The First Commandment – No Other gods

Appreciate Tyler for leading our songs this morning. He always does a great job and welcome you to our Sunday morning worship service and we’re glad to have you with us today. We are going to be looking at the Ten Commandments. It has made the news recently with the legislature passing the law that it has passed about allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted in the schools of Texas.

And it’s interesting that there is this monument on the steps of the Capitol in Austin, Texas, to the Ten Commandments, and that is there, and this particular monument stood the test of the Supreme Court many years ago. The Supreme Court allowed it to stand because of the historical background to it, and now the Texas Legislature has passed a bill, and that bill is to mandate the presentation of the Ten Commandments in every classroom where a 16 by 20 poster The lettering, specific wording in the particular legislation, the wording is in the legislation. If that’s donated, the teacher must put it on their classroom wall. And so that’s the legislation that the Texas court has passed.

I read an update on that this morning that it is in the courts. There are, of course, some groups that are challenging it and they are trying to get the courts to overturn it and say that it violates the freedom of speech and this, that, and the other, or freedom of religion, that kind of thing.

But anyway, this has been done. Personally, I applaud the effort. I think we need to have more teaching on the Ten Commandments in the schools. And why is that? Well, when you look around the world today and you just turn on the news and you see these commandments being violated left and right all over the place, people being murdered, people committing adultery, People involved in all kinds of horrible situations. It just makes you think, well, if they had been taught something about what God says to order their lives, maybe they wouldn’t have done that. I don’t know.

But it is a measure designed to help improve society, and I believe it would improve society if these Ten Commandments were something that children could see on a regular basis and then understand where they came from and what their purpose ultimately is.

And so I thought, given this context, this time of the year and the various different things that are going on in this regard, that we might just look at these Ten Commandments and think about them for a while. And so that’s what we’re going to do. The Ten Commandments basically can be broken up into two different sets of Commandments.

Commandments 1 through 4 emphasize man’s relationship with God. And then Commandments 5 through 10 emphasize man’s relationship to man. And as we think about our relationship with God, basically God is saying in those first four commandments, you need to love God.

And then in the next six commandments, He’s saying, you need to love others. And that’s the basic fundamental premise here behind these commandments. You remember what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 22, verses 36 through 40, when He was asked, well, what is the greatest commandment? What is the greatest commandment? And His answer was, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul, and mind. And the second is likened to it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

And then he says, on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. In other words, as you’re looking at the law of Moses, all of it hinges on loving God and loving your neighbor. Those are the two fundamentals. And that’s what the Ten Commandments are all about, really. Loving God and loving your neighbor.

So let’s think about this first commandment. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. This is Exodus chapter 20 and verse 3. And when we think about this commandment, it’s the very first one. And why is it, the very first one? Because the tendency in our lives is to not give God our priority because we have so many other things that want to intrude on our time and on our efforts and on our thinking, whatever they might be.

And we tend to kind of get drawn away by those things, right? I know this time of the year, it’s a big time of the year for us. And it’s exciting. You know, it’s fun. I love the beginning of the school year. I love football season. That’s no secret, I don’t think. I think a lot of you do, too.

And it’s easy to get caught up into that. It’s easy to get caught up into so many other things that can suck our time so that we now are engaged in physical activities and we neglect the spiritual. Well, God is saying we need to give Him first place. Think about the idolatry that they had in In the Old Testament, these idols took away from God, and today we have idols that can take away from God. What is our idol? Well, think about the idols that we set up in the heart sometimes. These things that we really focus on too much, maybe, and that we need to back away from.

In Ezekiel 14, verse 3, Ezekiel talked about the idols of the heart, and God said, you know, they’ve placed something else in their heart that’s a priority over me, and they want me to come in and fix things? That can’t happen.

So, and that just makes sense if you think about it. If we get into our lives in such a shape so that they need to be reorganized and changed, if we don’t put the right standard in place to make those reorganizations and changes, nothing good is going to come from that because we’re not changing the main thing.

