This recording is from Willow Creek Church in Winter Springs, Florida, where Dr. Pete Owensin is our senior pastor. Today, sermon is part 21 in a series on the book of Exodus and deals with the last of the Ten Commandments. This message is taken from Exodus chapter 20, verse 17, and is called Freedom from Obsession. Now here's Pete with today's message. Father, we do come before you in worship this morning, and we need to hear that you are faithful. Declare today as we look at our lives, as we look at your Word, as we look at the world that you are faithful and good and kind. You are strong, you're omnipotent Lord, you're almighty, and everything that you do. And you turn your power for our good, and we're so thankful for that Lord today. We come into your presence this morning as your people and we worship. We lift up your name. We want, Lord, today, at the beginning of this week to focus upon you, we want to think about you, Lord. We want our weak that is behind us and the weak that is to come to not dominate our lives. We want you to dominate our lives. And so, Lord, we come to you today, and we ask that you would help us to worship, that you would enable us to remember who you are, and then remember that we're your children, but we're not an afterthought that you haven't forgotten us. And in even the events of our lives right now, you are still sovereign, you're still in charge. As you think for a moment, as you sit in your chair, what are those things that God has done for you? For what do you have to be thankful? Think for a minute, just a minute. List five things.
Oh, Father, what seems to loom so large in our lives are the things that are not working right right now. And we come to you today and we pray that you would enable us to remember that you are in charge. And that though the economy is very, very slow, for some, this is a horrible time, jobs are needed, resumes are being sent out, houses need to sell, deals need to be made, but Father, we come to you today and remember that you have taken care of us in the past and you will indeed take care of us in the future. We give thanks to you today for first and foremost, being our God who created us, the one who provides for us and Jesus our Savior who redeemed us and Holy Spirit for coming into our hearts and putting there the true work of Christ, giving us faith, giving us the ability to believe you brought great change in our lives and we come to you today and we worship. We give you our brokenness and our sins and our shame and we ask today that you would enable us to remember as we look into your word and as we take communion that you are the God who provides, be with each one of us, Lord we pray now and as we look into your word we pray for the one who teaches that you would forgive him his sins. We look today to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith as we pray in his holy name. Freedom from obsession. Well, we're doing the sermon now and some of you are wondering why so quick, well because we're going to do communion and do it a little bit differently this morning. We're going to sing a little bit later after communion. We're going to look in God's word this morning and then we're going to take communion by the same method we did, the tincture method that we did on Good Friday and yet we still need to start as we look into God's holy word as we are studying still the 10 commandments. We're doing the 10th commandment and some of you say we haven't done the ninth commandment, good thinking. We're doing the ninth next week and the 10th today because the 10th has so much to do with the whole issue of Thanksgiving. I want to start with two e-mails. This one has to do with Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan is retired as you know. He is no longer playing professional basketball but is he still making money? Answer? Yes of course. He has $40 million in endorsements, he makes $178,100 a day working or not. If he sleeps seven hours a night he makes $52,000 every night while visions of sugar plums dance in his head. If he goes to see a movie it will cost him seven eight bucks but he'll make $18,500 bucks while he's there. If he decides to have a five minute egg he'll make $618 while boiling it. He makes $7,415 an hour more than the minimum wage. If he wanted to save up for a new Accura NSX it's about $90,000 it'll take him a whole 12 hours to do so. If someone were to hand him his salary and endorsement money they would have to do it at the rate of $200 every second. He'll probably pay around $200 for a ninth round of golf but he'll be in reimburse $33,390 for that round. He'll make about $19.60 while watching the 100 meter dash and the Olympics in about $15,600 during the Boston and Marathon. This year he'll make more than twice as much as all U.S. presidents for all of their terms combined. Isn't that amazing? However, and it's a big however, if Jordan saves a hundred percent of his income for the next 500 years he will still have less than Bill Gates has at this very moment. Game over. The nerd won. I got another email this week. A Michigan woman it seems goes up north with her family and vacations in the same town that Paul Newman and his family often visit. One Sunday morning the woman got up really early and took a jog. It was brisk cold. She took a jog but she warmed up sufficiently to decide that she wanted to get a double-dipped cone of ice cream. She goes over to the bakery slash ice