Sermon – The First Set of Commandments: God and You

(I preached this sermon at Christ Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, on Sunday August 23, 2026. It is in response to Exodus 20:3-11. You can listen to the audio of the sermon by clicking this link.)

Last week we spent an entire sermon on one chapter, Exodus 19, before we ever got to a single commandment. I told you that nineteen comes before twenty. God frees the people and claims the people before God ever tells them what to do. Grace comes before law. If you weren’t here last week, or if it’s already faded, that one sentence is the key you need for everything else in this series. Every commandment we look at for the next three weeks only makes sense once you know it is spoken by a God who has already carried this people out of slavery on eagles’ wings. These are not rules from a stranger. They are house rules from a God who has already moved in and called this people family.

Today we get to the first group. Exodus divides them into two groups. The first group is about our relationship with God. The second group, which we’ll get to over the next two weeks, is about our relationship with our neighbor. That order matters too. You cannot love your neighbor well if your relationship with God is out of balance. So today we start where the commandments start. Our relationship with God.

No other gods before me. You shall not make an idol. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. Remember the sabbath and keep it holy.

Before we look at each one, I want you to notice something about how this whole chapter is built. It doesn’t start at verse three. It starts at verse one and two, where God says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Every single commandment that follows, all ten of them, is resting on top of that one sentence. That sentence is the foundation, and each commandment after it is built on the one before it. You cannot get to no other gods without first hearing I am the Lord who freed you. You cannot get to sabbath rest without first hearing I brought you out of the house of endless work. Pull that foundation out and the whole building comes down. These commandments are never standing on their own. They are always standing on the fact of a God who acted first.

I want to name something else before we go further, because I think it matters for how we hear all of this today. There are two easy ways to get this chapter wrong. One is to treat it like an old artifact, some ancient rulebook that has nothing to say to a person scrolling their phone in 2026. The other is to treat it like a weapon, a list posted on a wall somewhere to be used against people, as if we walk in here already assumed guilty. Neither one of those is what this chapter is for. We’re not going through this so I can make anybody feel worse about themselves this morning. We’re going through it because scripture is honestly this relevant to how we live, and because looking honestly at where we fall short is exactly what opens the door to hearing how Jesus closes that gap for us. We are going to fail at these commandments. All of us. We’re human, and that’s not a surprise to God. 

But that failure isn’t the end of the sermon. It’s the doorway into grace, and I want us to walk all the way through that doorway today, not just stand at the edge of it feeling guilty.

Let’s take these in turn.

The first commandment sounds almost too simple to preach on. No other gods. Fine. Most of us walked in here this morning fairly confident we’ve got that one covered. We’re not out burning incense to Zeus. We didn’t build a golden calf in the garage.

But before we let ourselves off the hook, we need to ask a harder question. What actually is a god?

Martin Luther gave an answer to that question hundreds of years ago that I think is still the best one out there. He said a god is whatever you expect all good things from. A god is whatever you run to when everything falls apart. Whatever has your heart, whatever you trust with your whole weight, that thing is your god. Notice what that definition does. It doesn’t ask whether you kneel down in front of a statue. It asks where your trust actually lives. It asks what you’re actually banking your life on.

Notice what that definition does not require. It does not require a temple. It does not require a shrine or a ritual or anybody kneeling down in front of anything. We tend to assume a god has to come with some kind of formal worship attached to it, incense and candles and a building set aside for it. Luther is telling us that’s not the test at all. The test isn’t whether you’ve built something a stranger would recognize as an altar. The test is what has your trust on a Tuesday afternoon. This was never about some separate religious compartment of your life that only gets opened up for an hour on Sunday morning. It’s about the whole rest of the week. It’s about where your life actually goes when nobody is watching and nothing is scheduled as worship.

Once you hear it that way, the first commandment stops being simple.

Because the truth is, we haven’t stopped worshipping many gods. We’ve just stopped calling them that. The ancient world was honest about this in a way we aren’t. If you walked through an ancient marketplace, you’d see a god for the harvest and a god for the sea and a god for war and a god for love, all of them named, all of them carved, all of them competing for attention. It looks strange to us now. It looks almost childish.

But look at what we actually give our devotion to and tell me we’ve grown out of it.

For some people, the flag has become a god. Not love of country, which is a good and ordinary thing, but the flag lifted up into something you cannot question, something wrapped around a set of national myths that get treated as more sacred than the truth. The historian Richard Slotkin has spent his career studying these American myths, the stories we tell about the frontier, about who counts as a real American and who doesn’t, about violence as the price of progress. Those stories can become so powerful that people will excuse almost anything in their name. That is a god at work.

For others it’s a party. Whichever side of the aisle you’re on, ask yourself honestly whether that party has become something you can never criticize, never doubt, never walk away from even when it does something wrong. That’s not politics anymore. That’s worship.

