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In my ministry I have always liked to do special things over the summer months.
Those months are different, as far as I am concerned, and those hot weeks of
vacation coming and going are good times to try different things. This particular
summer I planned a series of sermons looking at each of the Ten
Commandments. This sermon here is the first of the set, the one that surveys the
territory before we look at each commandment individually. The title I put on the
series is the one above this sermon. I had never preached on the Ten
Commandments before, so I don't know what I was expecting. I think I was
expected to be uncomfortable on the rigid side of things. So this was all an
eye-opening experience for me, the preacher. It made me really take seriously
something that I had grown accustomed to saying in introducing a number of
sermons. I would say (as you will hear) "I want you to think with me about. . . ."
Think with me. As in, "I don't have the answers, but we really do need to think
about this together." Well, we had to think about these "commandments." The
bottom line was, as becomes obvious in this opening sermon, that as "clear" as
the commandments sound, they are not that clear at all. At every step, through
each one, there are problems, problems with the "rules." At any rate, this sermon
sets up what is ahead. Listen as we "think through" this matter together, the
congregation and I.