Put The Spotlight On Jesus’ Finished Work

I think this series of blogs is really going to raise eye-brows as I continue to write.  My rant today is that I believe many well-meaning pastors, priests, people, you name it preach strongly on the Ten Commandments, thinking that imposing the law would cause sin to be removed?  I have seen the billboards, read the signs, saw the books and heard the priests but do you know what preaching the Ten Commandments does?  It puts into sin-consciousness.

Let me state this again; the law is holy and just but it cannot make you holy and just.  The law is there to show you how inadequate you are and how impossible it is to keep the law perfectly.  Paul stated “For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, “You shall not covet.”  When you hear the inner voice that points out your flaws and faults and accusations and legalism that is the enemy using the old covenant of the law against you.  The enemy constantly puts a spotlight on your behavior and shows you how you are disqualified from fellowship with God and how you are undeserving of His acceptance, love and blessings.  The law is used to heap condemnation and guilt upon you.  The only way out of this is to rest in the finished work of Jesus and know that He once and for all took all the guilt and condemnation upon His body so that in Him you are completely free.

The law should be kept but you should not do it out of obligation but out of love.  You do not need the law to tell you right from wrong.  You do not need the Ten Commandments to continually condemn you and remind you how short you fall.  In the Bible it says that Jesus will write His laws on our hearts.  We do not need tablets to tell us what to do right, we have the law on our heart from Jesus through His Holy Spirit to guide us.  We do right and follow God’s law because of what He has done for us and because we love Him, not because we are trying to perfectly keep His laws to be held righteous before Him.

I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.  And the commandment, which was to bring life, I found to bring death.   —   Romans 7:9-10

The only way out of the vicious circle of defeat is to put the spotlight on the finished work of Jesus.