You know, in a recent Gallup poll, Gallup discovered that only 45% of the Americans surveyed could name even five of the Ten Commandments. Now, when he surveyed weekly churchgoers, you would think the number would soar.
However, it only rose to 49%. Now, in light of all the recent hullabaloo in America about Judge Roy Moore and the Ten Commandments, and in light of all of these similar cases that we've had in this country fighting about the public posting of the Ten Commandments, I suppose you would think that the average American would know the Ten Commandments better than they seem to know them. And so, what we're going to do is we're going to spend the next 11 weeks on the Ten Commandments.
And if you say, why 11 on 10? It's because I'm planning to take one week to cover each of the Ten Commandments, but today I want to do some introductory material. However, that doesn't mean that there's not an enormous so what for our lives at the end of all that we do today. So, I want us to begin by seeing exactly how God gave the Ten Commandments to Israel. So if you brought a Bible, I want you to open it with me to Exodus chapter 19. Exodus chapter 19, and if you didn't bring a Bible, reach under the armrest right next to you, and you'll find a copy of the Bible.
We're going to be on page 53. Page 53 in our copy, Exodus 19 in your copy of the Bible. And let's begin at verse 1. On the third month after the Israelites left Egypt, after they left Rephidim, they camped in front of Mount Sinai.
Here's a map, and remember the Israelites went south when they came out of Egypt towards Mount Sinai, and now they have finally arrived. Verse 3. And the Lord said to Moses, This is what you are to tell the people of Israel.
You are to tell them this. You have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagle's wings and brought you to Myself. Now, God says, if you will obey Me fully and keep My covenant, then out of all the nations you will be My treasured possession.
Even though the whole world is Mine, you will be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Verse 7. So Moses went back and summoned all the people, and set before them all the words the Lord had told him to say. Verse 8. And the people all said, We will do everything the Lord has said.
Now, so far, so good. But you know, it's easy to say you're going to follow God, and it's easy to say you're going to obey God when everything's going good. However, when the chips are down, when there's a price to pay for doing this, when God asks us to obey Him in going in a direction contrary to everything that our sinful passions want to do, well, friends, it gets a little harder to back up those words. And so, knowing that Israel was going to face this very same challenge, God did something next in love for them to help them be able to keep this promise they were making. Look at verse 10. Then the Lord said to Moses, Go to the people and tell them to prepare themselves. For three days from now I will come down to Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. Verse 16. And on the morning of the third day there was lightning and thunder with a thick cloud and a sound like a very loud trumpet blast. Mount Sinai, verse 18, was covered with smoke, and the whole mountain trembled and shook violently, and the trumpet sound grew louder and louder because the Lord had descended on the mountain in fire.
Verse 17. Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God at the foot of the mountain, and everyone trembled with fear. And then it was immediately after this, of course, that God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. Now, why did God put on this kind of terrifying show at Mount Sinai? Was it to intimidate the people? Was it to get an ego boost out of showing himself off and getting everybody to be afraid of him?
Absolutely not, my friends. God did this for the benefit of the Israelites. God wanted the Israelites to obey him and keep their promise to do that because they loved him. That was the primary motivation that God always wants for people to obey him. But God knew that the Israelites were going to face those moments when this primary motivation wasn't going to be enough. And so God decided to give the Israelites a secondary motivation. God decided to give them a glimpse of his awesome holiness here at Mount Sinai in a way that would put the fear of God in their heart in the hopes that the fear of God would help the Israelites keep away from disobeying God.
Now, friends, this very same dynamic exists for us as followers of Christ today. God wants us to obey him because we love him. He wants that to be our primary motivation. But he also understands that sometimes the desires of our sinful flesh overwhelm our love for God and take us to the very edge of disobeying God. And so in those cases, God wants us to have the same secondary motivation the Israelites had. He wants us to also have the fear of God. You say, Lon, isn't the fear of God kind of an Old Testament thing? Ah, listen to what Jesus said.
Luke 12, 5. Jesus said, Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but after that they can do no more. I will tell you who to fear, Jesus said. Fear him who, after killing your body, has the power to throw you into hell.
