“Big 10 Warmup”

Exodus 20:1-2

Rev. Dustin Largent

August 17, 2025

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The Ten Commandments in the Public Square

Earlier this year, the Texas Senate passed a bill. It's Texas Senate Bill 10. And what that bill does is it requires every public school classroom in the state of Texas to have the Ten Commandments posted in the classroom. And that's due to be done—it has to be done by September 1st of this year. Fifteen days from now, they’re required to do that. Some of you are like, “Man, that's awesome.” I'll tell you, there's a lot of battles going on right now with the Ten Commandments in particular.

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There were some supporters of this law. The supporters of this law use what's called the Lemon Test to determine whether a law is constitutional or not when it relates to the Ten Commandments.

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And so, the Lemon Test goes like this:

• Does the law have a secular purpose? Because the purpose here is we've got to separate church and state.

• Does it advance or inhibit religion? So is the thing that you're doing advancing religion? Or is it inhibiting a religion? It's not supposed to do either one.

• Does it excessively entangle government with religion?

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There was another case that was brought up back in ’98. There were Ten Commandments—it was a monument that was right in front of City Hall in Elkhart, Indiana. Anybody remember that? It was back in ’98. You remember that. The guy that took that up as the attorney for that was Jay Sekulow. You might remember him. He's one of Donald Trump's lawyers now—or was recently or in the past. He argued this thing all the way to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court knocked it down, said, “We're not going to look at it.” And so they had to remove the Ten Commandments from City Hall.

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The Ten Commandments and Their Cultural Relevance

So what's interesting about it is that after that, Sekulow was at the symposium. I read about this. He was at the symposium. It was a Pew scholar—or Pew Institute—symposium. And he brought up something a lot of people didn’t know about those Elkhart Ten Commandments. And that is that those commandments were—they were provided, they were donated actually—not by a church. They were donated by a guy by the name of Cecil B. DeMille to promote a movie that he produced in 1956 called The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston.

And so, Jay Sekulow—this is what he says at the Pew symposium—he says, “The best way to defend or to keep the Ten Commandments is to not argue them as being religious at all, but to say it’s not because they’re religious—they’re just advertisements for a movie.” That was his argument. And he was saying it kind of tongue-in-cheek. You know, he’s saying it tongue-in-cheek. He said, “If somebody wants to defend the Ten Commandments, here’s the problem with that. Here’s the problem with that.”

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Let me grab something for you. I brought a few props out today just because—oh, why not? I got my shorts on and I’m feeling a little bit frisky today. So, his defense is this: that in order to defend the Ten Commandments, I have to gut them. I have to take the moral power out of them. I have to make them an advertisement. I have to take God out of the Ten Commandments in order to defend them.

And here’s the thing—you can’t take the Ten Commandments and God and separate them. You cannot separate them. You either have to look at the Ten Commandments as belonging to God—they point to God, they point to Jesus, they tell us how to live a free and full life. You have to take it that way, or they lose all their power and there’s no reason for them. The Ten Commandments are integrally connected to God. They come from God, right? They come from God.

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The Ten Commandments Come from God

So, my first point I’m going to make—if you’ve got notes, you can put this down there—the first point is this:

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The Ten Commandments can’t be separated from the God who gave them.

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Let’s look at what it says back in the Old Testament when it tells us in Exodus 20. Now, the Ten Commandments are in a couple of different places. They’re in Exodus 20—that’s the first time they’re given. They’re also revisited when you get to the book of Deuteronomy, when one generation has gone away and now they’re getting ready to go into the Promised Land. Forty years have passed, and He revisits these with a new generation, which—everybody’s dead from before, except for a couple of people.

But here’s what it says:

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“And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’” — Exodus 20:1–2

 

That’s how the Ten Commandments start. They don’t start, “Here are rules.” That’s not how it starts. The Ten Commandments begin with:

“And God spoke all these words: ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.’” — Exodus 20:1–2

“I’m the one who did these things for you. I’m the one who is active. I’m the one who freed you. I’m the one that got you out of the mess you was in in Egypt. I’m the one who got you out. I’m the God who is now telling you how to live. I’m that God.”

And so, the commandments matter because of who gave them—God, our Creator. Look what Moses says when he retells this in the book of Deuteronomy:

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“Acknowledge and take to heart this day that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth below. There is no other. Keep his decrees and commands, which I am giving you today, so that it may go well with you and your children after you, and that you may live long in the land the Lord your God gives you for all time.” — Deuteronomy 4:39–40

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In other words, he’s saying, “Listen, I am the God of creation. I created you. You people that I freed out of Egypt—I made you guys. I freed you. I put you together. I took you when you was a mess, and I put you in the Promised Land. And now you need to live right.”