Which is the priorities. Mortify, therefore, your members which are upon the earth, fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil, concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry. So you look at all of these things and even though they may be mental sins, God still considers that to be idolatry, even though we don’t have these physical idols, you know, like they did back in ancient Israel.

We can have these idols of the heart that sometimes will take control of us and rearrange our lives in such a way so that now God isn’t first anymore. Well, let’s think about that point. God has to come first. That’s really the heart of this first commandment.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. God comes first. And, of course, we’ve already noted Matthew chapter 22 and verse 37, and the question is, who’s number one, right? Who is number one? Jesus said it has to be God. The first and greatest commandment, thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. God wants everything.

Now, that doesn’t mean that we have to leave everything else out. It just means that whatever we do, He’s got to take the priority in it. It’s got to be to His glory. It’s got to be to His honor. And we can do a lot of things in this life that, as a Christian, we’re doing those things, and we’re glorifying God while doing it. And that’s okay. That’s a good thing.

But Jesus taught us very clearly that nothing can be held equal to or in competition with God. Think about Matthew chapter 6 and verse 24. No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and mammon. You can’t have an equal situation here. Sometimes people call it riding the fence. Right? You can’t ride the fence with God. You got to be on His side all the time and working for Him. Think about the temptation that Satan brought before Jesus when he asked Him to bow down and worship Him. And Jesus answered, We are to worship God. No other thing in this world, regardless of how precious it is to us, is worthy of worship. Only God is worthy of our worship.

The Apostle Paul wrote these things in Philippians 3, verses 7 through 8. He said, But what things were gained to me, these I counted loss for Christ. Yea, doubtless, and I count all things but loss, for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.

And so, he knew that a lot of the things that he had held on to before had to be given up so that he could pursue Christ. Now, Paul was also a tent maker. He also traveled. He did other things. I’m sure he had some family connections at some point.

And so, he had friends, and he loved people, and so he didn’t necessarily give up any other activities other than those things that conflicted with following Christ. He gave those up, and that’s what he’s talking about here. And he was happy to give them up because he knew that Christ had to come first within his life.

And so, thou shalt have no other gods before me, first and foremost, means that God comes first. God comes first. But then secondly, thou shalt have no other gods before me means that we’ve got to identify our idols, whatever they are. Now, everybody has idols of some kind or another, all right? And don’t say you don’t, because you do.

And because this is the struggle, right? This is the struggle that we have every day, trying to balance things and maintain, not let things get out of whack, you know, so that we don’t allow the wrong priorities to take control.

Our idols are things that are the most precious to us. And what are those things? What is most precious to us? They’re different for different people. But let’s look at a few popular ones, I think, that we could say are idols for many people in this world today that they struggle with. And some people have just been completely taken with some of these idols in the world.

What is the first one? The idol of consumption or gluttony. You think about people who have become addicted to drugs or who are chronic overeaters or who have alcohol issues or things like that. This is the idol of gluttony. And there’s a lot of people, you know, the buffet places, a lot of them are still in business. The fast food restaurants, they’re all out there, okay?

We know what they are and we know you can go there and you can fill up pretty good. But we’ve got to keep in mind that all of these things that are an allure to many people are things that can become idols to us.

Now, sometimes people get involved with drug use, and they get involved with alcohol abuse, and those things are very detrimental, very destructive to people’s lives. We could add other things to the list. I’m not trying to give a complete list here, but the Bible teaches us that if our God is our belly, then our glory is in our shame.

You know, and we’re not doing spiritually very well. And that we become lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. There’s the idol of sexuality. That’s a big one today. A lot of people in the world worship the idol of sexuality.

What does the Bible have to say about it? 1 Thessalonians 4, 3-8. 3-8, for this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality or fornication, that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarn you and testify, for God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness.

Therefore, he who rejects this does not reject man, but God. There’s the idolatry there, right? If you reject the teaching about human sexuality in the Bible, you’ve rejected God. You’re not following Him anymore. You’ve erected an idol in your heart to go after instead of doing the Lord’s will.

