The final commandment is one that focuses less on outward actions and morality and turns inward. Each command that precedes it has to do with an external act– murder, obeying one's parents, theft, adultery, etc– and takes a look at an internal act that may not be readily apparent to another person, but takes place mostly in our hearts. Coveting. Desiring something that someone else has and we don’t. Letting jealousy run rampant in our hearts.

There is a lot of potential for sin surrounding sex. God has given us many parameters regarding it: who it is appropriate to have it with by gender and marital status. The freedom with which we are permitted to deal in it. No matter the way we look at it or try to slice the conversation, God is pretty clear about what He wants in that area for us.

Seems a pretty open and shut commandment. Don’t murder. Easy enough. Most people don’t really get the urge to premeditate and act on the actual slaying of another life.

But when God says “murder,” what does He actually mean? The word used here is “rasah,” which is a Hebrew word specifically meaning a premeditated killing. This would not apply to accidental killing, death related to self-defense, or death as punishment by law. To kill in the context of this word, rasah, is reserved for a murder born out of hatred or malice towards someone else. This could include vengeful murder handled outside of lawful verdict, assassination, and murdering due to bitterness or vindictiveness towards someone.

I remember being a kid, sitting in the church pew, and hearing this commandment. I remember looking over at my mom who was giving me a look that said, “Did you hear that?” I probably rolled my eyes because I thought God was backing her up on the whole 8 p.m. bedtime and doing my chores thing. Back then, that’s what honoring my parents meant: obeying them and following the rules. And sure, maybe that’s part of honoring– listening, heeding, and abiding. But it goes deeper than the age-old “because I said so” mentality that we’ve attached to that idea.

When you think of the Sabbath, what do you think of? Do you think of your local church service? Some worship songs, a message, and fellowship of other Christians? Do you think of your Sunday routine? Do you think of the last moments of family time before dreaded Monday morning?

Or do you think of rest? Do you think of a day where you don’t have to work or accomplish anything, and you just get to relax? Yes, our Sabbath in these times has come to mean church and Sunday morning, but in reality the Sabbath God is talking about in the ten commandments is a day of rest.

I grew up in the early days of the internet, when you still connected using dial up. You couldn’t use the phone when someone was on the web. As a kid, the internet was used for fun and games, but as I became a teenager, the draw became AOL Instant Messenger. That means I was part of the generation that abbreviated everything: LOL, G2G, TTYL, and probably the most commonly used OMG! Somehow, that turn of phrase became so embedded in the way I think and talk, to the point where I don’t even realize I’m using it sometimes. Lately, Sam has been correcting me more about it. “We have to start being aware of the language we use, because Piper is going to start mimicking it.”

If the first commandment is about holding God as supreme over our lives, not having any idols or distractions that take precedence over Him, then it might seem at first glance that the second commandment is a little redundant. Sure, the second commandment talks about not making images and bowing down to them. In ancient times, those ideas were closely linked. The Egyptian gods all had likenesses and images. Each god had animals that incarnated and represented each of their deities. As such, these animals were considered sacred, such as the cat which represented Bastet the goddess of protection, pleasure and good health, or a jackal which embodied Anubis the guide to the underworld and protector of graves.

Dear God,

Thank you for being everything I’ve ever needed. Thank you for being my friend when I am lonely, my heavenly father when I need guidance and direction, the lover of my soul when I need to be held and seen, my shield when I need to be protected, and my defender in times of fear and uncertainty. You have never let me down or given me a reason to not trust you.

No one signs up for anything because they want to be persecuted. And yet, one of the first lessons Jesus teaches us in the Bible, is that we will be persecuted for righteousness’ sake. And not only that, but we will be blessed because we are persecuted in Jesus’ name. But that’s not the reason people give their hearts and lives to Jesus. Usually, they want something else: forgiveness of sin, relationship with God, to be saved from eternal suffering, to go to heaven. The list could go on and on. But people don’t tend to give a confession of faith because they know it’s a guarantee for oppression.

This verse is probably one of my top 5 favorite verses, and very often, it’s a prayer in my heart. Lord, help me to be pure in heart so that I might see you better. Many times, when we talk about purity and the Bible, we think sexual purity. Preserving our bodies from sexual sin and saving them for our spouse. But when we’re talking about purity here, we’re talking about moral purity rather than ceremonial or physical purity. Instead of an obedient or honorable heart, we’re more so talking about an undivided heart. A heart so focused and unadulterated that it clarifies our vision.

Imagine: You’re a little kid and you’re tossing a baseball in the house– something you’ve been told many times not to do. The more you toss the ball, the more you get lost in your make-believe game. Suddenly, you’re not in the living room anymore. In your mind, you’re under the lights of a stadium, pitching in the World Series. You wind up for the pitch at the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and everyone’s eyes are on you. You throw and– Crash.

If you haven’t noticed by now, when Jesus teaches the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, He unveils them in such a way that they build upon one another. Blessed are the poor in spirit. That applies to any believer in God, where at the point of salvation, they realize they are so spiritually bankrupt that they could never save themselves. Thus, they are in need of Jesus to save them and pay that debt. Blessed are those who mourn. In other words, blessed are those who see their sin and realize how that sin has grieved God, and grieve over it themselves. They deeply understand just how badly their sin has separated them from the presence of God and find themselves in sorrow over how they’ve wronged God, and yet they find comfort from the Lord in that those sins are forgiven. And blessed are the meek?

Blessed are those who mourn… It might seem sort of contradictory. How can it be possible to mourn and yet be blessed? If we’re mourning, it would mean we lost something, right? And losing something or someone to the point of grief can’t be something Jesus wants for us, let alone something He blesses us with. Yes, when Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, He means real and harrowing heartache. The word He uses in the Greek is “pentheó” which means a deep, personal grief over a death or a hope that dies. It is a grief so severe that it takes possession of the person and cannot be hidden.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He gives a lesson on a mountainside. There is a great crowd of people around Him, and they are all attentive to what this Messiah has to say. For the Jews, they believed that Jesus was here to free them from Roman occupation and rule, restoring them to political power and peace, and reigning over them victoriously whilst pouring out spiritual and material blessings over His chosen people the Jews. But in Matthew 5, the beginning of what has more popularly become known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets a very different tone than what the Jewish people assumed of a Messiah for generations. Instead, Jesus lays out more of a foundation to discipleship; what daily life looks like for someone who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven, and how His followers should ethically live.

When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.

Picture this: The world seems to hold its breath and is eerily still. The wind whips through cold, damp trenches as the minutes tick into the wee hours of the morning. The year is 1914 and you are a soldier in the army holding down the western front against the Germans in World War I. The war began earlier that year at the beginning of the summer, and has been relentless ever since. If you were crazy enough to poke your head out of the trench to look across No Man’s Land, the bodies laying out in the cold would be staggering– a fresh dusting of snow being their only burial shroud. You miss your family, your hometown, and your own warm bed. It almost seems like a lifetime away as you sit at the bottom of this trench, the soil packed hard and unforgiving. You count the days since you’ve been here when it occurs to you; it’s Christmas Eve.