Sermon Central
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Only The Strong Survive Series
Contributed by Mark Atherton on Oct 15, 2001 (message contributor)
Summary: a look at the sixth commandment
---REVERE LIFE
------Because:
----------Life is sacred
----------Life is precious
----------Life is full of potential
Jeremiah 29:11 2 Cor. 5:17-20 Matt. 5:21,22
Man sees the number of SEEDS in an APPLE but God sees the number
of APPLES in a SEED.
---RESPECT LIFE
------Because:
----------Each life is valuable to God.
Psalm 8:3-8 Psalm 113:5-9 Mt. 10:29-31 Mk 1:40-41
There must be more to this commandment than what is obvious. Why would God waste one of His commandments on a law that seems to be written on our hearts? Doesn’t everyone know that it is not right to take someone’s life? Even the people that do it know that it is not right. There must be something lying beneath this command that God is trying to teach us.
All of us who are parents understand this kind of teaching. When we scold our children for not sharing a truck or a doll we are not as concerned with the obvious as we are with the principle that lies underneath. What we want to teach our children is to share their possessions. We’re not as concerned about the truck as we are them learning the deeper principle. Oh sure, we want them to share the truck, but the bigger picture is something else. That’s what God is getting at in this commandment. Sure he wants us not to commit homicide, suicide, abortion, or euthanasia. That’s a no-brainer. What is the deeper principle??
God wants us to revere life!! There is a holiness that goes along with this precious gift God has given us. We should revere life because it is sacred. We are created in His image and so there is a certain sacredness in our humanness. The Bible says that if we are Christians that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. We talk about Jesus living in our hearts. Paul says we can be filled with all the fullness of God. If those statements are true we can have the whole Godhead living in us!! Because of the sacredness of life we take care of our bodies and don’t mistreat them with habits or practices that can damage them. We revere life because life is precious. When I think of life’s preciousness, I think of its shortness. James says that life is but a vapor, here today and gone tomorrow. Because of that we should seize the Day! We should go for the gusto in a holy way! We revere life because of the potential of one life. No one knows what potential lies in each of our lives. Only God can see that and because of this potential life is to be revered.
Not only should we revere life we should respect it because each life is valuable to God.
The Bible says we are made a little lower than the angels!! Amazing!! Each life is precious to God. Even those lives that seem to have little worth in this world are precious to God. That’s why our ministries should be focused on Is. 58 kind of stuff. Even the ones who don’t looks like us land talk like us and smell like us and don’t share the same values as us are precious to God. They have worth in His eyes because in some damaged way, His image is still there. We need to have compassion on the poor, needy, drunken, homeless, drug-addicted people of the world because they are valuable to God.