Who's he talking about? He's talking about God. And I love what Hebrews 12 says. Actually, if you read the context, Hebrews 12 is looking back to the events of Exodus 19 that we're looking at here, and here's what the writer of Hebrews says. He says, So let us worship God acceptably with reverence, there's love, and with fear.
Interesting. Both motivations are in this verse. For our God is a consuming fire. Now, friends, I did a whole message on this, bringing balance to this whole thing in part five of this series on the life of Moses. It's called Living in the Fear of God. And what I encourage you to do is, if you want more information about this, go out to our bookstore and pick up a copy of that, and I'll give you a lot more information. But let me just say, if you're a wise follower of Jesus Christ, you will learn to live in the fear of God, just like God wanted these Israelites to do.
If you're not sure what I mean, you go pick up my CD. Now, the next question we want to answer here is, OK, so God gave the Israelites the Ten Commandments. But why? I mean, what was the purpose for giving the Ten Commandments?
And there were actually two, and I want to tell you what they are. Number one, God's first purpose in giving the Ten Commandments is to make every person alive aware of what a sinner we really are. Let me tell you what Paul said. Paul said Romans 7, verse 7, is the law. Are the Ten Commandments sin?
No, Paul says. Rather, the law, the Ten Commandments are holy and righteous and good. Verse 22 of that chapter, he said, On the inside, I joyfully concur with the Ten Commandments, the law of God. Paul said, You know what? In my heart, I want to keep the Ten Commandments. Paul said, My insides tell me that the Ten Commandments are good and they're right and they're worth obeying. But there's a problem.
And what's the problem? Problem is, Romans 7, 19, but the good I wish to do in keeping the Ten Commandments, that's not what I do. Instead, I practice the very evil that I don't want to do. Paul said, The problem is, no matter how hard I want to keep the Ten Commandments, I can't.
I simply break them over and over and over again. And Paul says, You know what? This forces me to come to a dreadful conclusion about myself.
Here's my conclusion. Since there's nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments, they are holy and righteous. And just, Paul said, Therefore, since I can't keep them, there must be something wrong with me. The point, folks, is that the Ten Commandments are what enable us as human beings to see this about ourselves. To put it another way, without a perfect standard of righteous behavior, that is the Ten Commandments, to compare ourselves to, you and I would never be able to realize just how deeply and thoroughly sinful we really are. This other problem that lives inside of us, that the Ten Commandments help Paul realize. What does Paul call it? Romans 7, verse 5, he calls it the sinful passions that are at work in my body.
Paul said, There's something nasty going on inside of me. And Romans 3, 20, Paul says, It was by means of the Ten Commandments that I was able to become conscious that this sin lived inside of me. We all remember the old Michael Jackson song, Man in the Mirror. Well, friends, God designed the Ten Commandments to force you and me and every other human being alive to take stock of the man in the mirror. And when we do this honestly, when we do it brutally, when we do it unflinchingly, we begin to discover that the man in the mirror or the woman in the mirror is not just a little bit off of keeping the Ten Commandments. We begin to discover how dreadfully we are off, how dreadfully and utterly and incurably sinful we really are in the sight of a holy God. And it was this very process of self-discovery that caused the apostle Paul to cry out in Romans chapter 7, verse 24, O wretched man that I am, who can set me free from this body of death that I have? Now, you know, this is a conclusion about ourselves that our sinful human flesh avoids at all costs.
This is a conclusion about ourselves that our sinful nature recoils from and resists and tries to escape with everything that lies within us. In fact, the rabbis of Jesus's day tried to avoid this conclusion about themselves. And the way they tried to avoid it is they tried to cheapen the Ten Commandments. They tried to bring the Ten Commandments down to a level where they could convince themselves they were keeping the Ten Commandments. And the way they did that is they did it by reducing the Ten Commandments to apply only to outward actions. In other words, they said, hey, so long as I never actually murder a person, I have kept commandment number six. And so long as I never commit actual adultery, I have kept commandment number seven. But in Matthew chapter five, remember what Jesus did? He corrected this perverse understanding of the Ten Commandments. He said, Matthew 5, 22, as far as God is concerned, Jesus said, anyone who is angry at a person in their heart is guilty of murder in their heart. And he said in verse 28 of Matthew five, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. You say, wow, one.
