Word of Salvation - Vol.48 No.32 - August 2003

 

The Desires of Our Heart

Sermon by Rev M P Geluk

on Lord's Day 44 (Q/A 113 Heid.Cat.)

 

Scripture Readings:  Deuteronomy 8; Romans 7:7-13

Suggested Hymns:  BoW 118:1,2,5; 41; 511; 468:1,3

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Catechism has three questions and answers on the tenth commandment and, the Lord willing, we will also have three sermons on this commandment, which is about 'coveting'. With the tenth commandment, the Lord specifically speaks to THE DESIRES OF OUR HEART, and firstly we will see what this commandment requires; secondly what it uncovers; and thirdly what it points to.

1. What is it that this commandment requires?

It says, 'do not covet'. The Macquarie dictionary says that 'to covet' means to have an improper desire, or a desire without due regard to the rights of others. Where are our desires? Where do they begin? Well, they are in our heart, or in our mind. Desires may be unspoken thoughts. We can hide our desires, keep them within, and let no one ever know what we would really like to have or do. A desire can be in your mind for years. You may have been thinking for a long time about something that you've wanted, and finally you may have the means to realise your dreams. But a desire can also come all of a sudden. Like when your attention is drawn to something, and immediately you act on the desire. Then it is one of those things we do on the spur of the moment.

Now what we have just done is to link 'to covet' with the desires of the heart and, as such, coveting means nothing more than a hidden intention in a person's heart. You can covet pure things. You may find yourself coveting God's forgiveness and the riches of Christ. But what if those hearts' desires are impure and without any due regard to the rights of others? That can happen also. God does not forbid the desires of the heart, but He does forbid the desires that are contrary to His commandments.

What makes a person want to steal? It's because he desires the goods or property that belong to another. What makes a person want to commit adultery? It's because that person is having desires for another person who does not belong to him or her. A desire that does not stop when one realises that what is wanted cannot be had becomes coveting.

The tenth commandment says: "You shall not covet your neighbour's house. You shall not covet your neighbour's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour." You see, it's the "anything that belongs to your neighbour" that signals the shift from desire to coveting.

The tenth commandment has sometimes been called the extra commandment because it doesn't seem to say anything new. The other commandments already forbade stealing your neighbour's house and committing adultery with someone's wife. And when you look at the other nine commandments in the light of the whole of Scripture, then you realise that sin always begins in the heart. The problem is not so much with the outward act, it's with the heart. Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander" (Mt 15:19).

So what's different, then, about the tenth commandment? Well, the nine commandments show us how to love God and the neighbour. Then God gave the tenth to say specifically to us that it is all a matter of the heart. In that sense the tenth is the extra commandment. It's the conclusion of the whole matter. And the Heidelberg Catechism has captured that very well, when it asks:

"What is God's will for you in the tenth commandment?

That not even the slightest thought or desire contrary to any one of God's commandments should ever arise in my heart. Rather, with all my heart I should always hate sin and take pleasure in whatever is right." (Q/A 113).

In the tenth commandment, then, God requires that our heart's desires are pure. And not a purity that meets our own standards, or those of the world, but what God regards as pure. People can easily fool themselves that they have an air of purity about them and what they are thinking has not come down to the gutter levels that others are living in. But we're not talking here about the standards of people but the standards of God. Only God is pure.

We read earlier from Deuteronomy 8 and noted that God reminded His covenant people not to forget Him when they had settled in the promised land. During the forty years in the wilderness, God had tested them many times to see what was in their hearts. Would they keep the Lord's commands? There was every reason to do so because God had looked after them in a wonderful way. There was manna every day. Their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell during all their wanderings throughout the forty years (vss 3,4). Obeying God's commands would give them happiness and their needs would be amply supplied. Disobedience would bring them all kinds of trouble for the Lord would forsake them.

You would think, then, that all the Israelites with faith in their hearts would give God their loving obedience as they took possession of the promised land. But Joshua 7 tells us that Achan coveted some treasure, which he saw in Jericho when Israel conquered that city. The Lord had said specifically what had to happen to the city and its people. And any gold, silver, articles of bronze and iron, had to be put in the treasury of the Lord's house. They were devoted to the Lord (vs 24).

