ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #49 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> What role do the Ten Commandments play in our life today? Do Christians have to keep the Ten Commandments? Do I need to preach about them? What should I say that is most helpful? >> Josh, this is another one of those perennial questions. And it's one of the most important questions that we can discuss because it goes to the heart of what the Gospel really is and our understanding of the Gospel. And it's a very critical issue in Christianity today here in 20th century Christendom because it's a matter of discussion among evangelicals and among Lutherans today. So let's see what we can make of it on the basis of the scripture. Do Christians have to keep the Ten Commandments? Yes. In order to be saved one must keep the commandments perfectly. Deuteronomy 18:13 says, "You shall be blameless before the Lord your God." I Kings 8:61 says, "Let your heart, therefore, be perfect before the Lord our God, walking in his statutes and keeping his commandments as at this day." Matthew 5, Jesus himself said, "You must, therefore, be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect." So if you want to be saved you must keep the Ten Commandments perfectly. But no one can keep the Ten Commandments. Not perfectly. Not at all. Isaiah 64 Verse 6 says, "We have all become like one who is unclean. And all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment." King James says "filthy rag." "We all fade like a leaf and all our inequities like the wind take us away." St. Paul repeats the same idea in the New Testament in Romans 3 Verse 10 when he says, "As it is written: None is righteous. No, not one." So yes, we must keep the commandments to be saved. But we cannot keep the commandments. Therefore, Christ has come to keep the commandments for us. As the author of the Hebrews says in Chapter 4 Verse 15, we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are yet without sin. So Christ has kept the whole law and kept it perfectly. And by keeping the whole law perfectly for us, Christ has freed us from the law. And so St. Paul says, "Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ. So that you may belong to one another to whom who has been raised from the dead in order that you may bear fruit for God." And again, in the next chapter St. Paul says, "For the law of the spirit of life has set you free in Christ from the law of sin and death." And finally, in Chapter 10 of Romans Paul makes the point perfectly clear when he says -- Chapter 10 Verse 4, "For Christ is the end of the law with respect to righteousness for everyone who believes." So if Christ has kept the law perfectly for us and by his keeping the law for us has set us free from the law, so the Ten Commandments no longer apply to us. We are free from them. And so no, Christians do not have to keep the Ten Commandments. But the Holy Spirit is at work within us to help us to conform to the image of Christ. So as St. Paul says in Ephesians Chapter 4, rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ. So if we are going to grow into Christ, we might want to ask the question: What does the image of Christ look like? When we grow into Christ, what will we be? Well, Christ is the one who kept the law perfectly. And as we grow by the grace of God into the image of Christ, God shapes us so that we do both desire to keep the commandments and, in fact, keep them at least to a degree in this life as God grows us into sanification and we grow into the image of Christ. So you can see that even though God has set us free from the law, even though Christ is the end of the law with respect to righteousness for everyone who believes, even so, the commandments do have a function in the life of a Christian. Because they show us what the life of Christ is that we are going to grow into. Now, your question, Josh, was an important one. You asked: Do you need to preach about them? And if so, what can you say that will be most helpful? And so I guess if the question is "What should I preach?" the answer is you should preach Christ who has kept the law for us and who has freed us from the burden of keeping the commandments. And indeed, has set us free from them so that we do not have to keep them at all. What should you preach? You should preach Christ who has kept the law for us. And therefore, as we grow into his image by the grace of God, we grow into the image of one who keeps the law perfectly. What you should not do is preach the Ten Commandments as the way to salvation obviously. Another thing that you should not do is to preach the Ten Commandments as a way of living the Christian life. Now, that sounds a little bit odd. So let me explain it. And this is kind of important because this is where we get to an issue that is important for Lutherans in relation to evangelicals in America today. You see evangelicalism approaches the Christian life from the perspective of duty. It teaches that the Christian life is something that we live for God. Something that we do for God in -- you know, in response to what God has done for us. But that's not the biblical teaching. And it's not the teaching that we ought to have, either. We should teach what the scripture teaches. That the Christian life is not something that we do for God. But rather, it is something that God works in us by grace as we rest in what Christ has done for us. And so what we should preach is that by the grace of God through the working of the Spirit of God in the word and by the sacraments, we are growing into the image of Christ. And if you want to know what that image of Christ is that we're growing into, you can look at the law. Because the image of Christ is the image of the one who has kept the law perfectly for us. But most of all, we have to avoid the great heresy of our age, which is reducing Christianity from a trust in the redemptive work of Christ to a morality, to a lifestyle that one lives in accordance with the law. And this is the major problem with evangelicalism in the area of sanification and even sometimes in the area of justification. That it tends to reduce the Christian life to -- or rather the whole Christian faith to a morality, to a lifestyle that one lives. Christianity is not a lifestyle. It's not a morality. It is being redeemed by God through his death and through his resurrection. It is growing into the image of Christ by the working of word and sacrament. But it is not striving to keep the law in order to prove to God that we have faith. And that's a great problem both in evangelicalism and also for Lutherans as we are influenced by evangelicalism. So I encourage you, Josh, to pay careful attention in your preaching to these matters that you don't slip into presenting the Christian life as a duty that we live or that we give to God. But see it always as a gift of God's grace, something into which we grow as we rest in the grace of God. And something that he gives us by his mercy through word and sacraments. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***