Brian's Sermons

Exodus 20:13: You shall not murder. Through the past weeks, we have been looking in depth into the Ten Commandments, God’s rules for living. We started with God’s introduction — the commandments come only in the context of who God is. After God’s people had disobeyed God and experienced the consequences of disobedience, we read God’s response as recorded in Isaiah 48:17-18: Thus says the LORD, your redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: I am the LORD your God, who teaches you for your own good, who leads you in the way you should go. O that you had paid attention to my commandments! Then your prosperity would have been like a river, and your success like the waters of the sea.   There are rewards for following God’s will, and there are consequences for not . God gave us the Ten Commandments, not to beat us into submission, but to teach us how to live in right relationship with Him and in harmony with one another.   Last week we shifted from the first commandme...

Exodus 20:12 Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.   Recently in Lusaka, RTSA unveiled a new plan for raising revenues; they installed speed cameras in various places around Lusaka, and they sent out speeding tickets via SMS. They apparently have raised K13.5 million already. One of the problems is that often, where the speed cameras are, nobody knows the speed limit! People are being punished for offenses they do not know about.   As God’s people, we have been given the Ten Commandments. They are the rules that God expects his people to live by. But they are not just arbitrary or random rules. They are rules that help us live in right relationship with God and with one another.   The commandment we are looking at today deals with families. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. Honor your parents. This s...

Exodus 20:8-11 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Once I led a game with the young people of the church. They were really excited about the game, but there was one thing I didn’t do. I did not tell them the rules. There was really no way anyone could win without knowing the rules. God doesn’t just give us rules to help us “win” but to point us toward him. God, in his power and love, gave us the boundaries that will help us be in right relationship...

Remember that when we look at the Ten Commandments, we have to start with God, Yahweh, the all-powerful Lord of Hosts, our Provider, our Healer, our leader, the One who gives us life, who is the Giver of all good and perfect gifts. The fact that He is the One who gives us the Ten Commandments is what gives the Ten Commandments their context, their power, and their reason for existence. We also pointed out that God gives us the Ten Commandments for our protection — as God wants the very best for us. In the play, Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare’s character Juliet asks the question: “what’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet.” The idea is that we are all the same; a name is just what we call something or someone. But God obviously has some different ideas. The third of the Ten Commandments is this: You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. ...