Ten Words That Matter: God’s Heart and My Words
Dr. Tom Pace
June 25, 2017
Exodus 20:7; Matthew 5:13-16
We continue our sermon series this week on the Ten Commandments. We had a great start as Thomas Harper and Linda Christians talked about the first two commandments the last two weeks. And this week we're going to hear and discuss what I believe to be the most misunderstood of all the commandments:” Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain."
So listen now as we hear Scripture read both from the Old Testament the Ten Commandments and from the Sermon on the Mount as well.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of theLord your God, for theLordwill not acquit anyone who misuses his name. Exodus 20:7
“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot. “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid.No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:13-16

Gracious God, open us up. Open our eyes that we might see, open our ears that we might hear, and open our hearts that we might feel. Then O Lord, open our hands that we might serve. Amen.
You all know the story if you've watched the Ten Commandments movie - most of you that's how you learned it, of course, the movie produced by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Charlton Heston. But I think it's important for us to review the whole story and really begin to understand. So let me take you through very quickly. Moses leads the Children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, and three months - literally three new moons - into their journey they come to Mt. Sinai.
We don't know where Mt. Sinai is for sure. There are a number of places that have been attributed as Mt. Sinai. And what happens is God tells Moses to gather the Children of Israel at the base of themountain, and God speaks to them.
What separates the Ten Commandments from the rest of the Law is that they were spoken to the people directly by God. We call them the Ten Words because it says "They gathered the people together and God spoke these words." Then we have the Ten Commandments. So the Jewish tradition has always been to call them The Decalogue or "The Ten Words."
So at the end of those Ten Words we have this little passage in Exodus 20:18. "When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, the mountain smoking, they were afraid, and trembled and stood at a distance." It goes on "Moses, you speak to us and we will listen but do not let God speak to us or we will die."
So after the Ten Commandments they're saying, "Moses you be our intermediary with God." Moses goes and meets with God and God gives him a whole bunch of other laws, laws about justice, laws about how to treat one another, laws about worship, and a number of other things. Then he gathers 70 elders and takes Aaron and Joshua and the 70 elders, and they go and they celebrate and have a covenant feast. And they make sacrifices, and they acknowledge that they are in a particular covenant with God.
Then he sends Aaron back down with the 70 elders, and he and Joshua go the rest of the way up the mountain, and they're there for 40 days and 40 nights. And while they're there God gives to Moses two tablets of stone on which are written the Ten Commandments.
NowI have to tell you that probably because I grew up watching the movie believing like all through seminary and fifteen years after that the two tablets were one through five and six through ten. Or maybe because one and two were longer it was like one through three and four through ten or something.
The truth is that there were two copies of the ten. Each tablet had a full set of the Ten Commandments on them. I learned that from Jim Fleming when we were in Israel. It's that way, because it's a covenant and when you have a covenant... if I were going to make a contract with you we would have two copies of the contract- one for you and one for me.
Well God didn't keep one of the copies but The Children of Israel knew that if indeed it was a covenant you'd have two copies. So there were two copies of the Ten Commandments. And after 40 days Moses comes down the mountain and sees that the Children of Israel have become impatient over 40 days. Aaron leads them. They make a Golden Calf, Moses is mad and God is mad, and he throws the Ten Commandments, the two tablets, down, and they shatter.
Then there's this rather kind of powerful part of the story where something softens Moses’ heart, and he intercedes for the people with God. He says, "God, these are still your people." There's this passage that you've probably heard, and it's echoed again through the prophets. The Scripture says, "The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger abounding in steadfast love." And Moses goes back up on the mountain, and God asks Moses to cut the tablets this time. I think that's kind of funny, since the first time he gave him the tablets, and this time he's like "Okay, you cut the tablets this time.” They cut two more tablets and God writes on them with his finger the Ten Commandments, and Moses brings them back down and puts them in the Ark of the Covenant. So there are 613 laws in the Old Testament, but the Ten Commandments stand apart as those that were directly given by God.
Two things I want you to know before we deal with this particular commandment. The first is that I want you to know that this is indeed a covenant. And often we'll hear the Ten Commandments interpreted as sort of universal laws for humanity, that this is how humanity is supposed to deal with one another. The truth is it's exactly the opposite. The Ten Commandments and all the law were designed to say to Israel, "You are special."
In fact, just before the Ten Commandments we get these words in Exodus 19:5: "Indeed the whole earth is mine but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation." He says, "You're going to be different."Then he gives them the Ten Commandments and he says, "This is how. This is how you're going to live set apart from the rest of the world where people kill each other willy nilly, where people steal from each other. You're going to be different and will be a witness to the whole world about what holiness is."
So it is a special people, a covenant people, a people set apart.
Also I want you to remember that the Ten Commandments always begin… In fact we read this morning, we started with the Exodus20:1 and then jumped to verse 7, because I want you to always hear how they always begin, and that is, "I am the God who led you out of slavery and led you out of Egypt. Therefore ...” Then it gives the commandment.
