Doug Murren - Ten: What God Really Meant by the Ten Commandments

TEN: What God Really Meant by His Commandments

by Doug Murren

ampelon PUBLISHING

Boise, ID

TEN: What God Really Meant by His Commandments

Copyright 2009 by Doug Murren

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture verses taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-98238269-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9823286-0-6

Printed in the United States of America

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Ampelon Publishing, PO Box 140675, Boise, ID 83714

To order other Ampelon Publishing products, visit us on the web at:

www.ampelonpublishing.com

Cover design: Jared Swafford - SwingFromTheRafters.com

DEDICATION

to Austin, Grayson, Madeleine and Katlyn

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special thanks and recognition is due to Margaret Christensen for all her work in preparing the manuscript.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

One afternoon, a rabbi friend of mine, Yechiel Eckstein, and I were talking just outside the Dome of the Rock at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. On this particularly delightful spring day, we were comparing notes about my conviction that Christians had a habit of turning a positive message into a negative one. He liked my approach and said it was consistent with Jewish thinking. He said, The commands were always seen as positive and as promises. As a rabbi I naturally go from 'Thou shalt not commit adultery' to 'thou shalt love your wife completely.' The positive is more than inferred in the negative.

The Apostle Paul taught in such a manner as well. He always seemed to interpret the law into a positive message of the Gospel. Men shall love their wives as Christ loved the church. Those who stole were to steal no more and work so they could give to those in need. We are to all bow before the Lord Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all-not simply stop being idolatrous.

As you begin this book, my hope is that you discover the truths held in the Ten Commandments. They are more than a list of rules-they serve as a guideline to launch us into a greater fullness of the life God intends for us to live.

God spoke these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. - Exodus 20:1-2

When I was 18 years old, the culture of the '60s held a firm grip on my life as I was incarcerated by life philosophies that only brought pain. A friend of mine, a famous jazz musician, Don Lanphere, had met Christ in a Denny's restaurant about two months before he presented the claims of Christ to me. One evening as Don made his way to pay his bill, he met an evangelical Roman Catholic priest and a local hippie Pentecostal preacher who greeted him as he was leaving. The hippie preacher grabbed Don's hand and said, Hey, man, I'll bet you don't have the courage to accept Jesus Christ right here and pray with me? Don was stunned by this sudden interruption into his life, and he didn't know what to say. The Lord knew the situation, bringing it about from the start. He knew Don was not about to be called a coward. Don replied, Yes, I can. So the two men stood with Don in the lobby of a Denny's restaurant in Wenatchee, Washington as he asked Jesus Christ to come into his heart and transform his life. Don became a completely different person and all who knew him could not help but notice. He was brought out, completely and thoroughly.

On the way home, Don asked Jesus to give him a sign that this was a true event. Already experiencing the joy, relief, light-heartedness of having a lifetime of wrongdoing forgiven, Don was high on God. He felt guiltless through Christ and a new sense of adventure emerged regarding the next steps in his life. Don had come out of his own Egypt.

When Don arrived home, he told his wife, Midge, what had happened. Midge had received Christ once at a Billy Graham event and knew what her husband was saying. Yet, she was skeptical. Billy Graham happened to be on television that night in one of his crusades. Don was trying to think of Christian songs. He asked Midge if she knew if The Battle Hymn of the Republic was a Christian hymn. She said she didn't know. Don and his wife had no more spoken these words when on the television screen the leader said, We're now going to sing one of the greatest hymns of all time. And that hymn? You guessed it: The Battle Hymn of the Republic. For Don, this was an initial sign that demonstrated he was, in fact, on the right track.

When Don began to share his experience with me, I wasn't sure what to think. I was playing in a rock jazz band group with him and was at least 10 years younger than the rest of the players. Don kept telling me that I should get saved. I had no idea what he meant by getting saved. He might as well have told me he wanted to fry an egg on my head. Don's encouragement eventually became more than I could resist. I visited a Christian coffee house one night not knowing exactly why. In fact, I was quite belligerent about this whole Christian thing. When I walked in the door the leader of the house said, Do you want to get saved? Again, he might as well have said, Do you want me to fry an egg on your head? I said I was not certain what he meant by that but added, I think I want what you've got.

A leader pointed toward a prayer room and said, Go in there and pray. This was shocking to me because he clearly assumed I knew how to pray. I could not remember hearing anyone pray except Billy Graham on television. I played in a band one time with a drummer whose family owned a warehouse. His mother said we could use the warehouse to rehearse as long as we watched The Billy Graham Show anytime it was on. So, I had heard Billy Graham pray. Billy had scared the hell out of us more than once but he hadn't scared heaven into me. Yet, here I was with an assignment to pray.

The only prayer I could think of to pray was this: Lord here is my life. You've got it. Take it all. I don't know what else to say. I waited for the couch to blow up or my hair to ignite-and neither happened. I did not have a dramatic conversion moment, but I did have a decisive one. I found that our departures through the Red Sea are not always dramatic but they are always decisive moments. At the last moment, I simply threw my hands in the air and said, Here you go! I knew something had happened. I left the coffee house with a friend of mine. She looked at me and asked, What happened in there? I answered, I don't know but I know I am completely different from the inside out. I had been brought out. I had been brought into total freedom as the children of Israel had at the Red Sea.

Christianity is supposed to be a faith found in the positive side of life. Yet so often our culture defines Christianity by what you can't do and what it is against rather than what it is for. Over the following pages in this book, we will aggressively pursue how our lives are fashioned from a positive standpoint; how the Ten Commandments guide our being shaped into Christ-likeness. These commandments, in fact, are prophecies of what we will look like when the Holy Spirit has completed His work in us. These are predictors of what one looks like under the steady hand of the Lord of our faith.