Mission Devotional Day 3
Then God spoke all these words
DAY 3
READ: Exodus 20:1-21
The story is told of a student away at college who asked his mother to mail his Bible to him. When the clerk at the mail counter asked if the package contained anything breakable, the mom replied, “Only the ten commandments!”
Many Christians have a somewhat awkward relationship with the commandments, thinking that they are too legalistic for believers who are saved by faith and freed from the burden of the law.
But these “ten words,” as they are called in Hebrew, are not a strategy for trying to save ourselves by our works. Remember, when Moses delivers the commandments, the people have already been delivered from their bondage in Egypt. God has saved them, and now, even more, they belong to him. This dynamic is reflected in the injunction we find in I Corinthians 6:20 where Paul writes, “You were purchased with a price; therefore, glorify God in your bodies.”
In the Heidelberg Catechism, which dates from 1563, the Ten Commandments are included in the section entitled “On Gratitude.” The authors understood that these commandments become for us an expression of gratitude to the God who has saved us and cares for his people so much that he won’t leave them to their own devices. Keeping the commandments won’t save us because we cannot keep them perfectly. No, these decisions and actions don’t save us, but they can help us to understand and live the kind of life that will enable us to flourish and to express our gratitude to God.
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
Are you comfortable thinking about the Ten Commandments as a gift from a loving God? Is there a commandment that you find particularly difficult to keep?
Can you ask God to do in you what you have not been able to do on your own?
PRAYER
Dear Lord, help me understand what it means to belong to you, and in a world of competing authorities, deepen my confidence in your word’s instructions about the kind of living that brings us life as you intend for it to be. Amen.