We don't follow the Ten Commandments in order to be set free, we are set free, and then in response we follow the Commandments. We don't live a certain way so Jesus will save us. Jesus died for us and in response to that we live a certain way. You see how the order is different?In both cases salvation freedom precedes living a certain way or behaving a certain way. We don't earn our salvation.
With those two things in mind I want us to look at this particular commandment, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain."
Last week while I was on vacation - actually week before last - we had a fence put in at our house, and it made a real mess. And my wife decided to power wash the driveway. Now Dee, my wife, loves to power wash. I don't get it. Don't ask me why but she loves to power wash. I got her a power washer for Mother's Day a few years ago... it was what she wanted!She loves to power wash!I don't know what it is, maybe a pathology of some sort.
So she's power washing, and I'm doing some other things. I’m going to Home Depot fifty times which is sort of my thing. And on my way back she called and said she just had a little more to do, but she said that a little hole broke in the high pressure hose between the power washer and the wand. Just a little pin-sized hole. So she said, "What can I do? Can I tape it?"I said "That'll never work."But we tried it anyway and of course it didn't work.
Now listen, I'm going to tell you that your pastor is ordinarily really very smart and very full of common sense. Ordinarily your pastor doesn't do dramatically stupid, stupid things. But in this case I just said, "I'm going to just hold my thumb over this little hole...." I didn't say this, but what I was actually saying was, “I’m going to hold back the 3000 pounds of pressure...you just start it up, and I'll hold it while you finish those last few feet..." So sure enough - I mean to tell you it was like a knife and a hot iron and a hammer all at once on my thumb.
Now the reason I share this story is that itmay be that your pastor used the name of your Lord in vain.It may be. I'm not even sure what all the words were. But I know they were not nice and were very colorful.So it just might be that I did.
But here's my question. If God is making a list of the ten things that matter most, do you seriously believe - do we seriously believe - that me speaking those words is what this commandment really all about? That's what we've been taught, right? But do we really think that's what this is all about? Or the 12 year-old girl who says "OMG!" all the time, right?
The Scripture says "And they shall not be acquitted..." Like they're going to bear the guiltof that "OMG!" the rest of their life?That twelve year old girl?Come on!
Now I think this is actually the most important commandment other than those first two and in fact, that's why it follows right after them. If we really look at it and take it seriously, those two examples are sort of little examples of a much bigger issue.
Here's what I think these commandments mean. First, it means don't trivialize God. Don't make God trivial.
If I'm in the TSA line at the airport and the person I’m in line with says "Hey did you ever think about bringing a bomb with you?"We all go "Shhhhh! Come on, man, this is serious stuff, we don't make silly jokes about it. This is big, this is important, people's lives are at stake, come on!"
Or your son goes off to college and comes back the end of the first semester and his grades are terrible. And in the ensuing interview you discover he has spent entirely too much time at the fraternity house drinking and playing video games. So you sit him down in front of you and you say, "Son, this is important stuff. We're paying a lot of money for college; this is a big important part of your life. This isn't about drinking and playing video games. This is important. Don't trivialize this by making it a four year party. Otherwise you're coming home."
You're saying, this is important stuff. So when we deal with God's stuff we’re dealing with important stuff so don't trivialize it.
When I first came to St. Luke's a number of the men in the church took me... we were beginning a study, Men's Life, which we still have every Wednesday morning. They took me to meet Pastor Dave Peterson of Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church where they had a really successful Men's Life Program. And we were trying to do best practices. Sovisiting with Dr. Peterson - he's retired now and sometimes worships with us - and in the midst of it we were talking about how similar the constituencies at Memorial Drive Presbyterian and St. Luke's are.
I hadn't been here yet a year, so I asked him, "Tell me what the hardest thing about doing ministry, being a pastor in a constituency, in a parish like this is." He thought for a long time and then he said, "It's people who wear their faith like it's jewelry."
Man, I thought, wow! How many times do we wear our faith like it's jewelry? Like it's like just this superficial thing?
You know when you do ministry, when we pastor, when we're people who grew up in the church where going to church, being a Christian, a nominal Christian, is just what you do. It's part of your life. The most difficult thing is not taking that for granted. It's actually letting it get past that outer shell of just going through the motions and really letting it transform your spirit and your soul.
I had a conversation with a young man who'd been a part of our LIFT teams. He'd gone through the Journey to Jerusalem, Scripture Shared Bible study we just did. We were talking about the app and the Bible study and he said it was great for him and that he learned a lot. Then he said, "You know, I accepted Christ as a teenager, and I've made Christ my Savior, but I’ve just now come to understand that I need to make Christ my Lord. That it needs to change the way I live."
