Yesterday, after listening to a sermon in church on love as the distinguishing mark of Christians, I went home and spent some time in personal study. I discovered J.I. Packer’s Growing in Christ on my Logos. For some reason I was drawn to the section on the Ten Commandments. I’ll be honest — I have been one of those Christians who, in resistance to legalism, has marginalized the “Law.” Packer offers a beautiful discussion of the Commandments. I will post a few of his thoughts this week and encourage you to purchase this volume as an excellent study on many important issues. These remarks are from the preface to his discussion:
“We too are wonderfully made, complex physically and even more so psychologically and spiritually. For us, too, there is a maker’s handbook—namely, God’s summary of the way to live that we find in the Ten Commandments. Whether as persons we grow and blossom or shrink and wither, whether in character we become more like God or more like the devil, depends directly on whether we seek to live by what is in the Commandments or not. The rest of the Bible could be called God’s repair manual, since it spells out the gospel of grace that restores sin-damaged human nature, but it is the Commandments that crystallize the basic behavior-pattern which brings satisfaction and contentment, and it is precisely for this way of living that God’s grace rescues and refits us.
Suppose someone says: “I try to take the Ten Commandments seriously, and live by them, and they swamp me! Every day I fail somewhere. What am I to do?” The answer is: now that you know your own weakness and sinfulness, turn to God, and to his Son Jesus Christ, for pardon and power. Christ will bring you into a new kind of life, in which your heart’s deepest desire will be to go God’s way, and obedience will be burdensome no longer. That folk who take the law as their rule might find Christ the Savior as their Ruler is something to pray and work for.
God’s love gave us the law just as his love gave us the gospel, and as there is no spiritual life for us save through the gospel, which points us to Jesus Christ the Savior, so there is no spiritual health for us save as we seek in Christ’s strength to keep the law, and practice the love of God and neighbor for which it calls.”
