You Shall Not Covet...

This weekend our pastor finished up his sermons on the 10 commandments with "The Heat of Commandment Keeping." Here are some highlights that challenged me.

Greed is that insatiable desire for more.
Envy is that resentful awareness of the other’s advantage.
Coveting is that powerful desire to get what belongs to another.

It seems that God placed the commandments hardest to keep at the beginning and the end.
In fact the two are quite similar.

The first says, "You shall have no other gods before me."
The last says "Don’t covet" or in essence, "Don’t set your affections on something else and think it will satisfy you."

The first is about trusting and serving God alone.
The last is about trusting and serving something else.
The first is about God being God in our lives.
The last is about something else being god in our lives.

Michael Horton said, "We are suckers for the latest products promising the latest cure for what the world has decided to be our latest problem (or need)." (Horton, The Law of Perfect Freedom, 251) .

What gets your best investment?

One author wrote that there are four stages of desire:
The initial desire
Dwelling on the desire
Developing a plan to satisfy the desire
Acting out the plan. (Douma, The Ten Commandments, 340)

Nine Requisites for Contented Living:

1. Health enough to make work a pleasure.
2. Wealth enough to support your needs.
3. Strength enough to battle with difficulties and overcome them.
4. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.
5. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.
6. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.
7. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others.
8. Faith enough to make real the things of God.
9. Hope enough to remove all anxious ars concerning the future. Johann Wolfgang Goethe