#LENT2019 Day 19: Exodus 20
(For our lent devotional, we’ll be going through the book of Exodus with the rest of our church and be looking at the hand of God carrying the Israelites through their captivity and oppression as well as their sin and unbelief. Keep up with us as we look at how much God loves His people and never leaves us alone.)
First, read: Exodus 20.
Ah, the verses that are most both overused and ignored: the Ten Commandments.
Some of them are pretty straight-forward to obey, like “Do not murder,” or “Do not steal.” But others are not so straight-forward, like “You shall not have any other gods before me,” and “Keep the Sabbath holy”— or “Do not covet” and “Honor your mother and father.” Right? I want to ask you guys a couple of questions:
Do you care about these laws?
Do you know why they were written?
Do you know these laws?
Do you obey these laws?
Man, I have had not so good answers to these straight-forward questions myself when it comes to the Ten Commandments. After the point of Sunday school when I had to dance along to songs about the Ten commandments and memorize them, I don’t think there was a single day in my life where I was able to keep all ten commandments throughout my life. Naturally, in my pride and in my “I-know-it-all-and-no-one-can-tell-me-what-to-do” attitude, I disregarded them.
Even when I grew older and learned more about God, when I accepted God as my Lord and Savior forreal at 18-19, even though I wanted to care about the Bible and Jesus, I still avoided the ten commandments. Something about them was so… daunting. I knew that I would never be able to follow them. Besides, the Jesus that I knew was loving and gracious, but this God was… scary. I was afraid to confront the possibility that I would be still held completely accountable for my actions, so I ran away, hoping that these words meant nothing now that Jesus died for us. But these days, God has been showing me that His love is all over these commandments.
One clear lesson for me has been on this one: “Keep the Sabbath holy.”
When you grow up in a Korean church, the Sabbath is not just a holy day. It’s a day of play with my friends, or a day of eating with the family. In fact, because it was my parents’ only day off in the week, Sunday was the main day that we set aside for our family to eat together, often with our extended family as well. I also grew up seeing my family serve on Sundays— make food, sing on choir, hand out the joobos (papers of the order of worship), go to meetings, and leave church at 3-4 after getting there at 10 to eat with family. So I grew up thinking that Sabbath was just about being in a different context and getting away from work and school to be with family and church instead, even if you work the same.
After becoming a pastor, as life caught up to me and Sunday became my busiest day, I started to hit a wall. All of a sudden, my body started shedding pounds, my appetite faded, and my energy hit new lows. My family and friends were worried for me and kept telling me to go get check ups, see a doctor. People started to stop me and ask me if I was okay. I was confused. Is there something wrong with me? Life is great, I’m not trying to starve, and I love being with everyone on Sundays… God, why are you letting me lose steam? What’s going on?
What was wrong with me wasn’t just my eating schedule or rhythm of life. It wasn’t the quality of my life, it was my Sabbath. You see, I didn’t know how to take breaks and rest. I’m not just talking about resting my brain and scrolling mindlessly on Instagram. (If that was rest, then what you and I’ve grown up in would be been fine.) But God was showing me that real rest was when i went into God’s presence and spent time with Him. Now, there was nothing wrong with serving on Sundays and working for God— God loved that I was fulfilling my calling. But He cared that I rested with real rest. Rest was time with God and rest was healthy. Rest was single-handedly where I would be able to re-charge to be used for God’s glory. All this time, I had misunderstood what a Sabbath was.
Yet God warned me about this in Sunday school, in a song, in a way that was digestible for me. He was telling me all along, “Rest, Jane. You need it. I created you to need it— I took it too when I made the world.”
Another lesson on God’s love is clear in “You shall not covet.”
We live in a fast-paced, sell-yourself-in-an-Instagram-resume culture where we always want the next best thing and simultaneously always want to showcase the next best thing to the people around us. We think that if we follow all the trends, we have enough friends, and we have enough clout, enough influence in our spheres of life, we’re living it up.
But in order to be the best, we have to be looking around and comparing ourselves to others to make sure that we don’t fall behind, that we can keep up. And the other side of that, when others’ lives seem to be so much better than ours (which is, like, all the time), we get discouraged. Our self-esteem drops. We might start to wonder, Damn, why isn’t my life like that? What am I doing while this person is living it up?
And our smiles fade. When the person next to us is doing well, instead of being happy for them, we start to get jealous. Why can’t my life be like theirs? How come they get that instead of me? What am I missing? Others’ happiness becomes our misfortune.
God warned us about this too. He told us all our lives that it’s not good to want what others have instead of looking around at what we have and being grateful to God for it. God knew because He made us.
I love Jesus’s summary of the ten commandments because I think in the ten commandments, it’s easy to read them as laws and forget the Father’s heart for us behind them. But when Jesus explains it, it gets clearer. He says this:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt. 22:37-40)
Jesus makes it clear: God didn’t want for us to follow rules. He wanted a love relationship with us, and He wanted healthy, pure love relationships between His people. He wanted us to thrive, and He knew how. In spite of everything it might seem like, God is loving His people and teaching us how to live according to our design. And because Jesus has won the victory, because we live under the freedom of salvation that comes to us in grace, we can follow these commandments not to earn a seat at the table and hopefully be free and happy, but because we have a seat at God’s table, because we are free and happy.
Now that I’m an adult, now that I’m a pastor, I think God is really graciously, humbly leading me to obey these laws. He’s teaching me His heart and love behind every law He puts. And as you all read this, my prayer is that your eyes would be opened to see what God was doing when He put all this together. Remember these four questions, and try answering these this time:
Do you care about these laws?
Do you know why they were written?
Do you know these laws?
Do you obey these laws?
Oh man. How He loves us all. May you feel His love and be challenged to live to the fullest today.
love,
janedo
