Ten Words That Matter: The Choice Is Yours
Dr. Linda Christians
June 18, 2017
Exodus 20:4-6

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I theLordyour God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me,but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generationof those who love me and keep my commandments. Exodus 20:4-6 (NRSV)
As we begin this time of service please join me in prayer:
Oh, Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
So I want to ask you, have you ever considered that the Ten Commandments were God’s way of saying, “I love you so much. I love you so much that I want you to know how to love me in return. And I want you to know how to love others as well.”
The Commandments are indeed God’s love language. Think of it this way: we tell our children not to put their hands on a hotplate. We tell our friends not to drink and drive. We’re warned not to text and drive. We even go so far as to say “don’t text and walk.”
Now the reasons are pretty obvious but we do those things anyway. I for one not too long ago was walking along beside The Story Houston building on the sidewalk. This was before the garage was built and we were under construction. I was walking along the sidewalk going to my car and I was texting and walking, and as I’m texting and walking with my head down I hear the voice in back of my head say, “You better stop. This isn’t smart. You know better than this. It’s not safe – you’d better stay focused on where you’re heading.” But I texted and walked until my heel came down on a round and hard object. And when it did my ankle rolled and I went down. Now I didn’t go down hard and fast. It was one of those falls where you go down and you roll. And then you roll up like everything’s okay.
I was wiping myself off, flushed with embarrassment and I looked around to see if any of the construction workers had caught my special moment. They were all focused on what they needed to be focused on which was working. They had not been distracted by me. I, on the other hand, had been distracted by my text and not focused on getting to my car in a safe manner.
Why do we tell our family and friends not to do these things? It’s because we love them and we want what’s best for them. We want them to live lives that are full, unhindered by pain or suffering that can be caused by a lack of knowledge or perhaps not paying attention to the matters at hand.
You see, God gave the Ten Commandments – the Law - to Moses – on the top of Mt. Sinai with that list of “don’t dos” and “thou shalt nots.” And though they seem harsh in tone they really are as the Old Testament is, a covenant of love. God wanted the Israelites to know how much he loved them. He wanted to convey his love to them, he wanted to guide them, and he wanted to save them from themselves.
You see, the people following Moses were in a state of culture shock. They had been living in Egypt for hundreds of years. Now Egypt is similar to Israel in terms of the land. It’s dry, hot desert conditions; it’s very different in terms of who and what they worshipped. The Egyptians worshipped many gods and goddesses, they had images and statues all over of the gods that they worshipped. They believed you needed to worship more gods in order to receive the maximum number of blessings.
We don’t know how long Moses was on top of the mountain. But to the Israelites it was way too long and they got worried. They became distracted by their fears, they lost their focus and they began to think, “Who’s going to take care of me? Who’s going to provide for my needs, my security, and my identity as a newly freed people?” All of these distractions caused them to lose focus on the God who had been leading them out of the land of Egypt, the land of slavery.
So could what was true for the Israelites in Moses’ day be true for you and me as well? Sometimes on Sunday mornings the sunlight hits, and people are shading their eyes. Could it be sometimes the sunlight that causes us to be distracted and lose our focus in worship? Could it be that your plans for after church are already beginning to encroach on worshipping God? Could it be that that vibration in your phone, the text message going across the screen has already caused you to be distracted? I think it’s obvious how easy it is for us to be distracted with the images and thoughts that come to our mind that cause us to go this way instead of staying focused on God.
So it’s obvious to me that the Commandments that spoke to the Israelites so long ago indeed have something to say to you and me today. So here’s a quick recap of the First Commandment “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, you are to have no other gods before me.”
It is God who leads, God who guides, God who directs, God who frees from oppression, God who frees from slavery. It is God who saves. God acts alone. No other gods are needed to bless us or to provide for our needs or our desires.