cream parlor and there's only one other patron in the store. Guess who it was? Yes, it was Paul Newman. She goes in and there he is with his big baby blues. They don't do anything for me. But I understand it causes some women to go into a Twitter, it did her. With a slow smile, he kind of looks over and nods graciously and she's thinking, pull yourself together. I'm not a teenager anymore. I'm 50 years old. I'm happily married. I got a bunch of kids. Things are going good. I don't need to worry about this. So the clerk gave her a double-dipped chocolate ice cream. With that, she thought and one had changed in the other. She went out the door avoiding even a glance at Newman. But when she reached her car, she realized she didn't have the ice cream cone in her hand. So she had the change and she went back inside thinking that the store owner must be standing there still with the ice cream cone. He didn't have it. It's not in that little stand they have there. She looks over at Newman and he says, you put it in your purse. I love that. It's amazing, the impact that people and their possessions have on us, how we can be so influx, I mean, we think of a Michael Jordan, we go, my goodness, you know, all that money and then we get, people in their possession affects us. It really does. It affects us in an amazing way. And yet we can become, as the text is focused today, we can become obsessed and influenced by these people in an amazing way. You know the word obsession comes from the idea, a really biblical idea of a person being possessed by a demon and therefore controlled. And so that idea of possession obsession has kind of moved into a popular vernacular to kind of speak of a person who's become focused on something. So focused on something that it really rules their life and obsession really carries the same idea as coveting and we were studying the Ten Commandments. And these are not easy things to study. This has not been easy for me and it's not easy for you but here we go as we look at the whole issue of coveting because here's the Ten Commandment Exodus 20 verse 17, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his man's servant or his maid's servant or his ox or donkey or, and here's the really the idea, right, anything that belongs to your neighbor. And Jesus talked about this a great deal in Luke 12. Someone in the crowd said to him, teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me. I'm so glad people don't ask me to do that. I say, you got to talk to the lawyers, I don't mess with that but back then they got the rabbis. Jesus said, man who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you, then he said, watch out. Beyond your guard against all kinds of greed because a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possession. The word greed there is the Greek word that can be translated covetousness and in the old King James is translated covetous. So it's the same idea and Jesus is thinking of the Ten Commandment here when he's talking to this guy who's asking about money and he's really talking about, there isn't a person in this room who isn't thinking about money needs in their own life right now, is there? Some of you, like I said in my prayer, I know, I know, I know. You don't have enough deals. Some of you desperately want to change jobs. Some of you left a job because you want to get into a job that you really enjoy. Some of you are retired and you're thinking, hey, am I going to have enough to make it? I know. We're all thinking about money. I'm thinking about money. Are you kidding? I got a building to pay off and we're going into a recession. Oh, maybe not. Maybe we won't. Lord, please don't let it be that bad. And yet, you know, you know, we're all thinking about money. We think about money all the time because we live in a money oriented world and Jesus is talking about. He's saying that there needs to be this internal ethical monitor that's going off all the time inside us that reminds us not to covet, not to covet, not to covet, not to covet. We got to be careful. We all struggle with this. That the stuff we possess, we got to be careful that it doesn't possess us. I'm doing a Tuesday series with the gathering of men downtown Orlando on Tuesdays right now. And a couple of weeks ago when I got back there for the first part of the series, this guy came up to me and he said, do you remember what you talked on last time you were here? I said, absolutely not. I don't even remember my name sometimes. He said, okay, here was your sermon. Here was your sermon. God is life. Less is more. Life is short. I said, I remember that. I remember that because I taught it to my congregation and I teach it to myself almost every day. I have to remember God is life in the source of all life. Less sometimes is more because my stuff can possess me and I have to take care of it when it breaks. And life is short. You got to focus on what's important and I need this. I need this. So this is for all of us. Let's talk about it. This is a unique commandment. It really is. Somebody said that coveting is the sin nobody ever commits. Well, no. He said, no, it's the sin that nobody ever confesses to committing a Roman Catholic priest who said, you know, I've done confessions for 50 years. I've never had anybody come up to say, father, you know, I've been coveting lately. And I've been a pastor for half of that 50 years and I don't ever remember anybody saying, hey, I got a