I mean, by that definition, every single human being alive has broken the Ten Commandments thousands upon thousands of times. Aha. That's the whole point, my friends.
Bingo. Now you're starting to get the picture. See, this is the job of the Ten Commandments to bring every human being alive to the point where they say, wow. Now I understand. And what do I understand? I understand, number one, that I stand condemned before God as an incurable sinner. I've got tens upon tens upon thousands of infractions in my life.
Number two, I have no hope. I understand this now of ever satisfying the demands of the Ten Commandments. Number three, I understand that this means I have no hope of ever working my way into heaven, which means finally number four, I finally understand that I need some other way to get into heaven that doesn't depend on me, my good works, my religious activity or my keeping the Ten Commandments. That's where the Ten Commandments is trying to get you and me.
That's the purpose God gave them. Listen to what the scripture says, Galatians chapter three. Paul says, If there were a law that was able to impart eternal life, then righteous standing before God would have come by the law. But, he says, the law has shut all men up, has concluded, has pronounced all men under sin. You see, that's really the problem, isn't it?
That's really the curse of the law, isn't it? Because of the sin that permeates every single part of me and every single part of you and every single part of every human being alive. Because of that, when we compare ourselves to the Ten Commandments and the holy righteous standard they present, friends, all the Ten Commandments can do is condemn us. All the Ten Commandments can do is curse us. But praise the Lord. Hey, praise the Lord. That's not where the story ends.
Here's the end of the story. Galatians 3 13, But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law. Can anybody say Amen to that?
Amen. Can Christ redeem us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us on the cross? So then, Paul says, the law, the Ten Commandments was meant to be our tutor to lead us to Jesus Christ. You say, how? Well, friends, by making us understand how sinful and utterly lost we were and by making us go out and look for an alternate way to get to heaven, the Ten Commandments was our tutor, our schoolmaster leading us to Christ that we might be pronounced righteous before God.
How? By our own good works? By keeping the Ten Commandments?
No, by faith in Jesus Christ. Hey, the good news is, if you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, purpose number one for the Ten Commandments has been completely fulfilled in your life. Because if you're a believer in Christ, it's because you came to grips with the fact that you are exactly who the Bible says you are in the sight of God. And you embrace Jesus as the other way to get to heaven because you know you couldn't do it yourself. The law has done its job in your life. Purpose number one. The curse that the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament law pronounces on sinners has absolutely nothing to do with you anymore if you're a follower of Christ.
Why? Colossians 2.14, because Jesus Christ cancelled the law with all of its condemnation and its decrees against us. And how did He do it?
He took it out of the way by nailing it to the cross. I love the great hymn by Philip Bliss. He said, free from the law, oh happy condition, Jesus has bled and there is remission, cursed by the law and bruised by the fall, Christ has redeemed us once for all. Now we are free. There's no condemnation. Jesus provides a perfect salvation. Come unto me. Oh, hear His sweet call. Come and He saves us once for all. Hey, folks, what a glorious Savior.
What a glorious thing He did for us. Amen. Amen. I hope so. I hope you feel that way.
Now you say, well, Lon, I do, and thank God for that. But you know, you bring up a point, which is if the Ten Commandments had done their job in getting me to faith in Christ, then why in the world are we spending ten weeks studying them? I mean, they're done. They did their job.
It's over. No, no, no. Remember I said there are two purposes why God gave the Ten Commandments. That's the first one. The second purpose applies to us as believers in Christ, and that is the Old Testament law, the Ten Commandments.
Also, number two, show us how to live a blessed life. You know, everything in our world, folks, has a way that it's supposed to be operated. Everything in our world has rules by which it's supposed to be run.
And when we don't run things the way they're designed to be operated, we can get ourselves in big trouble. Recently, my daughter in law, Julia, entered my new granddaughter, who's almost four months old, in a baby contest here at a radio station in Washington. My granddaughter's name's Mia. That's her picture.