So we’ve got to think about that idol. Think about 1 Corinthians 6, 18-20. And so we want to glorify God in our bodies and not use them for the wrong purposes. We think about the idol of materialism. And this is another big one. You know, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t have a credit card or a debit card or a bank account, you know, and why is that?

Because it makes it more convenient to buy stuff. And this is materialism working. And this is something that we’ve got to wrestle with on a daily basis. How much stuff is too much stuff, right? And what do we do with it? Well, we’ve got to wrestle with this idol of materialism.

The Bible teaches us to flee from covetousness. Colossians 3, 5. We read that earlier. Look at Hebrews 13, verses 5 and 6. Let your conversation be without covetousness. What is covetousness? It’s the desire to possess and own and maintain stuff, right?

And a lot of times that belong to other people, you get caught up in this notion of wanting to have what somebody else has just because they have it. We don’t want to pursue that. We don’t want to think like that. We want to live modest lives.

Be content with such things as you have, for He has said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee, so that we may boldly say the Lord is my helper and I will not fear what man shall do to me.

So there’s an idol that can be erected in our heart, the idol of materialism. And then it all really stems back from the idol of self because what is the idol of materialism, the idol of sexuality, the idol of greed and money and all the other things that we’re thinking about? Where does that come from? It comes from me, right? And it comes from you. It comes from our desires We have in our heart. And so the idol of self is really what we’re all struggling with. Who’s going to take first place? God or me? That’s the bottom line. God or me? I saw something, you know, sometimes I get to scrolling through Facebook a little bit, and you see things that are interesting.

And I saw a little video. It said something about, you know, Generation Z and the language that they use and some of the things that they say. And there’s this thing they say about the main character, right? You’re not the main character. You know, they’ll tell each other things like that. And where does that come from? Well, it comes from telling stories and the main character in the story and some… Well, anyway, someone came along and said, God is the main character.

God is the main character. You know, that’s right. Wherever you go, God is there. He’s everywhere. He’s with you. He’s with me. He’s with everyone. He’s the main character. This is His world. We’re His people. We all belong to Him. He’s the main character.

And so, when we’re talking about the idol of self, we’re talking about trying to take over for God. And that’s really the biggest conflict, is that when we put ourselves in the place of God and try to be Him instead of just be who we are, we’re getting things out of whack, and we’re starting to worship self.

Think about these scriptures, 2 Timothy 3, 2-5. Men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, truce breakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.

Lovers of their own selves. This isn’t the same word that’s used in Matthew chapter 22. This is the Greek word philatos. But in Matthew chapter 22, when Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself, He’s using the word agape there. So these are two different words. The one word that’s used here in 2 Timothy 3 and the one word that’s used in Matthew 22, they’re different words for love. This love is more of an emotional type of love. It’s more of a love that comes from our passions, so to speak.

Whereas the love that Jesus is talking about in Matthew 22, the agape love, that’s love that comes from knowing what the right standard is and applying it to our lives faithfully and doing the right thing toward other people. So we are supposed to love one another as we love ourselves in that sense of doing the right thing for myself and for others, but not in the sense of letting our passions take control of our lives so that we then become passionate about our own interests solely. That’s the idol of self.

Philippians 2, verse 21, Paul says, “…for all seek their own, not the things which are Jesus Christ.” And that’s the issue. When you’re seeking your own and you leave God out, you have erected the idolatry of self. So what are we going to do about this commandment, this first commandment? Thou shalt have no other gods before me. We’re going to repent of our idolatry, right? And we’re going to make the changes that we need to make in order to put God first within our lives.

The problem is this. When we put idols first, we become what we worship. We become what we worship. And that is what brings so many problems into our lives. If you worship at the idol of sexuality, then your identity is going to become related to whatever that is. And we see that running amok in the world today, right?