real problem, Pete. Would you pray for me? I'm coveting. I coveted. I coveted. Probably this morning. I covet all the time. You do too. It's 100%. This commandment is not unique in that only some of us do it. We all covet. But it's unique in that it's one of those, it's the commandment that nobody will ever see. Let me back up. It is not necessarily commandment or an action that somebody won't see. They will see the effects of coveting if we covet. But here's, they might not see it. We can cover it up for a while. But it eventually rears its head, coveting always does. It's the last commandment, but it's not per se an action. The other ones are do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not do these things. This is, it takes the step prior, doesn't it? Goes into the mind and the heart. What's going on in your mind and heart? He says, don't covet. Not only don't steal their stuff, don't even think of doing it. Whoa. But it is amazing to me that Jesus uses it and that God gives us this command and He sums it all up by saying, you got to understand that it's not just what you do, it's what you think of doing, because what you think of doing, you'll probably do. And that old maxim, I love this, I love this. So thought, reap a action, so an action, reap a habit, so a habit, reap a character, reap a character, so a destiny. And so the movie, the Empress Club is right that a character, your character is your destiny. What we become is what we do and what we do affects the outcome of our life in every way. And that's why God says, you got to understand that what you think of doing is what you'll probably do if you're not careful, so don't even go there, don't even, I watched an investigative report a couple of weeks ago, it was one of those real grizzly, yucky murders. And it happened in Connecticut when Karen and I were still up there, and I'd never heard the outcome. In fact, I'd never even heard that it was a serial killer case, and do you like those things? You ever watch those? I do. I like those, because it's about sin, and you know, if sin goes, I've lost my job. And so I like to study depravity, and so I was watching this game, but partly it happened in Connecticut. And you know, the interesting thing is that what happened is we see that the guy who committed these, he was an insurance agent, got a couple of them here, it's just the nicest looking guy, but the thoughts that led to horrible murder started when he was this tall, and continued to bear fruit until in college he committed his first murder, first two. I'll go back to the mind and the heart, what rules there gets out, and so that's, see any thought can produce any action, even among believers. Let's talk briefly about the essence of the idea of covening. What's the essence? The essence is simply this, covening is illegitimate desire. It's basically saying, I want something that I can't have, and God says, don't want that. God says, don't covet your neighbor's house, or your neighbor's, some of you are saying, please come covet my house, I want to sell my house. You know, please, just come over and draw a little bit over, but back then you have to understand that there wasn't this mobile economy selling house is investing in that kind of stuff. It's kind of like, I want that house, and I'm going to find a way to get it. Or neighbor's wife, you see, it's never yours to have, so you can't have it. Or even think about it, because it's not yours to have anything, that's the essential idea. Let me ask you this, is having a wife a good thing, guys? Yeah, absolutely. It's a wonderful thing. Proverbs says that he who has a wife has found a good thing, not a good thing, boy, this is Thanksgiving, guys, you better be thinking, you married up, okay, all right? It's a good thing, it's a very good thing, but not somebody else's wife for you. You can't have it. Covening is envy, and the essence of envy is that envy turns to poison, and it corrupts you, and then you will corrupt somebody else. That's the essence of the idea, and the coveting on the loose is found in the Bible all over the place. Joshua, seven is the one instance that comes to my mind, but there's many instances in the Bible, right? We're coveting gone to seed, coveting on the loose causes problem. What was the first city that the Israelites conquered when they crossed the Jordan River and got into the Promised Land? What was it? It was what an AI. It was Jericho, right? And they conquered Jericho, but God said everything, all of the plunder in Jericho is mine. It's to be devoted to me, the gold, the silver, the clothes, the everything, it's mine. Now later in the battles, the Israelites were able to take some of the plunder for themselves. They built their economy on the stuff that they got there, but not from Jericho, but Aiken was one of the guys that saw some good stuff stole it, and then when the Israelites went up against AI, the second city, a little town, they'd taken Jericho, but they'd go up to AI and what happens? It's a little town defeats them. Why? Because God says somebody took something under the ban. Aiken replied in Joshua 70, verse 20, when he was found out, it's true, I've sent against the Lord, the God of Israel. This is what I've done. When I saw the plunder, a beautiful robe from Babylon, 200 shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing 50 shekels, I coveted them and took them. They're hidden in the ground inside my tent with a