I didn't take it, but that's it. Anyway, she made the semifinals on this radio contest a couple weeks ago, and so Julia called Brenda up and said, Brenda, you got to get all your friends to go to 99.5 and vote for Mia. By the way, she made the finals, and they're going to do this like American Idol. There's 12 babies. They're going to take off one every single week. So you need to go to hot 99.5 and vote for Mia.
But that's completely on the side. So anyway, here's what Brenda did. What Brenda did is she got on her AOL account, and she sent out an e-mail to every single person on her AOL account asking them to vote for Mia. Well, about five minutes later, she came to me. We were home, and she said, Lon, I can't log on to AOL.
I don't understand. Something went wrong with my account. I said, all right, well, let me try. So I went to my account, and I couldn't log on either. And so I called AOL, and I got somebody on the phone, and I said, I don't understand.
We're having a problem. We can't log on to our account. And she said, well, sir, she said, we shut your account off. I said, you shut my account off?
I paid my bill. Why would you shut my account off? She said, well, someone from your account sent an unsolicited e-mail to 550 people about 20 minutes ago. I said, ooh, okay. I said, well, look, that was my wife.
She said, I don't care who it was. She said, that completely violates AOL's terms of service agreement, and so we shut your e-mail down. You know, it took me an hour, an hour to convince them that my dear wife was not some spam artist using her private account to send spam out, an hour to convince them, and they kept saying to me, you know, you would have known this was wrong if you had read your terms of service agreement. Didn't you read your terms of service agreement? Well, of course I didn't read my terms of service agreement.
Whoever reads their terms of service agreement for this stuff, I didn't know. And I kept saying, no, I didn't read it, and they kept saying, why not? Well, how do you answer that? I don't know.
I just didn't. Well, they didn't like that answer at all. I guess they had nothing to do all day but sit around and read the terms of service agreement. Anyway, we finally got the e-mail back on.
They canceled all our passwords. It was a mess. My point, everything in the world has a way it's designed to be operated with rules. And when you don't operate it that way, you get yourself in big trouble. And, folks, as human beings, our lives are the very same way. God designed us to operate a certain way, according to certain principles. And when we don't operate our lives that way, we get ourselves in trouble. When we do operate our lives that way, our lives purr along with healthiness and joy and wholesomeness and blessing from God.
And when we don't operate them that way, man, we cling and pink like an old engine out of tune. Where do we find these specific operating principles for life? Well, folks, we find the vast majority of them right here in the Ten Commandments. And let me remind you that every one of the Ten Commandments is repeated in the New Testament, with the exception of the Sabbath, and we'll talk about that when we get there. Every one of the other nine are repeated in the New Testament, telling us that we are under obligation and that these are binding on our life today. And what this means is that the Ten Commandments are God's timeless, culturalist, non-negotiable principles for godly living, and that's why we're going to study them. So as we study the Ten Commandments, let me tell you how we're going to study them. We are not going to study them as a ball and chain around our leg, because they're not anymore.
We're not going to study them as God's measuring stick, pointing its finger at us in condemnation, because if we know Christ, we're past that, we're going to study them as God's blessed operating principles aimed at giving us a blessed life. And that's the perspective with which we're going to come at them. Now that's as far as we want to go with all of this, because it's time now for us to ask our most important question. And you know what that is, so are you ready? All right, here we go, nice and loud, one, two, three. Yeah, you say, Lon, all right, this is all great, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So what? What difference does any of this make to my life Monday to Saturday, huh? Well, friends, as a follower of Christ, the so what that I want you to leave here today is I want you to take with you out of here today a poignant reminder of how much undeserved mercy, and how much undeserved grace God poured out on us when He saved us from our hopelessly sinful condition. I want us to be reminded of our hopeless inability to keep the Ten Commandments. I want you and me to be reminded that in the sight of Almighty God, before we came to Christ, He had tens upon tens of thousands of infractions, not one, not two, not a half a dozen, tens of thousands of infractions against us. I want us to be reminded as we leave here today of how utterly sinful we looked in the sight of a holy God. I want us to be reminded of how utterly cursed we stood before the righteous judgment of God. I want us to be reminded of how utterly helpless we were to redeem ourselves from this curse.
