Sermon by Rev. Frank Rose

Lessons: Joshua 7:1-12; Matthew 15:10-20; True Christian Religion 326

Sermon: Of all the Ten Commandments, which are the least important? In some sense you would say, “They’re all important, otherwise they wouldn’t be there.” There is another question: “Which are the ones that people pay the least attention to?” I think for many people it would have to be the ninth and tenth Commandments: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”

This is partly because the word covet is not used a lot these days. How long has it been since you heard someone use the word covet in an ordinary conversation? Occasionally you hear it in a very mild sense. A person goes to visit someone else in their home, sees what a gorgeous home it is, and finds him or herself coveting the house and furnishings. That does not feel like a terrible sin. It could be just a form of enjoying what other people have. Is that what the commandment is about?

The word covet means much more than just desiring, or longing for something. Our modern term “obsessing” would be closer to the real meaning of the word. When you “obsess” about your neighbor’s possessions to the point where they are constantly on your mind and you are forever plotting how to rob them you are coveting in the biblical sense.

It is striking that there is a commandment about coveting! Suppose you went to some other country and wanted to learn its laws. You found the usual laws against murder and theft, and that you would understand. But suppose the country had laws about having bad intentions. Wouldn’t you wonder how they could you possibly enforce such laws? How can laws control the way people think, or crave in their hearts?”

This shows that the Ten Commandments are not just an ordinary legal document for the safety and prosperity of a country. They contain laws that are totally unenforceable, in a civil sense. They begin, after all, with our attitude to God – not worshipping any other god, not taking the Lord’s name in vain, and respecting His holy day. Those are spiritual laws. Then there is a commandment about honoring your parents. That is a moral law. In addition there are the well known civil laws, having to do with murder, adultery, theft and false witness. The last two commandments shift back up to the moral plane. They invite people to think not just about their actions, but also about their attitudes.

There was a man who was a very religious person, at least in his own eyes. He was anxious to keep the commandments of God. He would never dream of murdering or even harming any other person in any way. He was totally faithful to his marriage and would never hurt someone else’s marriage or his own. He was scrupulously honest in all his dealings, never took anything that didn’t belong to him and always spoke the truth. He thought to himself that he was following the commandments of God.

But inside he was seething with anger. He was constantly fuming about many issues. He hated people. He was also constantly fantasizing, and his mind was a kind of cesspool of really obscene thoughts, not just the usual sexual fantasies, but gross, distorted, and perverted things. All this was going on inside him.

He was proud and thought of himself as being superior to others. But his inner world was a mess. And yet he kept the commandments. For a long time he did not see any conflict between his inner state of mind and his external behavior. If someone had accused him of being dishonest he would have bristled and said, “I take pride in being a man of my word.” He tried to live the Ten Commandments as best as he could. But he was so miserable and unhappy that he finally went to the pastor to talk to him about his life. He was at odds with other people, his inner world was in disarray and he wondered why he could be so unhappy when yet he obeyed all the commandments.

The pastor gently drew his attention to the ninth and tenth Commandments. The issue in the ninth and tenth Commandments is that you have to learn how to deal with the source of evil in your internal attitudes and intentions. Until you deal with that level, keeping the commandments on a literal basis is not very spiritual. You have to change your thoughts toward other people. You can’t go around with murderous intentions and think that somehow you’re obeying the Word of God. As the Lord said, “You must cleanse the inside of the cup and platter, not just the outside.” The inside of the cup and platter is what is talked about in these last two commandments. Be concerned about your attitudes. Pay attention to your inner world. Work on cleansing the inside of the cup and platter, and then you will be fulfilling the commandments, not before. He congratulated the man on keeping many of the commandments, and suggested that now he had to work on the last two.