For others it’s money. For others it’s the job, and the identity that comes wrapped up in the job, so that losing the job feels like losing yourself. For some it might be a sports team.  And I’ll tell on myself here, because I’ve lived this one. There was a stretch of my life where I had wrapped up my identity in a football team so tightly that I actually believed the outcome of the game had something to do with where I was sitting or what I was wearing while I watched it. If they lost, my whole mood for the rest of the day went with them. Looking back, that’s ridiculous. But it’s also exactly what an idol does. It takes something that could be an ordinary joy, a game on a Sunday afternoon, and it quietly demands more than that, until your peace of mind depends on it instead of on God. I’m grateful I’ve let go of most of that. But I only noticed it was a problem because I stopped and looked honestly at what actually had my heart.

The list is long and it is different for every person in this room. That’s actually the point. The commandment isn’t asking you to go look at what society worships out there. It’s asking you to look inside. What are your gods? You can find out with three simple questions. Where does your time go? Where does your money go? Where does your attention go, the thing that grabs your mind the second you wake up and won’t let go until you fall asleep? Whatever wins those three, that’s your god. It might not have a name or a statue. It has your life instead.

And here’s the part that should stop us cold. When we hand our devotion over to something other than God, our neighbor is the one who pays for it. That’s not an abstract theological point. It’s what actually happens. When money becomes our god, we start seeing our neighbor as either useful to us or a threat to what we have. When the flag and its myths become our god, we start seeing our neighbor as either one of us or one of them. Something happens to our eyes when we worship the wrong thing. Our vision gets blurry. We stop being able to see the image of God looking back at us in the person next to us. Instead we start seeing the image of whatever false god we’ve centered our life on, projected out onto everyone else, and it never satisfies us and it never satisfies them either.

I wrote something recently about this idea of enough. We live in a culture that is obsessed with more and less, faster and slower, and we treat those as if they’re opposites of each other. But I think the real opposite of all of that is enough. When something other than God becomes our god, there is never enough of it. Never enough money. Never enough attention. Never enough winning. It cannot be satisfied because it was never built to hold the weight we’re putting on it. Only God can bear that weight. Everything else buckles under it, and when it buckles, it takes our neighbor down with it.

The next commandment gets misunderstood almost every time somebody brings it up. Most people hear it and think about cussing. Don’t say God’s name when you stub your toe. That’s not nothing, but it is not remotely what this commandment is actually about.

Using God’s name wrongly means using God for your own purposes. It means turning the creator of the universe into a tool you keep in your back pocket to justify whatever you already wanted to do. Instead of us being shaped by God, we try to shape God into something that agrees with us. We take the maker of heaven and earth and shrink God down into a character witness for our own side.

Think about what that actually does. It takes God, who is supposed to be the center, and pushes God off to the edge. It takes us, who are supposed to be creatures, and puts us in the center instead, with God trailing along behind, nodding along at whatever we’ve already decided to do. That is exactly backwards. That is the whole relationship turned upside down.

We’ve watched this play out at massive scale throughout history. The Crusades used God’s name to bless armies marching across the world to kill and conquer. In this country, defenders of slavery used God’s name and God’s word to bless the buying and selling of human beings created in God’s image. Christian nationalism does the same thing today, using God’s name to bless a fusion of faith and national power that God never asked for and never blessed. And on the smaller, almost embarrassing end of it, you’ve got people going on television after a hurricane wipes out a community and announcing that God sent it to punish somebody’s sin. Every one of those is the same move. Take God’s name. Attach it to what you already wanted. Call it holy.

But once again, the real question isn’t about the Crusades or Christian nationalism or the loud voices on television. Those are easy targets. The real question is about us, in this room, this week. Where have we used God’s name to bless our own anger? Where have we said “God wants me to cut this person out of my life” when what we really mean is “I’m tired of this person and I want permission to walk away clean”? Where have we said “God is on my side” in an argument, when what we mean is “I want to win and I want God to back me up”? That is the same misuse, just smaller and closer to home. 

I’ve certainly been guilty of this, reaching for God’s name to win a point instead of actually listening. It is worth sitting with this week, not because we should feel ashamed of it, but because most of us have done it more recently than we’d like to admit, and naming it honestly is the only way it ever loosens its grip.

Which brings us to the sabbath, and I want to spend real time here because I think it might be the most countercultural of these first commandments for us specifically.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote a whole book making one basic argument. Sabbath is not primarily about lounging around on a day off, even though rest is part of it. Sabbath is resistance. It is a refusal to live by the economics of Pharaoh.

Here’s what he means. Pharaoh’s economy ran on the idea that people are only worth what they produce. More bricks. More output. No day off, ever, because rest was seen as wasted value. And when the Israelites complained that they couldn’t keep up, Pharaoh’s answer was to demand the same number of bricks with less straw to make them. That is what it feels like to live under a system where your worth is tied entirely to your output.

God’s answer to that, once the people are free, is the sabbath. Once every seven days, everybody stops. Not just the head of the household. The kids stop. The workers stop. Even the animals get the day off. And notice who else God includes. The immigrant, the stranger living in your town, gets the day off too. This was, as one commentary I read this week put it, the first fair labor law in human history. It was never only about worship, even though it’s that too. It was about justice for the people whose bodies get used up first in any economy built on more.