But Achan happened to see a beautiful robe, some silver and gold, and he coveted them. He took them and hid them in the ground in his tent (vss 21,22). His coveting led to theft, and the Lord was angry. He had provided Israel everything, and yet Achan did not trust God enough and decided to keep a few things for himself whenever he might need them. He was not content with what God had provided and wanted more. After all, he and the rest of the people were going in to settle in a new country empty handed and the few things he had grabbed might come in handy.

Many years later, David the king had received every kind of blessing from God. Yet, he was not content either and coveted Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah. His sin led to adultery and murder. Years after that, there was Ahab, another king over Israel. He coveted the vineyard that belonged to his neighbour, Naboth. His coveting also led to murder and stealing.

Once you start coveting and break the tenth commandment, it gets easier to break all the other commandments. You treat your neighbour as a thing, not a person.

What God requires in the tenth commandment is that we are content with what He has given us and content with the way He provides for us, which may be different for each of us. Paul wrote to Timothy, "Godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with that. People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction." (1 Tim 6:6)

When we are content with God and look to Him for all our needs, then we have no desire to break any of God's commandments. Because God is good and loves us with an everlasting love, we have every reason to hate sin and take pleasure in what is right. But we fall into temptation and desire things or people that do not belong to us. We will sin against God unless we check that covetous desire, and learn to be content with what God gives or withholds in His gracious provisions for us.

2. What the tenth commandment uncovers

It's the commandment about coveting that made the apostle Paul realise what coveting really meant. He said, "I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'Do not covet'" (Rom 7:7). Coveting things that God is denying you is sin and, said Paul, "Apart from the law, sin is dead" (vs 8). Paul had always been a covetous person, like everyone else. But it was the commandment 'do not covet' that made him see it.

Sometimes a car manufacturer is forced to recall a particular model because a certain component is discovered to be faulty. The owners of that particular model do not know about the faulty component in their car. They think their car is fine. Then one day they receive a notice in the mail informing them of the fault and of the need to have it rectified.

Now God created man good and after His own likeness. Then the fall into sin occurred. Since then all people are born with human natures that are faulty. That's how they come off the assembly line. Their desires no longer give them a perfect performance.

Similarly, the apostle Paul says that he was quite unaware that certain desires in his heart amounted to coveting. In fact, he did not even know what coveting was. He thought, like most people do, that wrong things are only outward, observable acts. He did not realise that the real problem is with the sinful desires of the heart. God's law that said, 'Do not covet', made him discover that there was something terribly wrong inside him. The law did not make him go wrong, inasmuch as the notice to the car owners did not make the car go wrong. The fault was there already, the law simply uncovered it. Sin is not only the wrong you do. Sinning is an expression of what you are on the inside.

Now you would think that everybody knows something as basic as that. Many people are aware that the wrong people do stems from what is there in their human nature. Novelists, who are not even Christian, have written often enough about the depravity of the human heart. The atrocities that are committed in wars begin in the human heart. Even the perpetrators of such evils know that. Who would disagree with what the apostle James writes? "What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight" (4:1,2).

Children often want things they cannot have. They covet them. Because they don't get them, they will quarrel and fight with other children who do have the things they want. It's in the child's sinful nature. Now just transfer that process to adults and you get the terrible things that we see. People will grow or import drugs illegally because they covet the money that will come from the sale of drugs. They don't care about peoples' lives that are ruined by drugs. Similarly, a man lusts after his neighbour's attractive wife. He covets her and wants her for himself. He doesn't care about the woman's husband. The same also with those in power over nations. They covet certain things and they will go to great lengths to pursue or defend what they covet. As James says, they will quarrel, fight and kill. Yes, many people know that the desires of their heart, when they are evil, can be the cause of them doing terrible things.

And yet, people can also be made to believe that what God says are impure thoughts of the heart, are not impure at all. The pharisees fell into this trap. To God's commandments they had added their extra laws and regulations and thought they were righteous in keeping these additions. Before his conversion Paul was like that. After his conversion he confessed to being a fanatical pharisee. Before, his heart's desire was to see every Jew conform to the pharisees' idea of righteousness. He coveted that. And in that state of mind he thought there was nothing wrong in approving of Stephen's death, nor going to Damascus to persecute Christian Jews.

