This morning I had a breakfast meeting with a dear friend of mine Louie Posavac. We were discussing a sermon from Road To Life Church Chesterton on Holiness not being legalism and also the topic of mercy and how they tie together.
As I am writing my book on mercy being God's heart I told Louie God has given me revelations and much insight into His commandments and how they are about relationship, compassion, love and mercy. And in my book I go on to expound on each of the ten commandments and show the love and mercy within each one.
I think some of these commandments are so popular, we tend to gloss over them. We tend to think if it starts out with "Thou shalt NOT . . ." then it must be a commandment. Thats because we haven't taken the time to really study them. If you do, you will find they are to protect us from the enemy and our own sinful ways.
Then Louie said something that I think came straight from God's heart. He said, we think that the commandments are about NOT doing things and that we shouldn't do this and we shouldn't do that. But Louie said its more than that, its about what we NEED to do.
"Thou shalt not steal" means we should give. "thou salt not have any god's before me" means we should worship only Him! See, the first four of the ten commandments are about loving God and receiving the mercy He wants for us by giving us His protection against the ways of a fallen and broken world that is ruled by the enemy. God knows our hearts are easily deceived and He gave us these laws for our protection and safety! Then the last six of the commandments are about loving others and giving and doing mercy for our neighbors. The first four has to come first because without them we are not able to follow the other six.
Holiness is all about receiving God's heart and giving that out to others through filling various needs. But, in order to receive that Holiness we need to know what God's heart is. And to know His heart is only found in intimacy with Him. To spend time with Him daily.
- Doug McGowan
:-)
ReplyDelete