In this past week, we, at our membership class, dealt with the topic of a healthy church having the right, God given right, to discipline its members, what it means to be instructed and corrected by the body of elders. In that talk, we dealt with the 10 commandments, which is obviously the paradigm by which we measure. What is good and healthy instruction? What is the thing that we are commanded to be realigned to? And so from that, I thought it would be helpful for us to deal with one of those commandments that I mentioned on the night, the tenth commandment, the command not to covet, As perhaps one of the most influential, of the 10, if you can put it that way, because it touches on so many aspects of the other nine.
And we'll soon see how that works. But as a way of introducing the topic, there's a book written by an author called Oliver James entitled Affluenza. So it's a play on words on influenza. Affluenza, how to be successful and stay sane. And James reflects on the dysfunction of western culture generated by the relentless greed and a desire for more.
He writes, consumption holds out the false promise that an internal lack can be fixed by an external means. We medicate our misery through buying things. He illustrates this point by highlighting the shift in attitudes in the advertising industry after World War two. People no longer, he says, bought soap to make them clean. They bought the promise that it would make them beautiful.
In the virtual world of ads, toothpaste was not to kill bacteria, but to create white teeth. Cars were for prestige rather than travel, and even foodstuffs such as oranges were for vitality, not nutrition. Needs were replaced by the confected wants that people did not know they had. This is the world we've grown up in. In the words of one marketing expert, advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, they are a loser.
And so within this type of world, God speaks a word to us today about the deepest longings of our hearts, and God is doing this in the 10 commandments. Specifically, like I mentioned, the tenth commandment, speaks to the issue of the dread that unless we have more, unless we have the right kind of stuff, unless we have it, whatever it is, I cannot be happy or at peace. Unless I have it, I cannot be happy. We are trying to fix, in other words, an internal lack by an external means. But the message of the last words of God's 10 commands is that trying to fix ourselves with that sort of logic, well, it simply will not work.
It will not work. So let's have a read this morning of what God says again of these things. And we're gonna turn to Exodus 20. And then I also want to jump to the New Testament and we'll read a parable of what Jesus had to say on this topic as well in Luke 12. But firstly, Exodus 20:1, the 10 commandments.
And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love Me and keep My commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
The Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days, you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work. You or your son or your daughter, your male servant or your female servant or your livestock or the sojourner who is within your gates.
For in six days, the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Honour your father and your mother that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery.
You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covet your neighbour's house. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife or his male servant or his female servant or his ox or his donkey or anything that is your neighbour's. Then we go to Luke chapter 12.
We're gonna read from verse 15. And he, who is Jesus, said to them, this is the disciples but the crowd with them, take care and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. And he told them a parable saying, the land of a rich man produced plentifully. And he thought to himself, what shall I do? For I have nowhere to store my crops.
And he said, I will do this. I will tear down my barns and build larger ones. And there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years. Relax, eat, drink, be merry.
But God said to him, fool, this night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be? So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich towards God. This morning, want to consider the Bible's teaching on the tenth commandment under two headings. First, I want us to think about the diagnostic that God provides for us in this commandment. And then secondly, we'll think about the provision that God offers us as He gives us this diagnosis.
Firstly, the diagnostic, and secondly, the provision. So first, the diagnosis of the heart. The tenth commandment is set apart from all the others in one vital aspect. It is the only command that explicitly addresses the motive of the heart. The other nine, while always dealing with the implications of our motives, they nevertheless start and focus on behaviour.
You shall not murder, you shall not steal. The other nine commandments speak about blasphemy, about Sabbath breaking, about dishonouring parents. They focus on the actions or our behaviours. But the tenth commandment starts not with doing this with the action, but with the attitude itself. To covet is to desire within your heart.
Its main focus is the disposition of our heart. Many of us have had medical scans. A few years ago, I had to go for a brain scan, which was quite scary at the time, and I was amazed at what they could see about a c in my brain or concerning my brain. This is a great point for my dad to make the joke that there was something in it, which was amazing to see in the first place. But this brain scan along with similar scans you may have had reveals what is going on out of sight.
