THE POWER OF A HEART’S DESIRE
Exodus 20:17; Matthew 22:34-40
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you
shall not covet your neighbor’s wife…”
We have arrived…arrived at the end of this four-part
sermon series on the Ten Commandments. Have we learned anything beyond what we
already knew about the Decalogue before we started on this July journey?
One of the biggest ideas that I hope you caught
was that the Laws are not there to restrict our lives to the point of boredom
and oppression—the laws are there to explain how we are to be in relationship
with God and with each other.
A second major idea is that the 10 Commandments
teach us what is expected of us morally, physically, and spiritually—in order
that we can experience what lives lived in the freedom of Christ look like,
feel like, and yes, even taste like.
A third important message regarding the Ten
Commandments is that Perfect Love is God’s design—so much so that God put it in
writing and used his own finger to do so. With Laws written in stone it makes
it kind of hard to argue the point, doesn’t it?
Jesus summarizes all the law and the prophets
with the commandment to love God with all your hearts, with all your soul, and
with all your mind, and to love your neighbor, you know, as yourself. That’s an
order hard to fill for anybody, even we Christians who have had the privilege
of hearing and reading the gospels and the letters to the new churches.
Humanity is always the weakest link in God’s
design, so much so that it makes me wonder if our character flaws are not also
part of God’s grand design. If I have learned anything throughout my faith
journey, my studies and my life’s path it is that God wants us to rely
completely on him for our every need.
Oh, but we are proud of our self-sufficiency, and
even the best of us can be virtually vulnerable to the wiles and guiles of our
hearts’ desires. That’s when things get ugly.
“The desire of our hearts will lead us astray. We
are to love God. We are to love neighbor. We are not to desire our neighbor’s
spouse or house….and we cannot do it.”1
1 Jacobson,
Rolf. “Commentary on Exodus 19;1-6; 20:1-17.” Narrative Lectionary.
www.workingpreacher.org. June 15, 2014. (emphasis mine)
The sheer and staggering
numbers of faith-personality seminars, retreats, cruises, as well as the
Christian self-help books that smother the market are all clear demonstrations
of our desire to find SOMETHING to conquer the elephantine word of the day: covet.
The importance of the coveting commandment is
made abundantly clear by the numbers: the covet word is the only admonition to
be repeated twice. If God says something more than once, we best be paying
attention to it.
Covet: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house.
You shall not covet your neighbor’s spouse.” We are not supposed to long for,
be jealous of, or take anything that belongs to somebody else.
We are not to beg, steal or borrow—and we know
this, right? It’s not the obvious coveting that I think we have to be so
careful about; I think it’s the more subconscious kind that can really lead us
away from the finger of God. “Many (perhaps most) big sins start when we set
our gaze on something that belongs to another.”2
2 Ibid.
We are pretty familiar with biblical coveting:
Adam and Eve
coveted knowledge, wanting to be like God. So they bit and consequently lost
paradise. David spied Bathsheba bathing: he wanted her, he got her; they made a
baby, and Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, ended up gored through the heart,
literally.
King Ahab
and Queen Jezebel coveted neighbor Naboth’s vineyard. When he refused to give
it to them, he ended up planted in the garden, not tilling it.
Do I have to mention Samson and Delilah? How
about Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5? While all the other believers were
selling everything and putting all the money in the common purse, Ananias kept
some of the profit for himself and his wife…well, you guessed it, they both
ended up dead, too.
Coveting can lead to physical death. Yet, I think
we should be “lasered” in on spiritual death that coveting is known to cause.
It sneaks up on us; it slithers around—waiting and watching for our most
vulnerable moments, then the fangs come out. We’ve all seen huge corporations
coveting power and finance and politics.
But what about you and me? Haven’t we been caught
in the clutches of the claws of covetousness, from time to time?
I remember a summer as a young teenager, when I
strained my gaze out my bedroom window toward a neighbor’s yard. They had a
swimming pool there, and I could hear all the fun they were having. I wanted a
swimming pool more than anything!
When I went to work for Houghton Mifflin when I
was 19, one of the first things I bought was a swimming pool for the family;
yet somehow it wasn’t as great as I remembered. The pool was filled with water,
but it wasn’t filled with fun and friends and family, which is what I was
really wanting.
The interesting, tricky piece about coveting is
that we want some thing that we believe will make us happy, will make
our longings or sorrows disappear, will fulfill our hearts desires.
We can be fooled by the power of our heart’s
desires: never, ever underestimate the power of the heart’s desire to lead us
to places and people where we should not go.
The only place and person to whom we should go is
God, for he spoke all these words, “I am the Lord, your God.”
Only God can
deliver us from our Egypts, from the places where we have become enslaved.
Living the commandment faith keeps us from falling victim to coveter’s
deception.
Only God has the power to lead our hearts to
God’s deepest desire for our lives, finding and fulfilling the freedom that
comes from God to us in the expressed love of Jesus Christ, who died to buy us
back from all the things we thought would buy us happiness.
Thanks be to God that our journey toward
salvation is God’s heart’s greatest and most powerful desire. Amen.
July 27, 2014
First Parish Federated Church of South Berwick,
ME
The Reverend Donna Lee Muise, Pastor