If your idol is materialism, then your identity, when you worship at that idol, your identity has become more materialistic and you’re going to become like Scrooge McDuck or something like that, right? So, when your idol is self, you’ll be full of self, and you’ll be so self-centered and so conceited that no one will want to be around you, you know, because you give no attention to anyone else. We become what we worship.

So we’ve got to repent of our idolatry. Now you think this works toward God also. We become what we worship. If we worship God, we become like Him. And that’s a good thing because God is perfect. God is holy. And we become more like Him. And that makes us really good.

So think about these scriptures, Acts chapter 8 and verse 22, where Peter and John had encountered Simon, who was really caught up in materialism and greed and looking after money, and he wanted a gift of God so he could sell it and make money. And what did they say to him?

Repent, therefore, of this your wickedness, and pray, God, if perhaps the thought of your heart may be forgiven you. So he was caught up in identifying with an idol. He needed to repent. We need to repent. And it takes, you know, that identity. We’ve got to look at ourselves and be honest with ourselves and answer that question.

What is my idol? So that we can repent. And I think one of the greatest obstacles to that is telling ourselves, I don’t really have a problem. You know, I think that’s the easiest lie in this area of priorities is to say, I don’t really have a problem. I don’t have a problem.

Because then we’re not even making the effort to identify the problems. We’ve already sloughed it off. We have got to confess that we’ve all got these problems and that they’re all temptations for us all the time. And then we’ve got to look into ourselves. We’ve got to be honest with self.

We were talking about accountability this morning in our Bible class. We’re accountable to God, and we need to fess up and own up to our own weaknesses and work on them. You become a better person by taking your weaknesses and turning them into strength. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

And so, times of ignorance, God overlooked. But now, what? He commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom He has ordained. And who is that? It’s Jesus Christ. He’s given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.

So, the first commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me, is really a commandment about identity and who we are. Are we going to identify with idols or are we going to identify with God? Are we going to prioritize other things or are we going to prioritize God? Those are the questions that are before us. Paul wrote in Galatians 2, verse 20, I’ve been crucified with Christ.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me. I can do a lot of things in this world with Christ as my identity and as my priority, but I don’t want to get caught up in prioritizing something else other than God in my life.

Having no other gods means that God comes first. Having no other gods means we’ve got to identify our idols. And having no other gods means we’ve got to repent of our idolatry. So, ask yourself the question this morning. What is your idol? What do you need to repent of? I’m asking myself that same question. I ask myself that question all the time.

And you identify areas in your life that you can work on, and I’ll identify areas in my life that I can work on, and we can go forward together as long as we’re doing that. But this first commandment is really where it all starts. God wants our full attention, and we need to give it to Him.

Now maybe you haven’t been doing that. Maybe you’re like, well, how do I get started with this project? Because I want to give God my full attention and I would like to know how to work on that. Well, the gospel of Jesus Christ says, if you hear the word and believe it, repent of your sin, confess Jesus as Lord and be baptized. You can be forgiven of your sins, those things that have come between you and your God, and then you can turn back to Him and you can make Him your priority by doing that this morning.

That’s how we get started. That’s how the program begins. That’s how you make God the main character, right? By doing those things, identifying with Jesus Christ in baptism and saying, I’m going to start my life anew. Well, maybe someone needs to do that this morning. If you do, we are really wanting to help you with that. Maybe you need prayer. Maybe you have an idol that you just can’t overcome.

It’s so powerful and you’re like, I need help with this. That’s okay. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s a good thing to ask for help. I’m available. You can come make an appointment with me. We can talk. The elders are available. I know that they would be happy to talk to you. There’s deacons here who sound in the faith. They’ll be happy to talk to you. We can talk and we can work on these things together. That’s part of the purpose of the church.

It is for us to work on it so that we can understand what the priority is, you know. Well, if you have that need this morning, whether you want to put the Lord on a baptism or you want prayer, we’re here to help, and you can come forward and make your request known right now while we stand, while we sing.

End of transcript. Thank you for reading along!