What is going on in the body where we don't normally have a chance to see. And no doubt, it's a shocking thing when you look on a screen and you can see a cancerous mass, or a blocked artery, or a bleed that you would have had no idea about before. And yet, as hard as it is, that's the data that we need to know if we're going to get the help that is required. And that, in many ways, is precisely what the tenth commandment is. It's like a spiritual MRI for the soul.
It offers diagnostic insight into the deep structures of sin that motivate and drive our deepest desires. And when we notice the diagnostic itself, we discover that very often, it is exactly this issue of coveting that stands behind each of the other sins listed in the 10 commandments. John Piper in his flagship book, Desiring God, says, have you ever considered that the 10 commandments begin and end with virtually the same commandment? The first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me, and then the last commandment, you shall not covet. He says they are almost equivalent commands.
Coveting, he says, is desiring anything other than God in a way that betrays a loss of contentment and satisfaction in Him. Coveting is desiring anything other than God in a way that betrays a loss of contentment and satisfaction in Him. Covetousness is a heart divided by two gods. In a profound way, the tenth command links to the first one, which says you shall love only God. And so you can see that they're actually bookends.
They are linked. And it's linked in this way. To covet is to deny God's sufficiency. If God provides what we need and yet we long to have something that He has not given us, then we are denying the goodness of God's provision. We look beyond God.
We look past God to see what we believe He should be giving us. In other words, He alone is not sufficient. We need more. And so this deep seated dissatisfaction eats away at the trust we have in God. So we look to other things.
We look to other gods to get us the things we desire more than God. That is why the New Testament calls coveting idolatry. This is what Paul says in Colossians 3:5. Put to death, therefore, what is earthly in you, sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. Paul knew that the law on coveting is the battleground of the heart.
Coveting is essentially discontentment with God and a desire for a better satisfaction than Him. Dissatisfied with our own situation, we are jealous. We grieve the good that is happening to our neighbour. And it is precisely because it addresses the motive of the heart that the tenth commandment is linked to all the other laws of God as well. What does it mean you shall not steal other than I want what that guy has, so I'm gonna take it.
What is adultery? It is to covet someone else's wife or husband. Sorry. I'm not from the eighteen hundreds. I am a sensitive new age man.
To covet another person's wife, to so desire that person that you are willing to commit adultery. What is breaking the Sabbath? It is seeing what other people are doing on the Lord's Day and thinking that they get a better deal. You shall not covet is a law of the heart's motive and God is saying, if you can obey this one, you are well on your way to obeying the others. But the tenth commandment is a phenomenal law.
If you think about it, can you tell me or can you think of any place in Australian law that outlaws coveting? There is no such law. There is no such law in any jurisdiction that I can think of. Is there a law that tells us what to desire? There isn't.
So you can enforce the consequences of coveting, you can enforce, you know, that you can't steal, you can enforce fraud, but you can't enforce coveting because it is a matter of the heart. And this is the point that the 10 commandments are actually pointing towards. The 10 commandments are more than civil laws. They are more than laws meant to govern a nation, and so we have to be careful when we say Australia is a Christian nation because we are ruled based on law from the 10 commandments. Where is this final one applied?
And so this leads me to think we should be very careful to press that connection because God's intention wasn't simply for Israel to act a certain way. God's intention for His people was to be a certain type of people. God's intention was always to overhaul the hearts, not simply constrain behaviour. We know the Bible says that God searches the hearts, that God knows the heart, that God is concerned about the state of the heart. And so we see this highlighted in the second reading from today, Luke chapter 12, the parable of the fool.
If you go there again, you'll notice that the word soul is talked about several times in this short story. That word soul in the Greek, which is where we get our English word psyche from, firstly, the man says to his own soul in verse 19, soul, you have ample goods. Relax, eat, drink, and be merry. But then in verse 20, God says, fool, this night your soul is required from you. What is the battleground?
