What is your highest priority in life?

What are your goals and objectives? You should have some, lest you waste your life. As the saying goes, “If you aim at nothing, you’re bound to hit it.”

The Ten Commandments are God’s absolutes of how to live. In these commands, God lays out what our priorities should be, as well as what standards we are to follow. In essence, He shows us what is right and what is wrong.

Without a moral compass to guide us, we can become hopelessly lost. That is why an understanding of the Ten Commandments is so important today. We seem to be in a culture that exalts relativistic thinking, following the perilous precedent set by the Israelites in the book of Judges, where we read, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).

The Heart of the Ten Commandments

As mentioned in our previous lesson, Jesus emphasizes the heart, or essence, of the Ten Commandments when He sums them up in Mark 12:30-31: “'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.' This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no other commandment greater than these."

In short, the Ten Commandments focus upon our relationship with God (our vertical relationship) and our relationship with others (our horizontal relationships):

Loving God

Read Exodus 20:1-11 The Ten Commandments is much more than a list of “thou shalt’s” and “thou shalt not’s.” Upon closer inspection, we can see what should be the driving force behind our obedience to these commands: our love for God because of His love for us.

Before God even lays down the first commandment, He reminds His people of what He has done for them: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (v. 2).

God speaks these words to kindle a remembrance in the Israelites’ hearts of all that He had done for them. They had lived in misery and slavery in Egypt. They called out to God for deliverance as their lives became more and more difficult. In answer to their prayers, God finally sent Moses to them and brought them out of that life.

In the same way, we lived under the bondage and power of sin. We faced a certain judgment. Yet God—in His mercy—loved us and forgave us of all our sin as we turned to Him.

If we really appreciate all that God has done, and if we know anything of His all-encompassing forgiveness, it should be our privilege and pleasure to seek to live a life that is pleasing to Him. As 1 John 4:19 puts it, “We love Him because He first loved us.”

At the end of the second commandment, we read, “ . . . showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments” (v. 6).

God does not want us to obey these commands because we have to, but because we want to. In view of what He has done for us, we should want to reciprocate.

Jesus says, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). Why? Because, as James says, “Faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). If a person says that he has truly committed his life to Christ, yet he lives in open sin, it seems highly unlikely that he is really a believer.

Part III