Status Updates From Lifelines: The Ten Commandm...

There’s a difference between temptation to covetousness and the sin of covetousness. There’s a difference between admiring something and greedily wanting to take it away from the other person. There’s a difference between simply admiring a neighbors house, designing the same kind with saved money in order to build something similar and plotting to take something that belongs to someone else.

The tenth commandment really pokes out the source of all sin. Jesus singles out that fact in Matthew 5:28

The 10th commandment is the inside of the cup. It’s right where no other human being can see that it’s being broken. It’s the inside of the cup that Jesus was seeing as he stood saying these very words (Matt 15:6-9). He was actually seeing into the thoughts of their minds. He knew the real intent of their questions and read all their dishonesty.

If husbands tried to copy …the amazing love Christ has for the church, and cared for the wives in some minuscule manner the way Christ cares for us as he opens the way to us for communication, and for making requests, and if wives respected and desired to please their husband in a tiny manner, a small particle of the way we are meant to please and bring joy to Christ – then there will be no problems!

“This frantic search for happiness and fulfillment ensures brokenness and ugliness because this is the very opposite, in all its parts, of what people were created to be. Attempts to live on a false base of what it means to be human and to achieve total freedom end in a total freedom – from joy and from fulfillment.

“Adultery is the smashing of a mystical thing, a unity, a oneness between two people who have become one because of something which God made them to be capable of having together, which had the original purpose of making two people one.”

What about war? First, the Bible is clear that the same God who commanded, “you shall not murder” also told his Old Testament people that they were to wage war. The people they fought were nations which had come to a place of a fullness of wickedness the demanded immediate judgment.

“No mother and father can accept the work of Christ for their children. They can teach the truth, make it exciting, exhibit in their lives, show forth it’s reality day by day. But they cannot bow, accept, believe in their children.”

Even in praising God there is a danger of rendering lip service only, an outward display of praise and worship which has nothing real inside to back it up. This is another form of misusing the Lords name, in which each of us needs to check up on. … To praise him takes some care and thought, which is far deeper than the mouth and the throat.

“God punished Moses because he and and Aaron took credit for bringing water out of a rock. Numbers 20:9-12. Taking credit for what the Lord is doing, putting one’s own name on another person’s work, is another way of misusing the Lord’s name.”

“In Ezekiel 13 we have an account of false prophet who, even though they are not prophesying in the name of false gods and idols, but in the name of the true God, are not saying anything which comes from Him at all.”

“The use of God’s name, as if one had a signed note from him, is a very serious thing to attach to a request one is making of someone else to do something in one area or another. A claim to have the right to use God‘s name in that way can be a serious forgery.”

“if a blasphemous adjective comes to mind, it is an important thing to substitute a very different adjective which does not misuse God’s name in any way. Language becomes a very poor and limited thing of expressing idea and thoughts, of telling incidents or stories, is the vocabulary is not being constantly enriched with accurate words to give emphasis, without falling back on the shock element of curses.”

1st commandment - It has been three months Israel had come out of Egypt, saw the ten plagues, experienced the passover, saw the Red Sea split in half to walk through. It had been less than three months since they saw and tasted the only water (bitter) turned sweet by a piece of wood thrown into the water and saw manna on the ground to feed them everyday.

“God does say [Be ye perfect as I am perfect.] Yet, it is made clear that although perfection is the goal, in being closer to what we were made to be in the first place, perfection is not going to be completed, is not going to be a reality, … until Jesus comes back and we are changed, and all nature is restored.”