It's the soul, the deepest part of our being. The man firstly seeks to soothe his soul by pointing out all the possessions that he has now gathered. And when God's judgement comes, he takes away not his possessions, He takes away his soul. Your soul is required of you. And so coveting is a sin of the deepest parts of the human psyche.
Coveting concerns the passions, the pleasures of our heart. So let me ask you, how are you doing with coveting? Do you painfully desire to have the admiration and the respect of others? Do you envy a celebrity or their lifestyle? Do you envy a friend who is popular at school?
Popular at work or within your friendship circles? Do you want the type of money that a certain person has? Ask yourself the question, why do we Australians have such a bad problem with credit card debt? It's because we have a problem with coveting. We buy stuff that we can't afford.
So a very honest question to ask yourself is, do you have debt? And if you do, I'm sure you can argue there's good debt and there's bad debt. But if you do, why? Do you have discontentment in your life? Do you feel desperately sad because you long to be in a different situation than you find yourself in right now?
It applies to so many things. If you are single and you are desperately sad because you're not married, or if you're married and you're desperately looking for someone else or to at least be single. If you were to say yes to any of those examples, you are struggling with covering. And this command tells us that God not only cares about our outward actions, the things that we do, He cares about our longings. Like Adam and Eve back in the garden, who according to Genesis 3:6, when they were tempted, saw that the fruit was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that it was desirable to make one wise and that is why they took the fruit.
Well, it's the sin, therefore, that thrust humanity into the fall and that was ultimately the breaking of the tenth commandment. We want that thing when God said, that's not yours to have. And so you can say that coveting is a primal sin of discontentment that festers in the heart and it looks to find objects to latch onto, whispering that same old lie first heard by Eve from Satan, does God really not want you to have that? The lie is that until we have that relationship, until we have that approval, until we have the house that we've always dreamt of, until our children excel at school, until we have the body type we always dreamed of, until until until until we have that thing, we won't be satisfied. And that is the lie of Satan.
Watch out, Jesus says. Be on guard. Because as soon as you find yourself saying, if only, then there is no limit to what type of other sin you might be willing to commit. You will be willing to forfeit your own soul in pursuit of those things. And so uniquely for the tenth commandment, the command to not covet, well, that is a diagnosis of the heart.
And so the second question, the logical question is how do we put coveting to death in our lives? How do we overcome it? Well, the answer is by thinking and remembering far more often what God has provided us. The apostle Paul talks about his struggle with coveting. In Philippians 4:11, he begins by saying, for I have learned.
What does that mean? Well, Paul didn't know it at once and now he has learned it. I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.
What's the secret, Paul? He tells us in the next verse, verse 13, I can do all things through Him who strengthens me. And so for this reason, Paul can encourage the Philippian Christians in verse 19 of that passage, my God shall supply all your needs according to the riches of His glory in Christ Jesus. That is where your supply will be found. That is where your need is, in Christ Jesus, the riches of God's glory.
It's in fact Paul's version of David's prayer in Psalm 73:25. I believe it could be attributed to David. I'll have to check. But Psalm 73 nonetheless. Verse 25, where it asks the question, who have I in heaven but You?
The earth has nothing I desire beside You. Who have I anywhere? Who have I on earth beside You? There is nothing here that I desire more than You. I am satisfied with what I have in You, my God.
You are enough for my heart. The throbbing discontent of our hearts is a signal to you and I this morning that we need Jesus Christ. That is what the discontentment is pointing towards. We need to be satisfied. We need to learn, however, to say to discontented hearts, soul, heart, you are discontented because you've been looking for contentment in all the wrong places.
The contentment, the hope, the thing that you are seeking, you will never find because you are going to wells that give you salty water. And the more you drink from the salty water, the thirstier you'll be. You will never find water that quenches you there. That is what lust is. That is what theft is.
That is what pride is. Greed is salty water that you drink to try and quench your dry mouth. It might look like it's going to satisfy that salty water, it looks like it's going to quench your thirst, but the more you drink, the thirstier you become. But the good news for us, good news for our discontented hearts is that there is a fountain of living water. And if we will simply go there to drink, then the promise is what Jesus said, you will never be thirsty again.