Our culture does not believe in this at all. We brag about being busy. We treat burnout almost like a badge of honor, proof that we were serious enough, driven enough, faithful enough to work ourselves into the ground. Too much of what we call our worth in this country is actually just a measure of our productivity. Sabbath says that is a lie. Sabbath says your worth was never up for negotiation in the first place, because it was never based on what you produce. It is based on the fact that you exist, and that you were made in the image of a God who rested on the seventh day and called it good, not because the work was finished, but simply because rest itself was part of what a whole life looks like.

I’ll admit this is one I still struggle with myself. There are weeks I wear my own busyness like a badge, as if a full calendar proves something about how much I care. So ask yourself this week what it would actually look like for you to keep sabbath. Not a legalistic list of things you’re not allowed to do on a Sunday. A real, honest stop. A refusal to let your value be measured only by your output for one day out of seven. 

That is going to look different for every person in this room, and that’s fine. The point isn’t the specific shape of it. The point is whether you actually believe, deep down, that you are worth something apart from what you produce.

All of these commandments are really one commandment wearing different clothes. They are all asking the same question. Are you in a right relationship with God, or has something else quietly slid into your heart and your life where God belongs?

Being in right relationship with God starts with something simple and something we resist more than almost anything else. We are not God. We are creatures. We are part of creation, not the ones running it. We are stewards of what has been handed to us, not owners of it. We are not in control, even though almost everything in our culture is built to convince us otherwise.

If we stopped right there, this would be a heavy word to carry home. We would walk out of here knowing exactly how far short we fall and not much else. So let’s not stop there.

Because here is the good news underneath all of it. The commandments show us where we’re out of right relationship with God, and that same God has already done something about it. This is where the whole first commandment gets turned inside out in the best possible way. We could never keep our hearts fixed on God with the kind of steady, whole devotion this passage asks for. Not for one full day, let alone a lifetime. So God did not leave that gap sitting there for us to somehow close ourselves. God closed it. Jesus lived the perfect trust in God that we could not manage, and then he carried our failure to the cross and let it end there instead of in us. That is not a metaphor to make us feel better. That is the actual trade being made. Christ’s right relationship with God for our wrong one. His life for our failure. That is grace, and it is not a reward for finally getting the commandments right. It is the reason we can even look at them honestly in the first place without running away from the mirror.

And God does not just forgive us and then leave us standing there on our own to try harder next time. The Spirit is at work in us right now, this morning, prying our hearts loose from whatever false god has them and turning us back toward the true one. That is not something we manufacture through effort. It is something the Spirit does, the same Spirit poured out on us in baptism, the same Spirit that keeps drawing us back to this table and back to each other. Left to ourselves, we drift toward money or the flag or the job or the team every single time. It is the Spirit that keeps interrupting that drift and turning our faces back toward the Father, back toward the Son, back into the life of the Trinity itself, which was never a closed circle but has always been opening up to include us.

And all of this has a direction. It is not just so we feel better about ourselves privately. A right relationship with God is what frees us to actually love our neighbor well, which is exactly where this series is headed next. You cannot pour yourself out for the person next to you while you are still frantically trying to squeeze life out of money or a job or a flag. Getting your relationship with God back in order is not the finish line. It is what makes the next commandment, love your neighbor, even possible.

I think about this every time I walk through our clinics here in Allison Hill. Nobody who walks through those doors is asked to prove they’re worth caring for first. We don’t run a productivity test before we treat somebody’s teeth or somebody’s blood pressure or somebody’s grief. People come to us worn out from jobs that never let them rest, from a culture that has convinced them their worth depends on how much they can grind out before their body gives up. And what we try to offer them in this building, on our best days, is a small taste of what this whole passage is actually about. You are not what you produce. You are not what Pharaoh calls you. You are somebody God already claims, whether or not you’ve filled out a form. That is not something we manufacture through our own good intentions either. It is the Spirit working through ordinary people in an ordinary building, letting a little bit of God’s claim on people leak out into the world.

The commandments have been used plenty of times as weapons. People post them on courthouse walls and argue over classroom bulletin boards, using them to score points against a neighbor instead of examining their own heart. But that was never what they were for. They are a mirror, not a weapon. They’re not handed to us so we can hold them up to somebody else’s face. They’re handed to us so we can look honestly at our own, and then be handed something better than what the mirror shows us.

So this week, hold the mirror up to yourself instead of somebody else. Where has something other than God taken first place in your heart and your life. Where have you used God’s name to bless what you already wanted. What would it look like to actually rest, and trust that your worth was never in question to begin with. And when you see clearly what the mirror shows you, remember that you are not left standing there alone with it. Christ has already stepped into that gap. The Spirit is already at work turning you back toward God. Nineteen still comes before twenty. God has already carried us here. God claims us before we lift a finger to sort any of this out. Next week we turn toward our neighbor, and we’ll see how all of this comes back around to loving the people right next to us. But this week, it’s just you and God, and the good news that God got here first, and God is not finished with you yet.

Thanks be to God. Amen.