 

The Commandments Show the Freed Saint How to Live

A couple years ago I had to buy one of these things. It's called a garage door opener. Anybody ever put in a garage door opener? That's a trick to do it alone, right? To do it by yourself. I got this, and here's the lucky thing for me when I bought this—they gave me instructions. Now the problem is, I don't like instructions. I look at all these pieces and I'm like, “I don't need no instructions. That big bar is going to pull this big dumahickey over here, and it's going to knock into this deal here, and that thing is going to just flop there, and if I fasten it there, it'll be fine.”

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There's some important stuff in there. You know why they know how to put the garage door opener together and make the garage door go up smooth? You know why? Because they made the garage door opener. They made the thing. And so, when they created it—like other people, they didn't make it. Right? Your neighbor, your neighbor that comes over and says, “Well, you need to take a three-fourth Jing-a-Bag Bobby and put it in the Allen Frick Show turkey thing.” He doesn't know what he's talking about. He's just making stuff up on the fly. You want to ask the one who made the garage door opener. If you want to know how to live as free people—if you want to know how to live as free and full people, live a full and free life after God has freed you from the slavery of your sin—if you want to know how to do that, then you need to go to the instructions that God gives us on how to live.

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The Purpose of the Law

Now here's another thing. When they were in Egypt, how did God free them? How did God free them? What did He do to free the Israelites from Egypt? Did He give them a bunch of rules? Did He give them the Ten Commandments? Were they all making bricks?

He said, “You know what, guys, if you want to get free, if you want to be free, here's how I'm going to free you. Here's some rules. Take this little rule book, start obeying these commandments. So first you better know that the Lord is the Lord’s number one. Don’t have no idols.”

Starts going through these commandments and they're looking at it and they're making bricks and they're trying to figure stuff out and they're like, “Well, we'll be really good, we'll obey these and then we'll be automatically free.” Is that how it happened? No. No. When does God give the Ten Commandments? God gives the Ten Commandments after He freed them. He gave it to them after He freed them. Remember, He frees them back—what? About chapter 10, 11? He didn’t give the Ten Commandments until chapter 20.

Why? Because He’s trying—number two—

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The commandments show the freed saint how to live a

full and free life as God intended.

 

That’s what the commandments are for. The commandments were never intended to help you to get righteous before God. They were never intended for that. Just like they weren’t given to the people of Israel in Egypt ahead of time to make them. That’s how it works. They’re made to say, “Listen, I freed you. Now this is how. Don’t go back to the way you lived before. Don’t go back into slavery.”

 

Staying Free by Following God's Instructions

If you don’t follow these rules, if you don’t follow this and follow the directions of the Maker—of the person who made you—if you don’t follow the directions, if you don’t follow the instructions, you’re not going to function properly. You’re not going to function properly. You’re going to get stuck on the rails. You’re going to get stuck in addiction. You’re going to get stuck in the way you deal in relationships. You’re going to get stuck in the way you deal with finances. You’re going to get stuck separated from Me. Once I freed you, I need to give you these guidelines so that you can stay free. So that you can stay free.

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Those of us who’ve been freed by Jesus—we love the Lord. And we love the law. I like to read the Bible. I like to read His law. When it gives me instruction, when I read the Bible and I hear instruction from it, it says, “Hey, don’t do this,” or “Watch out for this.” When I read that, I love it. I love it because I’ve been freed by Jesus, and I know that this is going to help me to continue to live free and to live a full life. So it’s like, “Give me some more.”

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Why do I read the Bible over and over? Why am I reading it? Because I want more of it. Because I want to live fuller and freer.

 

“Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long.” — Psalm 119:97

“For in my inner being I delight in God’s law.” — Romans 7:22

“But whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night.” — Psalm 1:2

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The Law Reveals Our Need for Jesus

So, the analogy I oftentimes look at is—you know, I’ve done a little bit of, not a lot of boating—but when we lived in Seattle, we did a little bit of boating. A lot of people had boats for some reason. There’s just a lot of water everywhere. People would go into different places.

What I found about boats—I learned something. Maybe you didn’t know about boats. They only work in the water. But you always get some jack wagon, right? You always get some jack wagon who thinks that, “Oh, I don’t got to follow the rules.” Yeah, the rules as far as boundaries of the lake—like we have Lake Washington out there—there’s what’s called a bank. Right? If you go into the bank and decide, “You know what? I’m done living by the rules of nature. I’m done living by the rules of water. I’ve decided I’m going to go on dry ground. You know why? Because I’m a free person. I can do whatever I want.”

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And so, you’re driving your boat and you’re like, “You know what? I don’t like these restrictions that the banks have put on me.” So, I drive off onto the dry land, and when I drive onto the dry land, obviously I can’t go no more. Now if I can’t move, and now I’m not free, and I’m not having fun, and I’m not having a full life—why? Because I didn’t stay within the boundaries that it says on the boat: “This is for water.” This is common sense, right? This is common sense. We all went to public school. We know how this is going to go down.

