conversations? These laws have to get down into us as Christians, not so that we can beat other people over the heads with them, but so that we can minister God's truth to them.

And bring them to Jesus. And the law of God, we are told by scripture, is the tutor that brings us to Christ. And so if we lose the tutor, we lose the guide, we lose the way. And we don't arrive at the destination. So these commandments, they teach us how to interact with one another. You'll notice that the fifth commandment is the only positive one of the bunch. By positive, I mean do this. Honor your father and mother. And then we're told why. But the next five commandments are all negative. Don't do this. Don't do this. Don't do this. And so the basic principle that we can learn from looking at this reality is that the guiding light in our interactions with other people, the thing that's supposed to govern us, is restraint of our desires. That the thing that we have to focus on is actually what we're not supposed to do, how we're going to screw it up. Don't do these things. Now, if each one of those don'ts carries with it an implicit do,

But you do realize that saying to someone, don't commit adultery, is not the same thing as saying to them, love your wife. Like one of them has teeth in it and one of them doesn't. One of them gets your attention, one doesn't. I was skimming this last week the Antioch Declaration, and most of you probably don't even know what that is. It's just a bunch of Reformed Baptists who decided to write a thing about Christian nationalism and anti-Semitism and Hitler. You have to know a lot of context to understand what they're talking about, more than I do. But what I know about declarations is they exist in this form. They have affirmations and they have denials, okay? I'll just tell you, the affirmations are always boring. It's always like, sure, it's yep, uh-huh. There's never any substance in the affirmations. It's always in the denials that you figure out what they really think.

Because this is where they're saying, this is what we're opposed to. This is what we believe is sin. This is what we are fighting against. The denials are always the things that matter. And what you want to look for is whether or not they deny the right stuff. Whether or not they oppose the right stuff. Okay? That's what these commandments are. They're rejections of behavior. It's God spitting these behaviors out of his mouth and saying, I hate them. Would that my people keep from these things. So why do we need to be restrained from these things, from murder, from adultery, from lying and stealing and covening? Well, because as I said earlier, these are the things that we do. There's a dangerous idea that floats around politically. It lives and breathes in the libertarian camp. But it's alive and well outside of it in the Christian church, which is that most of my problems and sins that I commit are...

the result of other people's interference in my life. I wouldn't do that if my spouse didn't fill in the blank, or my kids didn't, or my parents wouldn't. The idea that other people are the source of our problems and our, you know, they come and they put pressure on me, and if they just wouldn't do that, I'd be okay. If I was just left alone, I wouldn't sin. Now, it wouldn't be as gorgeous to say it like that. I wouldn't sin if it wasn't because of them, but it is sort of how we live. But here's what Jeremiah says about us in this idea. He says that our heart is deceitful, more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick. Who can understand it? This idea, what that means is that when we are left to ourselves, by ourselves, without any external pressures or temptations, we're quite capable of falling into grievous sin all by ourselves. I'd say this is one of the principal mistakes that homeschooling families make.

if they homeschool as a way to protect their kids from every sort of evil and danger that's out in the world. There are evils and dangers out in the world. I'm not here to say they're not, and I'm not here to say parents aren't obligated to God to protect their children. But the idea that you can remove them from all danger and temptation, or at least all the big ones, by just building a wall around them is a foolish idea because they've got all of the seeds of corruption already implanted in their hearts. Sometimes it's the water and sunlight of the world that causes them to grow. But when my kids come home from nursery or they come home from school and they've got some new bad habit from one of your kids, I'm not mad at you because I know that that stuff's already in my kids and your kids just brought it out. Or in your case, my kids brought it out. It's already in there. Their heart's already sick.

So our sinful natures need to be restrained. The idea that autonomy and freedom and liberty, these things are only a blessing when men are individually ruled and governed by the law of God. Otherwise, you'll have anarchy and chaos. There's no other choice. Do you remember in John 15 where Jesus says, I'm the vine and you are the branches. He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit. For apart from me, what? You can do nothing. You can do nothing. This idea that if I was just left alone, I could do good is a foolish idea. There may be some sins that you wouldn't be tempted by, but there are some sins that you'd be tempted by that you would never be tempted by if you were with other people or interacting with them. One of the biggest helps in your fight against sin is to be really busy and to go to bed tired at night. It's a really godly game plan, isn't it? Fill your life up with

serving God and the people that he's brought into your life such that you don't have time or energy to go give yourself to those private sins. Get married. Have kids. Give your heart to them. It's a good help in fighting against sin. Now, what do you lose with all of that? Well, you lose autonomy and you lose freedom and you lose liberty. You gain responsibility. Those kids are a lot of work. They need a lot of governance. They need a lot of guidance. They need a lot of yeses and nos and do this and don't do that and here's why and there's a spank and here's how it works. If children need that, much oversight and that much guidance, why do we think that adults require so much less? Why do kids lust for the idea, for the time when they can get out of their parents' house and they can do what they want? Don't you remember feeling that way?