Later on, when God had converted Paul and made him see true righteousness, then Paul felt terribly ashamed of his past spiritual blindness. He had coveted the wrong things. When God's grace made him discover Christ and His salvation riches, then Paul began to desire things much more pure than those of his pharisee past.

By the grace of God, His Word today still uncovers in us our impure desires and makes us see that what we think is normal by today's standards is, in fact, covetous desire by God's standards. Just because everybody else is doing it, doesn't mean that God approves of it.

Have you ever realised, for example, that the tenth commandment uncovers much of today's advertising as being nothing more than making people covetous. There is not a great deal of advertising that just tells us the facts of a certain product. Like what it can do in plain and reasonable language. Many commercials have one simple aim: to attract maximum attention in the shortest possible time. And then once they have that, then they will somehow associate whatever attracted you to their product.

Commercials, therefore, will often use sex in some way because advertisers know, of course, that people will look at pictures of shapely, semi-naked bodies. It then becomes a matter for the advertisers to transfer the interest in things sexual to their product. They have succeeded when people buy the particular car, or the drink, or the clothes, or whatever the product is, because potential buyers have been made to think that they will look better in it or with it.

Or advertisers use a famous athlete or personality to feature the product. People who admire the person might begin to think that if they have the product then they might also look a little bit famous, rich, or important, as that person did on the advertisement. Or the advertisement might show people who appear to be really happy and successful, and so the idea is put into the viewer's mind that when you have the product, then you will also be happy and have success.

The whole idea is to get people to want the product, almost without them noticing it. But in the process the advertising has made people desire to be what they are not, or to have what they will never possess. People have been made to want things for which, if they are desperate enough, they will go into debt, or become very selfish, or ruthlessly ambitious. They want, they want, and they might commit many a sin to get it.

And this is what's wrong with it. People just live on the horizontal level and forget how important it is to have a vertical dimension with God. On that horizontal level one is not satisfied. There is always the desire for more. But the human heart will remain as restless as the sea, until it finds its rest in God. A person has to look up from the horizontal level and discover that he cannot live without God. The tenth commandment teaches us to be content with what God gives and then we will not become possessed by the things of the world.

3. The tenth commandment points us to God

The question is, what are we going to do with our restless heart? Will we continue to look around on that horizontal level and remain weary and depressed because we are not like the people we admire and do not possess what they possess? And when the Word of God makes you realise that's where you are, on the horizontal level, and that you haven't got the peace of God, nor are you living by the riches of Christ, then you can really feel low. Who will deliver you from your discontentment?

The answer is, God will! He says to every despairing person on that horizontal level who wants to get off, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon me and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light" (Mt 11:28-30).

How great a burden is the yoke of covetous desire! It never leaves you alone. It makes you want something different, makes you want to be someone else, makes you think that those whom you are with are not as nice as those other people you see. It focuses your thoughts constantly on yourself. It makes you quite weary.

Jesus said that following Him will also give you a yoke and a burden, but by comparison it will be easy and light. You may be persecuted for following Jesus. It may mean having to carry a cross. But the Lord's grace, strength, nearness, and encouragement will lighten the load and the burden.

You see, all around you the world is trying to save you with perishable things - things that don't last. But God saves you with the precious blood of Christ and gives you an inheritance that can never spoil, perish or fade. Someone put it like this: "If you want to focus your desire on something, if you want to base your destiny on something that won't let you down, then forget about all the stuff you've been coveting and focus all your desire on the Lord Jesus Christ. Depend on Him as your source of happiness. Trust Him with your life both now and forever. Believe that He died to pay the penalty of all your sins and selfish desires. Believe that He rose again to bring you into a whole new way of thinking and living. Jesus is the only One who can give a fresh start to a self-centred, covetous person. So stop selling your soul to other people and Satan. Repent of your sins and believe that Christ has paid for them by His death on the cross." (David Feddes - The Radio Pulpit)

With faith in God, work on the vertical dimensions of your life, that which ties you to Christ. With regard to the horizontal level, the Lord said, "For the pagans run after all these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (Mt 6:32-34).

Amen.