What does it mean to become like Jesus? One way of breaking this down into its constituent parts is to recognize that the 10 commandments is the description of His character. To learn how to obey the Law is to learn to inhabit His character of love and liberty.

The 10 commandments are given to a redeemed people. We have been brought out of slavery and death and must now learn to live a new creation life. That life is built on the foundation of an unrivalled pursuit of the Living God into whose image we are being transformed.

Nothing in creation can capture the fullness and reality of the living God. He is so far beyond the reach of human imagination or conception. We are not create an image of anything in creation because it would inevitably reduce Him. Only an image He has begotten can be adequate.

The question of how we ‘use’ the LORD’s Name runs surprisingly deep in the Scriptures. When we treat it as not having the capacity to shape us, we are taking it in vain, and His Name is not glorified in us. To take His Name in baptism is a weighty and glorious privilege that defines everything about us.

Time is a gift from the Lord and it is critical we use it in the way He ordains. That includes setting one day in every seven aside to rest and worship with the people of God. Perhaps no other commandment is so relentlessly attacked as this one, which gives us a sense of how important it must be!

Parents are models of God, and children born into the covenant learn how to relate to the Lord by learning how to relate to their parents. Parents’ primary responsibility is to raise their children in the training and instruction of the Lord. This is partly done through the dynamics of relationship… a relationship which changes with time.

This is one of the oldest commandments in creation, and it is one of the deepest. Jesus shows us that we cannot simply reduce this to a prohibition on the criminal act of taking a life unlawfully. It is the stripping away of all hatred, contempt, bitterness or anger.

The Archetypal Bridegroom is Christ. The human experience of marriage is designed to reflect the dynamics of His covenant relationship with His Bride. Only the pure in heart can reflect His unflinching commitment of Christ to the Church. But anything less violates this commandment.

The Law was always supposed to be written on the heart of the redeemed. So many of the commandments are ‘negative’ because they assume we are aligned to the heart of the Lord. There is positive correlative we must inhabit to keep the Law. In this case, sacrificial generosity.

Christ is the epitome, the embodiment of truth, the faithful and true witness. To be like Him is to be profoundly committed to truth at every level of our being in a world predicated on the idea that we can’t trust people, in a world under the control of the father of lies.

This asks the question of our desire. What do we actually want? Who do we want? What do we believe we need before we can be fulfilled? Our desires are disordered, and the deepest battle of faith is often the battle for our heart. In the final analysis, our security is not rooted in our desire for Christ, so much as His desire for us.

This shorter session seeks to guard against both spiritual insecurity and legalism by underlining the fact that the our righteousness is the result of faith in Christ. It is in fact His righteousness. This liberates us to enjoy our growth in holiness as a growing into something we have already been given.