In our modern day world we have images all around us. Images of fashion, cars, homes, luxury vacations and the like. Successful marketing departments have the keys, I believe, to opening the door to desirous attractions and distractions that cause us to be led astray. None of these are bad in their own right, it’s okay to have these things as long as they are not your God that you worship.
You see, we lose our focus sometimes. It’s like celebrities. How we’re brainwashed into thinking that we have to live and look like the celebrities and if we don’t, we’re not blessed. We don’t have enough. We lose that focus on the God who provided for the Israelites being the same God who provides for you and me today.
Now we get to the Second Commandment and there are several pieces that are important. The first is “You shall not make for yourselves a carved image in the likeness of anything in heaven or on earth or in the waters.”
Last year Doug and I were able and so excited to be able to go to Egypt on the “Footsteps of Moses” trip. It was just amazing how many carved images, statues, representations of gods and goddesses were everywhere. They were in the ruins of the temples, the palaces, and they were everywhere. Ra, the sun god; Horus, the god of the western deities, a male body with a falcon’s head. Horus was the counterpart, the goddess, and had a cow’s body with a woman’s head. Isis, the goddess of medicine and healing, and especially Pharaoh. Statues of Pharaoh everywhere because Pharaoh was believed to be a god who needed to be worshipped and served.
So when God said, “Don’t make an image, don’t carve an image,” this was really significant to the Israelites because this is all they knew. Remember, they’d been living in Egypt for hundreds of years. This is the culture in which they had been placed.
You know, it’s interesting. Archaeologists have uncovered many representations of gods and goddesses but they have yet to uncover an image of Yahweh. The Israelite faith forbids them from carving an image in the image of God. It’s because you can’t put God in a box and you can’t carve God out of a box, because there’s no way to define or characterize all of God’s divine characters.
I want us to think about how the archaeologists have uncovered things looking at what people worshipped. If in a thousand years archeologists were to come to this area and they were to look in this area, the area of Houston, trying to find as they dug, what it is we worshipped. What would they find? They’re looking to see what it is we worshipped. If they uncovered the earth a thousand years from now what would they find? They might think perhaps we worshipped shopping malls, banks, stadiums, jewelry stores. Maybe it’s the steeple with a cross on top on a building that was once a church. I think it’s important to keep these things in mind.
Now the second phrase is, “You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” So it’s saying, “don’t worship anything or anyone – you worship God alone, no one or nothing else. Your worship is for God and God alone.”
Noralyn Carpenter on our staff gave me a book to look at. It’s written by David Foster Wallace and the title is rather lengthy and this quote may be too, but it’s worth listening to. His book is called This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.
The author writes: “You get to decide what to worship because here’s something else that’s true. In the day to day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough, it’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.”
“On one level we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified by myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables – it’s the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth upfront in daily consciousness.”
“Worship power, you feel weak and afraid and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart. You will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out, and so on.”
“Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is that they are unconscious. They are default settings.” So I say, consciously or unconsciously, we make choices and if we choose not to focus on God, then we go down a path that leads us to pain, isolation, loneliness and most importantly, on being in a relationship with God who loves us so much. This pathway not only affects us, it affects those who are closest to us.
Which leads us to that next phrase which could be really disturbing if you don’t understand the context. In that passage “God visits the iniquity of the fathers of the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate God, but shows steadfast love to the thousands of those who love him and heed his commandments.”
What is God really saying? In Jesus’ day and before, people married at a much younger age. So it was common for three to four generations of families to be living in the same home, the same compound. If one member of that family, let’s say, stole someone’s goat, or they murdered someone, or they hurt someone, then the shame and guilt and consequences were not just on that one person, but it spread throughout all of those three to four generations. It was a family situation.
But note, it’s for the three to four generations. God’s steadfast love, though, to those who love him and keep his commandments, are for the thousands of generations. The thousands of generations who know and are in a relationship with God.
So you may be saying, “Linda, all this sounds really good but give us some examples of what we can do. How can we choose to live life intentionally focused on keeping God central in our lives? How can we live in a way that the distractions don’t take us down a different path?” These are good questions and the answers are easy. But the solution involves discipline and obedience. And part of that is being intentional about getting to know the God you worship.