I'm going to stay up late and drink soda pop and whatever else, the other stupid rules your parents had. You're like, I'm going to go do it. I'm going to eat sugar and not brush my teeth or whatever. I'll be Abrams kids, you know. But you just have this idea that I can't wait until I can get away from the constraints. Oh, man, so what do we do with the law of God then? Oh, we shed it. We just throw it off our backs and we're like, we don't need to wear this. We don't need to. Keep it with us. We don't need to have our lusts restrained. That we, like children, because of our shared sinful natures, need to be governed, and many times, more closely than we think is necessary. We need shorter leashes than we give ourselves. That man that came to Jesus and said, what must I do to be saved? And he has the interaction with him about the law, and he says, well, I've kept these things from my youth up. That is the most,

sad man you could ever meet. Because Jesus doesn't say, you're wrong, you're a liar, and you should know better. He just says to him, okay, well there's just one other thing that you lack. Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor and you'll have treasure in heaven. Did he do it? No. What's it say about him? It says he went away. I don't remember if it said discouraged or depressed or downcast or something like that because he was very wealthy. So what was his failure? In that moment, how did he sin? did he fail in? He failed to love his neighbor. He says, you know, I've got all these things and they're mine and they belong to me. And those other people who have needs, that's not my problem. And you know what the irony of the whole situation was? That then became God's disposition toward him. He wasn't saved. He had no regard for the poor and needy because he didn't realize he was poor and needy. Perhaps not in this world, but as it relates to God, he was poor and needy.

He hadn't kept these commandments. He was wrong. While they're simple and they're familiar and they're understandable to us, man, when you start to focus on them a little bit, oh, man, you shine lights in those dirty corners like pulling your refrigerator out of your stove. You know, my kitchen's clean. Want to pull the stove out and take a look-see? See how clean it is? You eat off that? You eat off the fork that's been down there for six months? It's got... and dust and all kinds of grime and nasty. You probably want to wash that two or three times before you put it in your mouth. It's hard to keep a kitchen that clean, isn't it? But as long as we just don't look, as long as we have this really superficial understanding of the law, we're doing good. We're doing good. But we're only doing good in our own sight. We're not doing good by God's standard. You see, he's not ashamed of his law. And he's not ashamed of telling us what we...

are tempted by what will lead us to hell and what we need to repent of. Because he's given us his son to save us from all of the stuff we screw up. And so if we refuse his law, we refuse the one who fulfilled the law. The law really does matter to us. It really does matter in our lives. We should be able to look at our own lives and say, you know, these are the ways that I've stolen in this last week. Stolen from my employer, stolen from my family, stolen from God. These are the ways that I've committed adultery this week. These are the things I've coveted. And here's why I coveted them. You're in a good spot spiritually. And what I mean by good spot is you're becoming more mature when you can say, these are my sins.

And they're not my sins necessarily because I feel bad about them or because I agree that they're the wrong. I know they're my sins because God said these things are sinful. And I find what he says to be abhorrent in me. He taught me about myself. And once he taught me about myself, I made it my business to go learn more about myself and my own temptations and my own paths toward falling into sin. And I realize they're particular to me. They may not be particular to the guy next to me. He may have a different way of getting there. But I've learned about myself and how I fail and how if I'm going to screw it up, this is how I'll screw it up. The planner never screws it up by a lack of planning. And the free spirit never screws it up by having too much fun. They always screw it up by the stuff they're not paying attention to. They're so worried they're not going to do the thing they're good at.

all the while ignoring the thing that they're terrible at. They don't even know they're bad at it. And so what it means for these laws to become sweet to us, it means you have to chew on them. You have to chew on them. And you have to ask God to show you how you violate them. And there's no harm in you learning how you violate them because he sent one to save you from all of your violations. And so you don't have to be like, wow, no, that's so bad and that's so frequent and that's so deep-rooted. If that's the truth, then praise God that he would show it to you so that you can look to Jesus and find forgiveness for your sins. The law ought to be sweet to us. It shouldn't be made this sterile clinical list of rules that you have to conform to because you know you're supposed to. Haven't you had a tutor or a teacher or a coach in your life that you love because they showed you things about yourself and taught you and made you better?

That's the type of tutor Christ the law is to us. It leads us to Jesus. So all the games we play and all the facades we put up and all the lies we believe and try to convince others to believe about us can all go away. And we can just be sinners who are saved by grace and who love Jesus. And who can say, these are the sins I've committed and these are the ways that I've fallen short. And thanks be to God that nothing can separate us from the love of God. This is the first step to Seeing your family change? Seeing your state change? Seeing your country change? The first way to bring these laws, which Jesus defines as loving our neighbors as ourself, the first step in loving them is living by them and acknowledging when we don't. That's our first step. Let's take the step. Let's pray.