Sin is Serious Stuff!

Passage:  Exodus 20 - The 10 Commandments

Main Point:  Sin is serious stuff!  But God is merciful to those who love Him and keep His commandments.

• Promise  Mercy comes to those who keep His commandments and love Him - but woe to them that hate Him. 
• Lesson  From these ten commandments we should learn several things:
• We cannot live up to them fully
• We need God's mercy; we're utterly dependent upon it
• We can look to God for that mercy.

• Blessing  Mercy is always a blessing.  Dealing with the truth of sin in our lives is the only way we can be brought to where we will even seek God's Mercy.  May we remember the truths of the 10 Commandments as a blessing because they lead us right back to God for mercy.
• Command We should keep the Commandments.
• Sin  The sin is in not loving God.  He has mercy for the rest.  Let us love Him with a true love, not faked.
• Revelation about God  God loves righteousness, hates sin, and desires a relationship with His people.  God demonstrates this by asking us to worship Him above all else, to love Him more than anything else.

Devotional:

Many people today have lost sight of something that is very important.  Living in the 21st century seems to bring, with all the advances in technology, a blindness to us all.  We have a "form of godliness, but deny the power" of a genuine faith (2Ti 3:1-7).  God gave the Ten Commandments a few millennia ago, and men honored them--until recently: some are trying to have them removed (even though they are engraved in marble) from government buildings (i.e., the Supreme Court Building).  We no longer believe in sin.  We are blind to the things of God.  We have lost sight of sin.

Of course, no one can fully live up to the standard of the Ten Commandments, but they still serve us well - they reveal our sin!  (Could this be one of the reasons why there are those wishing them to be removed from their lives?  Could it be that men and women are willingly blinded to sin?)  In our modern lives, we have tried to hid, ignore, or deny sin.  Sin leads to guilt, which leads to shame, which leads to humiliation.  Apart from God, there is no cure for such things - and many are committing suicide because we have convinced them there is no God, and so no salvation.

But God offers mercy to those who love Him (Exodus 20:6)!  Seek Him for mercy.  Don't write Him off, or try to win His mercy as something He owes you.  Just ask!  His plans for us are good - prosperous (Jer 29:11)!  His mercy comes through the work of Jesus on the Cross; and the resurrection means we can live forever with Him (John 3:16, et. al.)  We who remember God and shun sin for His sake will have mercy!