Jesus said that anyone who comes to Him, they will receive this water, and in return, streams of living water will flow in and through them, in and out of them. In other words, you will never be thirsty again. There is so much water that you can drink until you are satisfied. It is the type of contentment that another psalm, Psalm 131, also gives us. Beautifully summed up.
My heart is not proud, O Lord. My eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul like a weaned child with its mother. Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
Think about the metaphor that is being used here of a weaned child. On the one hand, the Bible is telling us that we are a child. It's an image of complete dependence. We are completely dependent on God. Without Him, we can do nothing.
But specifically, we are told we are like a weaned child. That is an image of contentment. Unweaned children are children that still require breast milk, and I'm learning all about that at the moment, as you can imagine. An unweaned child, is a baby that will cry well, a newborn baby is a baby that will cry for three things I've learned. Being tired, needing a nappy change, or being hungry.
An unweaned child will cry until they get the thing that they want from their mom, her milk. Only then is an unweaned child quiet. But a weaned child is the picture of satisfaction. They are satisfied just to be with mom for herself. That is how the Christian can actually obey the tenth commandment.
When grace changes our hearts, we don't ultimately care what happens to the life that we have. As long as we have Him, the rest doesn't matter as much. The pursuit of recognition or wealth or power is not compared to the eternal recognition we have. The eternal wealth that we have, the eternal power that has been given to us in God. A weaned child is satisfied in the presence of God and it's not someone who knows contentment in a principle way, but someone who has worked the truth of the gospel into their soul so that it is a felt reality.
They experience satisfaction in all aspects of their life, but this is only ever achieved when we come to know what Jesus Christ has given us. It's when we realise what we have gained from the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross, our reconciliation with God the Father Himself, that we are utterly transformed. Internally, our hearts are then calmed into contentment. Externally, we live lives of humility and righteousness. We don't steal.
We don't fudge numbers. We don't sneakily try to get away with things until we're caught. We are people of integrity in our actions. And so the more we mature in our faith, even when we experience hardship, we realise that the reason God's actions are sometimes for us cloudy and unclear is not because we are wise and He is foolish. Things are cloudy and unclear to us because God is too great and too wonderful for us to understand.
That is what Psalm 131 is saying. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. If we are like weaned children with God, we can trust that if we really needed what we think we need, God is so wise and so good, He will have given it to us. But because we don't have it, well, perhaps we don't need it or at least we don't need it yet. And so friends, if I have God, I have everything.
And because I have found God in Christ, I'm now free to move past the gifts that God gives me and I am free to marvel and be satisfied with the gift of God Himself to me in Jesus Christ. So in finishing, may the covenant of our hearts be exposed to us today. It is a healthy thing to be diagnosed. Secondly, may we realise with clarity how destructive it can be for all parts of our lives. And finally, may we commit ourselves to fix our gaze on Jesus Christ continually, learning to be content in all circumstances because He strengthens me, and therefore, I am able to endure abundance and need, hunger and plenty.
Let's pray. Lord, we come to bow our hearts before You, realising, Lord, that You have spoken directly to the deepest parts of our hearts. Holy Spirit, expose those things in our psyches, in our souls, that passionately desire for things other than You. And God, grant us the grace that by Your love, You will allow us to taste those pleasures now. To taste and see that the Lord is good.
To know that with You, there is fullness of joy. To understand, Lord, like a weaned child that by Your side are pleasures forevermore. And so Lord, help us to gaze so regularly, so habitually, so consistently on what we have received eternally through the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, reconciling us to God, granting us citizenship within the kingdom, so that as heirs of Christ, with Christ, we receive the wealth of the kingdom. Our Lord, that we can sit in the heavenly places, that we rule alongside Him. Lord, that by association, we grant the wealth of the world.
Guard our hearts, Lord, protect us from the temptations of the evil one who continually will ask us, does God really not want you to have that? Help us to say to him and our souls, if we have received Jesus Christ, we don't need anything more. In His name we pray. Amen.