Not long ago I listened to a consultant speak at a non-profit organization about how they could raise more money without adding more fund raising events. The consultant said, “If you will focus your energies into cultivating a relationship with a select group of people and you begin to get to know them and they get to know you, much like dating, and you develop a really good relationship with your courting them, when it comes time for that big ask you kind of know already the answer is going to be yes.”
In much the same way when you and I spend more time with God and God’s courting us, wanting to be closer to us, that when we are given the choice to make, our answer is more likely to be “yes” and “no” to the distractions.
But recall, Moses gave the law to the Israelites as a guide for them. And time after time after time they made bad decisions. And so do we. So God tried through Moses with the Commandments and finally God sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world to show us and to be our guide. To show us, to bear God’s image in this world, to guide us, to show us, to save us. Jesus’ call to obedience and our call to obedience is the same today as it was in Moses’ time. But now by God’s grace and the leading and guiding of the Holy Spirit we are able to make those choices providing we stay on a pathway where we encounter God.
Jesus stayed focused on Gods purpose for humanity and his job on earth because he stayed focused on God through the disciplines of prayer, fasting, silence, solitude. Here at St. Luke’s we practice the five habits: we pray, we study the Bible, we make friends, we tell our stories. We give ourselves away in generosity and service and we come to worship. We have the opportunity for the Holy Spirit to mold us and shape us and guide us into that way of life where God is that central focus.
My friend Chris Hall is president of the Renovaré organization and its purpose is to cultivate, to have resources to help people cultivate a “With God” life. A “With God” life. He says, “All humans are created with an invitation to know God stamped on their very nature. For the Trinitarian God who is beyond knowledge, desires to be known.”
The more you and I know and worship God the more like God we become. We become more focused on being with the one that we love, the distractions don’t have a chance to take us off course.
Since it’s Father’s Day one of the illustrations I’ll use is the time I spent with my dad. I was probably in junior high school, and we’d gotten up early one morning. I’d gone fishing with my dad which was quite unusual for me. First, it was unusual for me to get up early and two, unusual for me to go fishing. But my dad invited me and so we went.
It was early in the morning, at Lake Nacogdoches, and we were sitting on his boat. The sun had yet to come up and we were sitting silently, because we didn’t want to scare the fish away, I guess. We were sitting there and were just casting out the fishing line time after time, just sitting there casting the line.
The dark sky began to roll back as the sunrise came. With the sunrise came the glorious colors, the yellows, the oranges, peaches, and pinks. A glorious display and we sat there in silence. We kept casting in silence watching the beautiful display. We didn’t get agitated or annoyed because I don’t think we caught one fish that day. But I will cherish that memory because of the time I spent with my dad.
Our relationship grew closer during that time and our bond of love grew stronger.
I say to you this is the kind of relationship God wants with you. God loves you so much and he wants you to know how to love him in return. And if we’re able to do that and spend more time with God, then God’s the central part of our lives, the distractions don’t have a chance to take us off course.
You’ve heard Dr. Pace refer to the passage in Romans from Eugene Peterson’s The Message Bible translation about “ordinary, everyday lives.” You know, worship isn’t just here on Sunday mornings. Worship is a way of life. When you keep God centered you just live in a way that worships God.
Eugene Peterson puts it this way:” So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life, your sleeping, eating, going to work and walking around life. Place it before God as an offering, embracing what God does for you as the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well adjusted with your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it.”
“Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.”
Worship is a way of life. It’s living obediently in response to God’s love for you. So in closing I want to say to you, “Don’t text and walk. Don’t put any other gods before the one true God. Don’t have images of things that replace God – don’t try to put God in a box. Have no other gods, bow down to no other gods. Worship God and God alone because God loves you so much. He wants what’s best for you and he wants to bless you. But the choice is yours and you get to decide.”