silver underneath. Then start with a desire, always, always. And here's Aiken, Aiken, what happened was the death of Israelite warriors because this guy coveted. David and Bashsheba led to, let's see, adultery, murder, and the death of their baby, Ahab coveted a plot of land and a lead to the murder of a guy. The small bad stuff and big bad stuff comes from coveting. It's on the loose in America today. Read Diana West's book, The Death of the grown-up, so good. One of our elders said I should read it and so I read it, The Death of a grown-up. Basic thesis is it. Even grown-ups in America aren't saying no to themselves, even when they should. Not saying no to their kids. They're not saying no to whatever they want. Whatever they want to do, the growing immorality in our culture, is that we're not saying no. Everything's okay, so we do it. Now, we have to understand, this commandment does not teach against desiring. This is not saying you shall desire nothing. That's not what he's saying. That's Buddhism. The history of Buddhism is this, in all of the wars and the havoc that was going on in the culture around them, he said, we've got to get away from this. How do we get away? And Buddha said, get away. And don't think about it. Don't be involved in the messes and the crimes and the wars. Get away from it all. And clear your mind of every thought about everything bad. Clear your mind of that stuff and you'll have peace. And you know what? He's right. You will. If you wipe every bad thing, you're thinking to do it and have no desire for anything. You don't want to do it. You don't want to get anything. You don't want to be bad toward anybody. You don't want to do it. You don't want to think about anything. You know what will happen? You'll have peace. And you will become a nobody. If you don't desire anything, you don't desire anything bad. You also don't desire anything. Good. You're a nobody. It's not Christianity. So God is not saying don't desire anything. He's saying he's not saying don't desire less. He is saying I want you to desire more. I want you to desire what is really important. We said it last week. Jesus said it. Take first his kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be out of you. That what he said is so good. I love that. And so he's telling us to desire the good things, not the bad things. Red another book called Status Anxiety was so good, Status Anxiety. How sometimes we covet simply for status. So if I ever was coveting a building for status for me, God has a great sense of humor in that Northland just finishes their new building over there. Isn't that good? It's so good because it never pays off. Kills us. How do we cure it? How do we deal with it? We leave you four quick suggestions before we take the Lord's Supper. The first thing that will help us cure coveting is the raw power of the gospel, the raw power of God. And I love Romans six. What shall we say then? I'll be to continue and sin that grace might increase. May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death. Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism in the death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father. So we too might have newness of life. If we receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord what happens is that we become so united so connected to Jesus Christ that we literally through faith in him are united to his death toward the power of sin and are raised to a new life toward the power of a new life. And this is the raw power of the gospel. It is not behavior modification. It is not you just trying to be better. It is literally because you can't be better connecting up to God and he says, I'll come in and do a work in your life and I'll set you free. That's why it says. That's why it says in Romans 6, 12, therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey. It's lust. Don't give in. You don't have to. And you say does this really where it does. I mean this week I was going out, I was coveting and preparing this message. It was very difficult when you're doing that. And he said, you memorize us, use this and I said, you know, I don't have to covet and I went over this text of scripture and he said, you're free. You're not good but you are free and you're my son. And the thoughts went away. That's how it's supposed to work. Now they returned later in the day. And so what did I do? I went back. The word of God feeds us and sets us free. It is the power of the gospel. It's not that we don't know these Bible verses. It's that we don't allow their power to seep into our heart. If you don't know Christ, Romans 3, 23 is bad news for all of sin and fall short of the glory of God. But the good news is that the wages of sin is death but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. And if coveting is killing you and for some of you, it is. You have this desire for more all the time. You have a restlessness in your spirit that just you're not happy to get the next thing and then you get it and it just doesn't satisfy you need Jesus in your life. Just like the rest of us, receive him and get his power and he will give you the ability to deal with that coveting urge that raises its ugly head and eventually it does taper off when you stop listening to those voices. Second, cure for coveting is grace thinking. It's once you understand the gospel and once you have the power of God in you, then it really is taking control of your mind, finally