Listen to this passage from the book, Heaven and Hell:

“In outward form a merely natural person lives according to the Ten Commandments in the same way that a spiritual person does. He too worships, goes to church, listens to sermons, looks to God. He refrains from committing murder, adultery and theft, from bearing false witness and from cheating his companions of their possessions. But he does all of these things merely for the sake of himself and the world, and for the sake of appearance. Internally, he is completely opposite to what he appears to be on the outside, since in his heart he denies God. When he worships, he’s a hypocrite. When left to his own thoughts, he laughs at the holy things of the church, believing that they’re merely means of restraining the simple masses. As a result he is completely disconnected from heaven. Since he is not a spiritual person, neither is he moral or civil. Because, although he refrains from committing murder, he hates everyone who opposes him and from his hatred burns with revenge and would commit murder if he were not restrained by the civil laws and kept in bonds by his fears. Although he does not commit adultery, yet since he believes it is allowable, he is still an adulterer in heart and commits it whenever he is able to. Although he does not steal, yet since he covets the possessions of others and does not consider fraud and cunning to be opposed to the law, he is continually acting the thief in his intentions. The same is true of all the commandments that we relate to moral life. Heaven and Hell #531

The Ten Commandments end by lifting our thoughts and inviting us to look more deeply at our inner world, the world of the spirit. It’s a way of saying that all of the commandments have to do essentially with your heart, not just with your behavior.

A person whose inner world is self-centered, hateful, deceitful, will eventually end up breaking the commandments in the literal sense as well. But even if he doesn’t break the commandments, his world is far from the spirit of heaven. We find the stories in the Word where people, because of covetousness, broke a whole series of commandments. Like Achan, King David or Ahab. Each of these men began with coveting and ended up by committing theft, adultery or murder.

The problem begins on the spiritual level, and this is why even in courts of law people treat a crime differently according to the intentions of the people involved. Deliberate murder is not treated the same as manslaughter. A person who plots, meditates and thinks how to steal over a long period of time commits a totally different crime than someone who simply walks into a store and absentmindedly grabs something, not thinking about what he is doing. Even in courts of law, the attitude has an effect on how serious a crime is seen to be, and what the nature of the punishment should be.

Throughout all of this we are invited to look not just at our behavior but also at our state of mind.

There is a spiritual reason why two commandments are devoted to the subject of coveting.

The ninth is “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s house” and this refers to all the crimes that come out of our worldliness, our material nature and our attachment to possessions.

The tenth Commandment warns us against all the evils that come out of our selfishness and our desire to dominate. These are the most destructive evils of all, represented as coveting your neighbor’s wife, and his servants and his animals and all his possessions. These include all the evils that come from a self-centered desire to control the lives of others and to use others for personal gain, without thought of their well-being.

These are the things we have to guard against in our inner spiritual world, worldliness, and selfishness. And both of them produce a kind of obsession, or craving, or coveting. Then the question is, how do we deal with this inner world? How do we cleanse the inside of the cup and platter?

The first step is to see the nature of the covetousness in ourselves - to be conscious of it, to acknowledge it for what it is, to not be content with it, not to live as if the evils in our heart do not matter. Next we need to recognize the negative nature of our selfishness and our worldliness. We need to cease acting in any way out of those evil desires. We need to avoid situations that bring out the worst in us. We have to be clear in our intention to not act out of these evil desires. We have to cleanse the inside of the cup and platter. We need to replace our negative feelings with positive ones. We need to stop thinking or contemplating things which we know are wrong, spiritually. And we need a lot of prayer. We need to turn to the Lord and ask Him to bring His cleansing love into the inner world of our thoughts and intentions.

It is wonderful that the Ten Commandments end by lifting us up to a higher level. They encourage us to not be content just to clean up our external behavior so other people think of us as being honest and loyal and good and faithful and true. They invite us to pay attention to the world of the spirit, the world of attitude, and intentions. And in that area we need Divine help. We need to look to the Lord and ask for His love and His wisdom to purify us, cleansing the inside so that all of our life may be clean.

A person can live as a citizen in any country provided he or she obeys its laws. How can a person live in the kingdom of God? We do this not just by obeying laws, but by changing our attitudes, because the kingdom of God is the kingdom of the heart, and mind. Blessed are those people whose hearts are full of love, understanding, compassion, honesty, integrity. Those people also are full of peace and joy and are not far from the kingdom of God.