a Life Marked By Love

The Ten Commandments can be grouped into two categories. Love for God and love for each other. Jesus himself sums up the 10 commandments this way in the gospels.

Matthew 22:37-38, “And [Jesus] said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

Love For God
We touched on this last time but it’s important to restate. If we truly have responded to the mercy and grace of God then we would expect to see a change in attitude towards God.

In the first four commandments God outlines for Israel what a life dedicated to loving Him looks like. He’s already proved his superiority in saving them so in effect he says; there shouldn’t be anything else in their lives that come before him. You don’t pray to anything else, you don’t rely on anything else, and you don’t worship anything else.

Moses probably had in mind the Egyptian gods that they would have known from their time in Egypt as well as whatever false gods were being worshipped in the lands they were travelling through.

They had been influenced by the world they had grown up in while they were slaves in Egypt. But as God’s chosen people, freed from slavery, nothing was to come before God and He is the only God they were to worship and serve.

When something comes before God in our lives because we rely on it, or believe we can’t function without it, we call it idolatry.

God demands to be more than just “added” to our lives. We don’t just add Jesus to the life we already have. We must give Him all our lives. When I first responded to the gospel almost 18 years ago, in my mind I was just adding religion to my life.

My response to God was genuine but I didn’t initially see any reason to change my lifestyle. I remember having a conversation with a Christian friend about why I wasn’t going to give up sleeping with my girlfriend. I was telling my friend that I didn’t see why God would want me to upset my girlfriend in this way. If I’m honest the real reason I didn’t want to stop was because being able to have sleep with my girlfriend made me feel accepted, secure, and significant. It didn’t think I could function without it.

As I grew in my relationship with God, I began to realise that Jesus’ death on the cross had restored my acceptance, security, and significance. I was then able to rid of this false god that was vying for attention with my father God.

How we speak about God is another way of demonstrating our love for him. To take the name of the Lord in vain is to say something about God that detracts from a true appreciation of his name and character. So it’s not just about using his name as a swear word, although it certainly includes that, but is more about how we talk about God.

When we talk about God to other people do we do him justice? Or do we dumb him down for fear of what others might think? We must talk about God in ways that honour him and demonstrate our love for him.

The 4th commandment reminded the Israel to demonstrate their love for him by respecting the Sabbath. If God can take a rest day then so can we. When God stopped, the whole world didn’t come tumbling down around his ears and neither will ours. We don’t have to celebrate the Sabbath in the same way as Israel did because Jesus fulfils the Sabbath in that we have a “rest” in Jesus that is ours to live in every day.

However, though we are free from the legal obligation of the Sabbath, it would be crazy to avoid the importance of a day of rest - God has built us so that we need one. Friends, when we consistently allow ourselves to avoid taking a day off then what are we saying about our faith in God’s ability to sustain things while we rest?

Jesus said to love God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. That involves more than just singing four or five great songs on a Sunday and having a warm fuzzy feeling inside. It’s about a life given completely to the lordship of Jesus Christ in response to his saving grace. It’s about letting nothing get in the way of our loving obedience to Him.

Love For Each Other
Commandments 5-10 show us what our relationships with each other will look like if we get the first four sorted out! They are inextricably linked together. If we really love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength then the natural outworking of that will be a life characterised by an unselfish loving attitude towards others.

It’s not just about making sure you don’t dishonour your parents’, murder, steal, and so on. It would be very easy to just follow these commands to the letter and self-righteously believe you were very spiritual for doing so. But they’re not meant to be an exhaustive list.

In fact Jesus himself elaborated on them when he said that you have committed adultery if you lust after someone in your own heart. He also says that  if we’re even angry with someone it’s like committing murder in our hearts.

God was saying to the Israelites that if they really were putting him first in their lives then this would be demonstrated in the way they treated each other.

In Matthew 7 Jesus says, “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them”. It’s known as the “golden rule”.

I use this golden rule to govern my car parking philosophy. When I’m driving around the car park looking for a space I sometimes see someone waiting for a car to reverse so that they can go in the space. What often happens though is that as the person in the space reverses out they block the person waiting which leaves the space open for me to go in.
But guess what? I don’t go in. I don’t steal the space. Not because the eighth commandment says “you shall not steal”, but because I hate that when people do it to me.

This second group of commandments are about wanting the best for others; about putting their needs before our own. It can be hard because we have dreams and aspirations; even God given dreams and aspirations. But we must avoid the temptation to short circuit God’s desire that we put others before ourselves.

It will be sacrificial at times; sometimes people will advance faster, or achieve success quicker. But our attitude always is to be the same as that of Christ who, as the nails were being driven into his palms, was putting the needs of everyone else before his own.

I encourage you to be open to the Holy Spirit revealing to you situations where you need to start putting others first. And then do something about it today. Make that phone call, write that email, or part with that cash.