You know the Beatles song - which has nothing to do with this of course - the song "Hey, Jude?"It's all I could think of - "remember to let her into your heart, then you can start to make it better. Never let her under your skin and you can begin..."
Do you let Jesus under your skin? Do you let Jesus into your heart? Does it transform who you are? Friends that's what this is about. The word "in vain" in Hebrew is the name SHUV which literally means to "make empty"to "make light." The opposite of it is to give something weight. The opposite of SHUV is to give something weight. When we take the name of the Lord in vain, we trivialize it. We make it superficial.
Okay, here's the second way we do that - when we use God's name to justify something that's our agenda and not God's agenda. Let me give you a really dramatic example. When someone walks into a train station or a bus stop or a nightclub and yells "Allahu Akbar!"and starts killing people.
By the way Christians who speak Arabic call God "Allah" - just the word "God."We shudder at that and think, "What a perversion to use God's name to do something that horrible!"
Well maybe that's about the worst example I can think of. But that's what we mean when we say to take God's name in vain. When I use God's name to enrich myself. To make myself richer, to make my business go better, I'm taking the name of the Lord in vain. I'm claiming God for my own agenda not God's agenda, but my own agenda. Here it gets even tougher, when I use God's name to promote my religion, to make a bigger, more significant, more successful institution of the church, rather than joining God's agenda to draw all his children to him and have them enter into a relationship with the living Christ and to build the kingdom of God together.
Now that may seem like a fine distinction, but I'm going to tell you that as a pastor it makes a big difference. What are we really trying to do as a church? Just be better, be bigger? More significant, more successful? Are we asking God, "Bless this that I'm doing?" orare we saying, “God we want to be part of your agenda and follow what you're doing?"
When I use God's name to become more socially acceptable to go to church so that people will think, "Oh, he's a good person. He goes to church." When I use God's name to get my candidate elected - to get myself elected.
You can go on and on about all of those times that we use God's name to justify our own agendas.That's using God's name falsely. That's another translation of SHUV. Falsely. That's why the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible says, "Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God."
Let me give you a kind of opposite example.I got into my daughter's car over vacation. Her car was parked behind mine, and we were going to run to the store for something. On her dashboard, I was so gratified to see, was a prayer. And it was a prayerI was familiar with. It's called the Wesleyan Covenant Prayer, and you may know it. It goes, "I'm no longer my own, but thine. Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt, put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee, exalted for thee or brought low for thee. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal."
It's all about you and your agenda, God, not mine, not what I want, not what I dream about, not what I hope for. I'm not here dreaming about something and saying, "God bless this, please bless this!" What I’m saying is, "Let me do what you want. Let me give myself to you."
You know, Jesus does it in a neat positive way, too. Jesus says: "You are the light of the world. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a bushel. So let your light shine before others so they may see your good works."
Now see everyone would say that - every culture, every group of people, everybody you know. No matter their religion or no religion, everybody would say that. Do good things and others will look at you and say, "What a good person Tom is."
But that's not what Jesus says. "Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in Heaven." You see the difference? Give glory to your Father in Heaven - it’s aboutGod's agenda. Not glory for you, glory for God. Not accomplishing what you want to have accomplished but accomplishing what God wants to have accomplished to be drawn into God's purposes. The hard part, of course, is knowing what those are. And I'm going to tell you that the key to that is just a little bit of humility, to actually try to be humble enough to be led by God, instead of being arrogant enough to expect that God must be on your side.
I want to close with this. I was in a conversation with some other pastors and we were talking about ministry and what it’s like and all of that. One of the guys who was there said, "I feel like my people don't listen to me. I work and I work on my sermon, and I do my very best, and I preach it, and I look at them, and I don't think they're listening to me at all."Another pastor who was with us, she said, "I don't worry that my people aren't listening to me, I worry that they are."
I thought a lot about that - that's a great statement. We have to be careful when we use God's name and when we say we're doing something in the name of God. Paul writes it this way in Philippians: "So work out your salvation with fear and trembling for it is God who is at work in you to will and to act according to his good purpose."
"Work out your salvation" - likedon't earn your salvation like you've been given it now work it out do something with it. Live it - like going to the gym is working out. "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling. “ Live your salvation, because it is God "who is at work to will and to act according to his good purpose."
This is nuclear power you're playing with here. The most powerful thing in all of creation, and you are messing with it. So you better be really, really careful and not throw it around carelessly or casually. Because this God stuff is powerful stuff.
Let’s pray together. Lord God, forgive us, forgive us when we trivialize God's name. When we trivialize the name of your son Jesus Christ or the Holy Spirit or your name. When we wear our faith like jewelry. When it's superficial and we go through the motions, forgive us. God, forgive us when we expect you to be about our agenda and our purposes rather than us about yours. Forgive us, God, and by your grace cleanse us from all unrighteousness because you are gracious and merciful, abounding in steadfast love. And by your Holy Spirit draw us into your purpose for creation. In the name of Christ, Amen.