Keeping the Tenth Commandment by "Walking" in the Spirit


Last night I preached a sermon at Redeemer Presbyterian Church of New York City on the Tenth Commandment closing out our summer series on the Ten Commandments. If you'd like to, you can purchase it here.

What follows is an abbreviated intro and the outline:


Intro
We may think that the Tenth Commandment is the least important of the Ten and/or it may be the one we least understand. We may think it's the least important because it's the last in the list of the Ten. So we think to ourselves, if it's the last in the list, then it must me the least important. But the Tenth Commandment may be the second most important simply because it is the tenth; simply because it one of the bookends of the Ten.

But also, it may be the one we least understand because we've become completely desensitized to its meaning. Think of all the synonyms for the word covet: desire, envy, crave, yearn. Every one of these words has a perfume named after it. So we have Desire by Dunhill; Envy by Gucci; Crave by Calvin Klein; and, Yearn by Victoria's Secret. Therefore, our culture has done a good job of desensitizing us to its meaning.

So, let's figure out what this commandment means by looking at it under three headings. Let's look at:

1. What It Is (let's define it)
2. What It Leads To
3. How It Can Be Kept

The Contemporary Pulpit: Midrash at its Best! 

Instead of all the commotion some are causing in reformed-evangelical circles about the use of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism sources and whether or not they are helpful to current Christian discussions, one might begin by thanking these Jewish exegetes and preachers for the helpful framework and tradjectories they provided us with.  Can anyone truly admit that contemporary Christian preaching is anything other than midrash?  Richard N. Longenecker says that midrash is

"...exegesis which, going more deeply than the more literal sense, attempts to penetrate into the spirit of the Scriptures, to examine the text from all sides, and thereby to derive interpretations which are not immediately obvious." 

and

"Midrashic interpretation, in effect, ostensibly takes its point of departure from the biblical text itself (though psychologically it may be motivated by other factors) and seeks to explicate the hidden meanings contained by means of agreed on hermeneutical rules in order to contemporize the revelation of God for the people of God."  

Sound familiar?  We are post-modern midrashic preachers of Chirst!