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Each week at The Shepherd’s Church, we preach short homilies on the law of God and have decided to share those here as a resource to the people of God. This week, the command to not commit adultery.
Well, every week we look at the law of God because we wanna know how to obey this God. We wanna know how to worship Him rightly. We wanna know how to follow Him in every area of our life. We don't want a single nook and cranny of our existence to live in a kind of unsanctified or undisconnected kind of way to what God would have us live.
Now we know we don't obey God to be saved, but we know that as we have been saved, we have been saved for good works, not saved by good works. Today, we're looking at the seventh commandment, which is you shall not commit adultery.
I went too fast, sorry. You shall not commit adultery. Exodus 20, verse 14. Now there's a desire inside of every single one of us to be desired. It doesn't matter how a person presents himself. It doesn't matter how crotchety or Scroogian a person looks on the outside.
Underneath the scowl, he wants what you want, what I want. He wants to be known. He wants to be loved. He wants to be understood, accepted, wanted. And when he has shown who he is, he doesn't wanna be thrown away.
And that desire in and of itself is not wicked. God made it. It was there in the garden. They were both naked, the man and the wife, and they were not ashamed. There was disclosure of who they were. There was acceptance of who they were, and there was not a rejection between each other of who they were.
It's a desire that fuels marriage. It warms a home. It creates true friendship. It's good. But what God made good, sin bends. The desire to be desired can become, while it was a good thing, it can become a taskmaster.
It can become a slave to us. It can become an over-mastering passion that drives us into relationships that are idolatrous, relationships that are destructive, and relationships that are sinful. Why?
Because our desires are always downstream of our worship. Whatever sits upon the throne of your heart will tell your desires where to run. Think about a mirror. Every morning you stand in front of one and you ask the same question.
How do I look? Does this look okay? Can I go out looking like this? Some days I don't. That's the days I should have. We do the same thing, though, with our souls. All of us are always holding something up to our face and asking a deeper question.
Am I worth anything? Am I wanted? Do I matter? Do I have value? God meant for those questions to be asked. He just meant for them to be answered in Him. He meant for us to see ourselves in His face. There's this great phrase in the Psalms that says, we are the apple of His eye.
Now, the translation annoys me because what the actual Hebrew says is we are the little man in His eye. And what that means is that you have gotten so close to the face of God that He's bent down and stooped so close to you that you can see a reflection in His pupil.
That's what that means. I don't know what apple of the eye means. I really don't. But you are the little man and so you're the reflection in His eye. So we were made to know God. We were made for His face to shine upon us.
We were made to be in relationship with Him. We were made to find our value and our worth and our identity and everything else in Him. But Paul tells us what happens when we turn our face from this God to everything else.
Paul says in Romans 125, they exchanged the truth of God for the lie and they worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator. And then look what comes right alongside of it. God gave them up to uncleanness.
God gave them up to vile passions. God gave them up. Disordered worship always produces disordered desires. And when we turn from the creator to the creature, we don't actually stop desiring. We simply to begin desiring the wrong things and the wrong ways and in the wrong places which leads to death.
The prophets knew this. God said to His people, surely as a wife treacherously departs from her husband, so you Israel have dealt treacherously with your husband. With me, O house of Israel, Jeremiah 320.
In scripture, idolatry and adultery are the same thing. And adultery is idolatry. That is why the seventh commandment was never meant to be about what one merely did with their body. Yes, adultery is when you are unfaithful to your spouse.
But who is your true and greater husband that we have been unfaithful to in our sin? When we don't find our worth, our value, our identity in the face of Almighty God, we will start holding up creatures as our mirrors.
And the opinion of a coworker will become our God. The glance of a stranger will become our God. A number on a picture will become our God. A spouse will become our God. Food will become our God. Addictions will become our God.
Everything else will become what we set on the throne of our heart that we say, that's going to satisfy me and it won't. Every one of those is a cracked mirror. It will flatter you today and it will condemn you tomorrow.
It cannot hold you long enough to keep you. So the question that I wanna ask us today is what cracked mirror have you been looking in? What broken thing have you put on the throne of your heart that said, I'm gonna have this and this is gonna satisfy me and it doesn't, it hasn't and it won't?
And what repentance is necessary for you to say, God, I'm sorry, I want this thing vacated from your throne. I want you back on the throne of my heart. I want to see your face more than anything else.
What is it that we need to repent of today? And will we have the courage to do it? Let's pray. Lord, I find it so interesting that you compare our sin and idolatry to adultery. When you say you shall not commit adultery, we often think about the horizontal relationships in our life.
We think about that we ought to remain faithful to our spouse, amen. And then even if we press the application further, we should be faithful to the degree that the relationship has been defined with that person.
So we should be faithful to our spouse in a marital way. We should be faithful to our children in a parental way. We should be faithful to our coworker in a vocational way. We should be faithful in all aspects of our life in these horizontal relationships that we have in the ways that those relationships have been established.
And yet God, let us not forget that we must be faithful to you in the verticality of worship. Let us not forget that you above all are our bridegroom, our husband. You say it, your maker is your husband.
You say that for the joy Christ left to the treasures of heaven to claim for himself a bride, that's us. So Lord help us in our lives not to adulterate and whore after many gods and many sins and many trifle things.
Lord, let us receive the love that you have for us as a true husband, the washing of the water of the word that you have for your bride, the church. And Lord, let us not play and let us not dabble in the very sins that caused you to die.
Lord, when we see those things in our heart, may we repent and may we repent with sorrow over our sin and yet joy in the fact that you have died for those sins and you have given us grace and you have given us freedom.
It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen. Thank you for listening to this homily on the law of God from our Covenant Renewal worship this past Lord's Day. We publish these messages each week because we believe that God loves his law and far from throwing it away, we believe that the death and resurrection of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will actually help us learn to love and obey God's law.
And that's our prayer for you, that as you chew on these expositions each week, that you would both learn to love and come into alignment with the law of God. And we pray that you would do that by the Spirit's power through the finished work of Christ and to the glory of God.
And with that, God bless you.