“God is to fill the horizon of our lives. God demands literally everything from us. Having God as our God means that our lives are not our own. It means that no part of our lives are our own. It means that we exist for God. It means that every second of our lives and every thought that we think and every thing that we do is to be directed by love for God and directed to pleasing God. Any time that is not happening we are breaking the first commandment.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
“Jesus is God’s answer to the dilemma posed by the author of Ecclesiastes as he agonizes over the horror of oppression in the world. God sent Jesus to proclaim liberty to the captives and to set at liberty those who are oppressed. But Jesus went about fulfilling that mission in a very unexpected way. He did it by entering into suffering himself. He did it by being on the receiving end of oppression himself.”
“The fact of the matter is that we are all inclined to be atheists by nature. We all suppress the truth of God that comes to us from the creation, from Moses and the Prophets and from Jesus and the apostles. In 1 Corinthians 2:14 Paul writes, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” That is all of us by nature. The reason that there is atheism is not that the evidence for the existence of God is weak. The reason that there is atheism is that human beings have sinful hearts that suppress the truth about God in the creation and in the word of God.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
Read: Ecclesiastes 3:16-22
“We need to remind ourselves that the only reason we are not on the receiving end of God’s wrath, for all the times that we have treated others badly, is Jesus Christ if we are indeed trusting in him. When we are horrified by injustice in the world, we must remind ourselves that we have committed some of the same sins and that we share the same sinful nature as the worst perpetrators. If we are different, we are different because we have been rescued from our sins and forgiven and have received the Holy Spirit.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
Read: Matthew 5:17-20
“So, we saw in the first sermon that God gave the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel after he had saved them from slavery in Egypt. He introduces the Ten Commandments by saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” First God saved them. Then he gave them his law. The order is very important. It means that the law is not intended to function as the way to a relationship with God. The relationship came first. Then came the law.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
Read: Ecclesiastes 3:1-15
“So, fear God. Stand in awe of him. Stand in awe of what he is doing even when you cannot understand it. And realize how small you are, if all the nations are like a piece of dust on a scale. God is working towards something beautiful in human history and you and I are a very small part of that. And our role is to rejoice in what God is doing and focus on his significance and not our own. As Paul writes in Romans 11, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.””
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
Read: Exodus 31:18 – 32:14
“The law exposed the depth of Israel’s sinful condition. It exposed the fact that all that God had done for them so far was not enough. Delivering them from Egypt. Embracing them as his people. Giving them the law as the way of life and blessing. All of that was not enough. It did not accomplish what God had wanted it to accomplish. What it did instead was expose the fact that human beings are sinful to the very core of our being. It exposed the fact that we have sinful hearts. It exposed the fact that we are anti-God at the deepest level of our being. Jeremiah summed it up when he said in 17:3 “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick; who can understand it?””
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
Read: Ecclesiastes 1:12 – 2:26
“Do not make your life about making money. Do not make your life about your reputation. Do not make your life about having as much pleasure as possible. He is saying that all of these things should be secondary in your lives. None of them should be the meaning of your life because, if they are, you will one day come to understand that you have lived for nothing – your life has been empty and meaningless – it has all be a striving after the wind.”
Sermon Series: Ecclesiastes
Read: Exodus 20:1-21
“You see the Ten Commandments define the life of salvation. Salvation in the Bible is salvation from slavery, to obedience to God’s law. The contrast is the slavery in Egypt. God saved his people so that they might live the life that the Ten Commandments describes and requires. They were given by God to his people out of his love. They were given by God to his people because of his desire to bless them. They were given by God to his people because they are the way of life.”
Sermon Series: The Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments are a summary of God’s will for our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. In this series of sermons, they are/will be expounded in the light of the good news in Jesus Christ that believers are not saved by obedience but unto obedience which is the abundant life that Jesus came to give.
