Desire

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Happy Palm Sunday. This is the week, right? This is the week. If you haven't realized it before, I'm going to tell you now, one third of each of the four Gospels spends, this week is the week that it focuses on. In other words, two thirds of the Gospel for 30 plus years of Jesus' life, one third of each of the Gospels for just this one week of his life. It says something right there about the importance of this week and all the events that we are experiencing. So, today is Palm Sunday as Jesus enters Jerusalem. This Friday, we are celebrating a Good Friday service at 6.30 to focus on, in fearful faith, that awesome day and what God did there and then. And then Easter Sunday, the resurrection, basically a confirmation, an authentication, a validation of everything that Jesus did and amazing. It's an amazing week. It changes world history. In fact, our calendars flip because of this one person and this one event. So welcome. It's good to have you here. Now today, we are finishing the series of fearful faith in terms of the Ten Commandments. And I hope through this series, what you have found is what I would like to think is a deeper logic rather than a surface reading of each of the commandments we have gone through. And that, as I stated last week, these Ten Commandments, these ten words from God that are both recorded in Exodus chapter 20 and Deuteronomy 5, are the most important, historically greatest ethical directives ever written in the history of the world, partly because they are so succinct. They're not that long. And because they are so universal. We all understand them. Today, the last commandment on coveting, a word we don't use too often. You might think, well, at least in my Sunday school experience, when I was a kid, I always thought the first commandment, of course, is the most important, you shall have no other gods before me, right? And they kind of, in my understanding, kind of went down in priority to kind of a cleanup role for coveting. Let's just throw that one in to make it ten instead of nine or whatever. And here we go. And what is covening? That is the question. And now I realize this commandment, in a sense, goes a lot deeper than we ever really thought. It really touches on the mystery, the paradox, the, what do you call it, just the living contradiction we human beings are. Yeah, just we're living that, because it gets to the heart of our desires and motives. And it expresses in one of the most poignant ways, the Christian teaching on human nature and what the law of God actually does. And so we're going to read the commandment first. Here it is in, it's Deuteronomy version. Now Deuteronomos means second giving of the law. It's a long sermon, by the way. If you think mine are long, Moses preached a long time on this sermon. Okay, Deuteronomy, the whole book, one sermon. But anyways, it's the second reading of the law, and this is what it says in Deuteronomy. And you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, and you shall not desire your neighbor's house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. So we're going to meditate on this commandment today, and we'll explore these three points with it. First of all, what we need, that is, what does this commandment expose in us that we are lacking, and what do we really need, okay? And then secondly, why we need it, that is, what happens if we don't get what we actually need? What happens in our lives? And then finally, how do you get it? Well, what means do we actually are able to receive what this commandment really needs? So what we need. Now when you think about coveting, you know, it starts with the spouse, and then it turns to property values and things, you know, ox, donkeys, you think, well, okay. And we could easily translate it to cars and houses and all that stuff today, but probably what most people think about coveting, if they even know what the word means, is be satisfied with what you have. That's the basics of this commandment. But is that really what this commandment's about? Just be satisfied. And by the way, who is? I mean, who's satisfied? That's why advertising works. We're not. They're always offering more, more, more, better, better, new, improved, right? But we hardly ever use the word covet today. And most people probably don't know what it means. Now we're going to kind of go back and do a little word study here, like I teach some of my students to do. Let's look at it in Greek and in Hebrew. So the Bible was first, Exodus and Deuteronomy were written first in Hebrew. And the word is chamad, and it means to desire or take pleasure in. And then the Greek word, when the subtuagent was written, which is the Greek translation of the Hebrew, it uses this word epithumia, which epi is over, and thumia is desir...