 

Boundaries Lead to Freedom

But here's what you find out. If—when you go talk to people about the Bible—most people don’t like the Bible. I don’t know if you know that. Most people don’t like the Bible. They don’t like it. They’re like, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it because it makes me feel bad.” Right? “I dislike the commandments because they make me feel bad.” And that’s because until I know Jesus, all the law does—all the law does before I know Jesus—is convict me and tell me how I’m wrong.

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And you say, “Well, that’s not good.” No, that’s really good. The law’s purpose for the person who does not have a relationship with Jesus is to make you feel bad. It’s to make you feel bad. It’s to make you say, “Oh, I got a problem. I’m not right with God.” That’s its purpose. And so, if you’re in a church—if anyone’s watching online and you’re in a church—and they don’t believe that there is sin, they don’t believe that we don’t take the Bible as it says, when it says something is wrong, “Well, that was just back then. We don’t believe that. We don’t want people to feel bad because they won’t come back to church.” I don’t care. The Bible says what it is. And if it says something is wrong, it’s wrong. If it says something is right, it’s right. And the reason it’s saying that is not because God hates you. It’s because He wants you so bad to be in relationship with Him that He’s going to tell you the truth about who you are and about relationship with Him. He loves you. He’s not that spineless friend that doesn’t tell you the truth that could save your life because he doesn’t want to make you feel bad. The Bible doesn’t play games like that. God doesn’t play games like that. He wants you to know the truth.

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The Law Points Us to Jesus

Maybe I'm not right with God. It's going to change us. It's going to point me to Jesus. So, the third point I'm going to give you is this:

The Ten Commandments reflect the truth about the sinner. Look at what it says in Romans 3:20:

 

“Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God's sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin.” — Romans 3:20

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And so, the Ten Commandments are a lot like a mirror. “Wow, that's a good-looking guy in that. He's pretty good. Oh, there's the bad side over there.” Yeah, you know what? I can't wait till tomorrow—I get better looking every day. This mirror reflects something. You know what the mirror does? It tells me the truth.

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If I got a booger in my nose—I just ate one of those peaches back there—make sure I don't got anything on my face. Go through a whole meeting or something and you got like a big corn deal flossing out here, and you get done. It's been three hours and you're like, “Oh man, I should have looked in the mirror.” But when you look in the mirror, the mirror don't lie. Well, unless you go to one of those fun parks where all of a sudden I was—because I like those—because I look really, really thin and skinny in some of those things.

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The Law Reflects, But Doesn’t Clean

But when you look in the mirror, the mirror don't lie. Well, unless you go to one of those fun parks—because I like those—because I look really, really thin and skinny in some of those things. But the point is, the Bible is like that. The Bible is reflecting back to you the truth of what you really look like. What your real relationship with God is really like.

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And a lot of people miss the boat if they think that the mirror can make them clean. Some people think, “Well, the mirror is going to make me clean. So I got a really dirty spot there, so now the mirror is going to make me clean.” Right? The Bible doesn’t—the law doesn’t—make me clean. The law is like a mirror. My mirror doesn’t make me clean. I look and say, “Oh, I got a big booger coming out of my nose.” Well, I can’t ask the mirror to now wipe the booger from my nose. Can’t do that, because the mirror doesn’t do that. That’s not what the mirror does. The same way, the law tells me, “You got a big booger in your life,” but it ain’t going to wipe it.

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The Law Drives Us to Grace

What the law does is this: it tells you, “Read deeper.” The Bible—the law—says you are a sinner. Keep reading. Keep reading. And if you keep reading, you’re going to discover—it drives me to look further in the Word and find out that the God who says that I’m a sinner also provides a solution by sending Jesus to atone for our sins. It drives me to God’s Word for the remedy. That points me to Jesus. And so, it does that in a couple of ways. It points me to Jesus in a couple of ways. The law does. This is like the law. First of all, it shows me that I’m not in right relationship with God, and it drives me to look further in the Word. It does that.

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Jesus and the Great Commandment

Second, though, it shows me how to live what Jesus calls the Great Commandment. You remember that Jesus—some cat comes up to Jesus and he says, “Hey,”—he’s trying to mess with Him. You know what I mean? They’re not asking these real seriously. It says—it’ll show you in Matthew chapter 22:

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“Hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, the Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question: ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’” — Matthew 22:34–36

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So, it’s a test. It’s not that he really wants to know.