And I want us to be reminded of how utterly merciful the Lord Jesus Christ was to us when He agreed to come die on the cross to rescue you and me from a situation that we were hopelessly, hopelessly imprisoned to. Now, you know, we don't like to hear this about ourselves, what I've said today. We don't like to be told that we are utterly sinful in the sight of God. We don't like to be told that we are utterly helpless in the sight of God. We don't like to be told that we have thousands upon thousands of infractions of God's law against us. We don't like to be told that we are incurable sinners. Friends, we don't like to hear that. But hearing this is the only way that you and I will ever fully appreciate the amazing grace that Jesus showed us on the cross.
Until we understand the problem really well, we will never appreciate the solution the way we ought to. And I want us to walk out of here today appropriately humbled by all of this. You know, in reflecting on the incredible plan of salvation of God, I love what the apostle Paul said. He said Romans 3.27, so where then is boasting? He says there is no room for boasting.
It's excluded. I love what Paul said, but may it never be that I should boast in anything except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because when we really understand what we are, and when we really understand what Jesus did for us, there's no room for any pride, there's no room for any arrogance, there's no room for any haughtiness. The only thing there's room for, friends, is utter and abject humility and gratitude for God doing for us what we could never do for ourself. Now, you know, ladies and gentlemen, we live in an amazingly arrogant town.
I mean, the only thing bigger in Washington than the power that's here is the hubris that's here. And as followers of Christ, God calls on us to live a different way in this town. God calls on us to reject all of the arrogance of this town and reject all of the arrogance of our fleshly sinful nature.
And God calls on us to live in true humility, a humility that comes from realizing what we really are, as ugly as it is, and then, praise God, realizing what Jesus really did for us in all of His grace and His mercy. You know, John Newton, some of you know that name, he wrote the hymn Amazing Grace that we sang earlier. John Newton was a slave trader. He went to Africa. He took men away from their families, women away from their families, children away from their families. He transported them across the Atlantic in the most inhumane kind of conditions beyond description.
Half his cargo usually died before they reached this side of the Atlantic. He was a drunkard. He was a profane man. I mean, you know how bad I was in college. You've heard me talk about it. I'm telling you, this man made me look like a choir boy.
You understand what I'm saying? And then he came to Christ. He was walking down the streets of Edinburgh one day, and George Whitfield was preaching in the open air, and Whitfield saw and preached to Newton, and Newton came to Christ. He became a pastor of a church and the leader of a part of the great revival of the time of Wesley and Whitfield in England.
And he wrote Amazing Grace. Well, at the end of his life, most of his memory was gone. He couldn't preach anymore. He couldn't hardly even carry on a conversation.
And on his deathbed, this was one of the last things John Newton ever said. He said, and I quote, It seems as if I can only remember two things very clearly, that I am a great sinner and that Jesus is an even greater Savior. Folks, this is why the apostle Paul said, If any man boasts, let him boast in himself. No. Let him boast in what he's done. No. Let him boast in his accomplishments.
No. Let him boast in the Lord. And I call on you, as people here in Washington, D.C., as followers of Jesus, I call on you to accept the truth about what you are in the sight of God. It's ugly.
Okay. Accept it. And then accept the beauty of the mercy and the grace of Jesus that overshadows our ugliness by its sheer mercy and grace. And allow that to make us humble people as we carry on our daily lives.
Because, friends, the truth is, there's nothing for you and me to be arrogant about. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, remind us of the words of the apostle Paul. May it never be, Paul said, that I should ever boast in anything except the cross of Christ, by which the world is crucified to me and I to the world.
If any man boasts, Paul said, let him boast in the Lord. And, Father, I pray that you would use what we've talked about today to humble us in an appropriate way. And to cause us, Lord, to be men and women who live in true humility because we understand what we really are. And then we understand the incredible mercy and grace of the Lord Jesus. Change our lives because we were here, Lord.
Change the very way that we conduct ourselves each and every day in this town. And thank you for the mercy of the Lord Jesus. The more we understand what we are, the sweeter it becomes. And we pray these things in Jesus' name. And what do God's people say? Amen. Amen.
