“Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you.” — Exodus 20:12 (ESV) Every other commandment in the Decalogue addresses a category of behaviour that remains relevant…
“Be still, and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10 (NIV) Today, many people worship their work, they work at their play, and they play at their worship. Read that sentence slowly, because it describes a specific kind of…
“He leads me beside quiet waters; he restores my soul.” — Psalm 23:2-3 (NIV) Genesis records something that, on first read, seems almost unnecessary: God rested on the seventh day. The God who spoke galaxies into existence with a word,…
“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” — Mark 2:27 (NIV) By the time Jesus walked the earth, the Sabbath had been buried under so many additional human regulations that its original purpose had become almost…
“In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” — Matthew 5:16 (NIV) There is a question, sometimes attributed to various sources but always worth sitting…
“They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him.” — Titus 1:16 (NIV) There are two further ways the third commandment is broken, subtler than casual exclamation but, in some respects, more spiritually corrosive. The first is…
“You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.” — Exodus 20:7 (NIV) Names, in the world of scripture, were never merely labels. A name carried…
“You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence.” — Psalm 16:11 (NIV) Every idol makes a promise it cannot keep. This is the quiet tragedy embedded in every act of…
“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.” — Hebrews 1:3 (NIV) If the second commandment forbids manufacturing an image of God, a fair question follows: how, then, are we supposed to know…
“They make idols, but the idols will disgrace their makers; they are frauds, lifeless and powerless.” — Jeremiah 10:14-15 (paraphrased, NLT) We tend to imagine idolatry as something that happened to other, more primitive cultures, distant in both time and…