brother and whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute. If there is anything excellence and anything worthy of praise, let your mind what dwell on those things because you see, what happens is that coveting is dwelling on thoughts that will lead you to an obsessive way of life that will destroy you and so God says, hey, monitor yourself. This is a great passage. Think about grace, think about what I've done, think about who you are. Now in me, grace thinking, one evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that was going on inside people's minds and hearts. He said, son, there's a battle going on, there's two wolves inside of us. One is evil, it's angry envy filled with jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, all that stuff and the other wolf is got joy and peace and love and hope and serenity. The grandson was thinking, oh, he said, well, which wolf wins? The old Cherokee said, the one you feed. Salvation isn't something you get or you gain, but you know what? Our level of growth and contentment in our life, a lot depends on how we appropriate what we've been given. Grace thinking, what do you feed? What do I feed? Is crucial toward contentment or coveting? What else can destroy a covetousness, working? We talked about this last week. See, if you want some work for it, Ephesians, work for it, you'll get it eventually, probably. Work. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving helps to control covetousness. It does for me. Somebody sent me this email this week, frustration, they said, is trying to find your glasses without your glasses? You've found that to be true. The irony of life is that by the time you're old enough to know your way around, you're not going anywhere. I always was taught to respect my elders, but it keeps getting harder to find one. I don't know why they sent that to me. We really frankly kind of ticks me off. So there's always the negative stuff to think about and the stuff that could frustrate us. But Thanksgiving and the text is there. And everything you think, this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus. In other words, there's a determined sense of making the list. Did you do that this morning? I didn't. Everything's giving me, I do try to make the list of those things for which I have to give thankful. So that on Thanksgiving Day, I can talk about it, and it's tough for your kids when you're a pastor, because every family gathering and every prayer is a potential sermon. I try not to preach too long, but Thanksgiving. I've got to make my list, because I can always make the negative list. And I've got to make the positive list. And when I start doing that, I find that that list is a whole lot longer than I thought. It's amazing. It's amazing. It's always a huge list. I encourage you as we move toward communion right now to start thinking about that list. Remembering when you didn't know Christ and now that you do in the difference that it makes. The relationships that have been restored. The changes in your character, the hope that you have, the ability that God's given you to overcome some of the stuff, even what you're going through right now, some of you to give up a long time ago if it weren't for Jesus now. Make your list. Keeping the cross central to what God has done for you, but also keeping in mind what He's going to do. As we take communion, it's important to understand that communion is for believers, for those who place their faith in Jesus Christ. If you don't know Jesus Christ, don't take communion. Just stay in your seat, but take Him, receive Him and save your Lord. He's your only hope to set you free in your thinking and your actions, and to set a new course for your life. But if you're His, you get in line and come forward and get communion. We're going to do this in a clockwise fashion. This section over here will come up, we'll have an elder right here. You'll come out this way, we'll let you go, row by row. This section here, I'll be standing right here in the center. You come up and come back this way, back to your seat. This section over here, you come up here, but be an elder right here. Come back to your seat, come up, take the bread, dip it into the cup, and remember that this is the body of Christ for you. You are not an afterthought. When Jesus died on the cross, he didn't die for this nameless, faceless mass of humanity. He died for you by name and by face, and he's so glad that you're His child. And He wants you not to have less desire, but a greater desire, a desire for Him. That's our heads and our hearts. As our elders come forward, and as we prepare our minds and hearts, start thinking right now, what is it? What is it that you have to be thankful for? Our Lord, we come to you today grateful that we're your children. And we pray that you would begin to do something internally in our hearts that is so different, that Lord we would think and feel differently because the shame is removed, because in your body and because of your blood, we have been cleansed and forgiven, and you see us today, Father, through the work of our Savior Jesus. May we remember this morning that His body and His blood was given for us, and that we are clean, but we pray these things. The strong name of our Savior Jesus Christ. Our new Creek Church is associated with the Presbyterian Church in America. Our website is www.willocreekchurch.org and our phone number is 407-699-82-11.