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Loving God and Neighbor

Jesus replied:

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“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:37–40

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Now the guy asking the question—again, he’s wanting to know which of these is most important to keep in order to have a right relationship with God. In other words, “Which is the most important mirror to reflect that will make me not look bad?” Right? “Which of the laws is going to fix me and make me right with God?” But Jesus is talking about something else. God created us to live fully and freely. That’s what I want you to get out of this. God wants you to live fully. He wants live a great life. He wants you to live fully. He wants you to live freely. He doesn’t want you to live like a boat on the shore. He wants you to be living in the freedom that He provides.

 

Living Fully and Freely

And we do this by loving the Lord with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind. That’s what Jesus is saying. If you want to live a full life, if you want a life that really matters, if you want a life that’s full, you want a life that’s free—this is how you do it. According to Jesus, you love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and all your strength—and you love your neighbor as yourself. And that's how you're going to live a full and free life.

And the Ten Commandments are telling us how to do that. The Ten Commandments tell us how to love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind. The first four tell us how to do that. The first four tell us how to love God with all our soul and all our heart.

So, it says, here’s the commandments:

• The first one: “You shall have no other gods before me.” — Exodus 20:3
  That’s how to love God—not to have any other gods before Him.

• “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” — Exodus 20:4–5
  That’s about God. How do you love God? By not creating rivals for Him—having your heart focused on Him alone.

• The third commandment: “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
  That’s how you love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind.

• The fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.” — Exodus 20:8
  We love God by understanding and practicing rest. And we’ll get into that in a few weeks—what that means to be in His rest. But that’s one of the ways that we love God.

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And when you get to the last six commandments, they’re telling us: how do you love your neighbor as yourself? Well, don’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife. That’s probably a good idea, right? Don’t lie. Don’t steal from your neighbor. Don’t covet your neighbor and want all your neighbor’s stuff. This is how you love your neighbor as yourself. And so, Jesus is basically solidifying and breaking it down for us so we can understand how to live free and full lives as freed people. That’s what He’s doing in the Ten Commandments.

And what we’re going to do is—we’re going to dive into these one at a time over the next 10, 11 weeks. There’s only 10 commandments, but you never know. Sometimes I get stuck on something and I can’t finish. So I just built in a buffer for us just to make sure that we can do it. But the commandments are fulfilled in Jesus. Okay? Jesus doesn’t come—Jesus comes to actually fulfill the law. He doesn’t come to get rid of the law. Says He comes to fulfill the law.

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Okay? So, Jesus fulfills the law not by simply obeying it completely, obeying it perfectly, but He fulfills the law by transforming it. He transforms it. And we’re going to look at how He transforms it over the next several weeks—how He transforms that.

Think about some of the things Jesus said about the law and loving God and loving your neighbor and how that all goes together. Think about some of the stuff that He said when He was walking on earth and how it differed from what they read in the Old Testament when they read the Ten Commandments. Like Jesus made some bizarre Ten Commandments-type of statements.

 

Jesus Transforms the Law

Like in Matthew 5:43–44, He said:

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“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” — Matthew 5:43–44

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And so, they’re looking at the commandment one way, and Jesus shows up and says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa—I’m going to transform this. I want you to understand. It’s not the way you thought.” They were thinking, “Well, I haven’t committed adultery because I haven’t actually had intercourse with somebody that’s not my wife or not my husband.” Jesus says, “I want to explain these. I’m transforming your understanding of these. It’s not just about the actual physical act, but it’s about your motives. It’s about how you approach it. It’s about—you are sinning in your heart ahead of time.” “Says, ‘Well, I’ve never murdered anybody.’” Hold the phone. “You haven’t murdered anybody?” Yeah, but you have in your heart—because you were angry. You had this anger.

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The Heart of the Commandments

And so, He transforms these, and we’re going to have to dive into this and understand really what it means. So, when we see Jesus in the pages of the gospel, we see a new way that the Great Commandments are fulfilled. We see how to love the Lord with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind. And we see how to love your neighbor as yourself. And we realize that to obey the Ten Commandments—okay, so some people think, “I just got to obey the Ten Commandments. That’s what it’s going to be.”

But to obey the Ten Commandments and love the Lord your God and your neighbors—I need to see how Jesus transforms those commandments when He fulfilled them. Okay? And you’re like, “I don’t know what you’re saying yet.” You will as you come back week after week. You’re going to understand.

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The Journey Ahead

So, the next 10 weeks—until Christmas, really—we’re going to go through these one by one and understand what they mean in light of the fulfillment of Jesus. And so, what do they tell me about living a full and free life before my Creator? And what do the Ten Commandments reveal to me about Jesus? What do they tell me about Jesus? This isn’t just an Old Testament rules thing. This isn’t about rules. The Ten Commandments isn’t about rules. It’s about Jesus. It’s about how we love the Lord our God with all of our heart and all of our soul, all of our mind, and how we love our neighbor as ourselves. And we’re going to start next week.