John 1:1-18

After the sermon this morning, we are going to be saying the Ten Commandments together as a congregation. This is something that churches and Christians did hundreds of years ago as a way to begin the New Year. Think of it like a New Year’s resolution for the Christian life, except with matters of right and wrong. Instead of resolving to exercise more, or eat less fried food, or to try and not get annoyed with your relatives as easily, saying the Ten Commandments together on the first Sunday of the new year is a spiritual and moral resolution to remind ourselves of God’s ways and recommit ourselves to living in the way of Jesus.

Before we recite the Ten Commandments together, there are two important concepts that I would like to talk about first. They are law and grace. We heard them in our gospel reading from the gospel of John this morning, the seventeenth verse: “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The law comes into existence through Moses, grace through Jesus Christ.

The law is the Ten Commandments. In the Old Testament book of Exodus, the story is that Moses (Moses is man called by God to lead the Hebrew people to freedom from hundreds of years of brutal slavery in Egypt), after God freed the Hebrew people from slavery, climbed the mountain and received the Ten Commandments from God himself. Why? Because these newly freed people needed a moral compass. They had only known brutal slavery at the hands of the Egyptian slave masters. All of their life until they were freed, they saw cruelty and greed and war-mongering and not caring about human life from the Egyptians. They thought that was normal and how the world was supposed to work. Their spirits were beaten down. They adopted the Egyptian story that they were nothing but slaves.

It’s like if you were the kid at school who was bullied or were the black-sheep of your family. The story that you probably told yourself about yourself went something like this: that you are not good enough, that you deserved the bullying you received, that there must be something wrong with you. None of that is probably true, but it can take years, if not your whole life to unlearn that kind of stuff. To heal from that you need to learn that you are valuable, that you do have worth, and that you may not be good at everything, but there is something that God has gifted you with.

In a similar, but much larger way, that’s the kind of transformation that the newly freed, former Hebrew slaves needed to undergo. A big part of the change that they needed to make was reorienting their moral compass about who God is and who they are. Thus, God gave them the Ten Commandments through Moses. Again, from the gospel writer John this morning: “The law indeed was given through Moses…”

The Ten Commandments can be summarized like this: love God and love your neighbor (and the big assumption to be able to do those things is that you need to be able to look in the mirror in the morning and have a healthy love and respect for yourself). The commandments are the basics of our duties and responsibilities towards God and towards others. Thus, as Jesus taught, all of God’s law can be summed up like this: love God and love your neighbor as yourself by doing to your neighbor what you would want done to do if places were switched. For a Christian’s moral compass, true north is making decisions, taking actions, and speaking words that love and honor God and love and honor others. If we are not sure of what we are doing is right, a good question is “does this decision or this word I am going to speak honor God and does it love and build up and honor the other person?” If it doesn’t, our moral compass is probably off.

Here is a quick summary of the Ten Commandments if it’s been a while since you looked at them:

1. I am the Lord your God: you shall have no other gods but me.
2. You shall not make for yourself any idol. Commandments 1 and 2 go together. What is our duty towards God? To love and obey God and to bring others to know him. To put nothing in the place of God.
3. You shall not dishonour the name of the Lord your God. What is our responsibility to God? To show God respect in what we think, what we do, and what we say.
4. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy. What is our duty? To set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God’s ways. Showing up to church to worship God is important. Praying on your own is important. Reading and studying the Bible is necessary.
5. Honor your father and mother. What is our responsibility here? To love, honor, and help our parents and family; to honor those in authority whether in church, school, or government, and to do the things they ask of us when the things they ask of us are just and in accordance with God’s law.
6. You shall not commit murder. What does this mean? Beyond the obvious of don’t kill another human being, our duty is to show respect for the life God has given us; to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God;
7. You shall not commit adultery. Again, beyond the obvious that we are not to be unfaithful to our spouse, this commandment means that we are to use our bodily desires as God intended. 
8. You shall not steal. Again, our responsibility is broad here. On the surface, we should not take what does not belong to us. But, even more so this commandment means that we are to be honest and fair in our dealings; to seek justice, freedom, and the necessities of life for all people; and to use our talents and possessions as ones who must answer for them to God.
9. You shall not be a false witness. Our duty here is to speak the truth, and not to mislead others by our silence.
10. You shall not covet anything which belongs to your neighbour. Our responsibility here is to resist temptations to envy, greed, and jealousy; to rejoice in other people’s gifts and graces; and to do our duty for the love of God, who has called us into fellowship with him.

Those are the ten commandments. My guess is, though, if you’re like me, hearing them and thinking about them, you have two minds about them. On one hand, the commandments are important. We should live by them. We want to live by them. They are there to protect us and protect other people from all sorts of evils and corruptions. On the other hand, we are aware of just how impossible it seems to live by the law and how many times we have violated a commandment, whether we did so intentionally or the violation happened accidentally.

I’m reminded of a very short story I read a few weeks ago. It was told by the UCC pastor, Anthony Robinson, in a weekly email about a famous Jewish Rabbi named Abraham Heschel. It goes like this:

Heschel was once walking to synagogue on the Upper West Side [in New York] when a man stopped him to say he never attended [worship] services. 

“‘I’m a good person,’ the man explained. ‘I try my best; I don’t need prayer or God.’

“Heschel [the Rabbi] smiled. ‘How I envy you,’ he said. ‘I’m always saying the wrong thing, wounding those I love, forgetting to offer a kind or gentle word. I need synagogue.’”

Here is the fundamental problem with the law. The law can teach us how to live a good life. It can tell us what is right and wrong. It can point us towards the ways of God. But the law cannot heal us. Following the rules can’t heal our angry spirit. It can’t mend our broken heart. It can’t repair our damaged relationships. It can’t forgive us our sins. The law can show us the right way, but it can’t fix us. And we can’t fix ourselves or anyone else, hard as we might try.

But, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. The grace and truth of Jesus Christ is what ‘fixes’ us. The Scriptures call this ‘getting a new heart, a new mind, and a new spirit”.

How would you describe grace? For me, grace is forgiveness that is not deserved, joy and happiness that is not earned, and relief from the pressures to try and be who the world wants me to be. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is what allows us to be free before God. As much as I’d like to think of myself as a good, decent, responsible, hard-working man, I know that at times, I am not. That knowledge can lead us down one of two paths: either we can be consumed by guilt and think very low of ourselves or it can cause us to not care about anything and just keep doing the wrong we want to do, no matter the cost to others, ourself, or our relationship to God.

That’s why we say that the grace of God heals our angry spirit. It is what mends our broken heart. It is what makes it possible for us to repair broken relationships. When we experience forgiveness, it is the grace of God at work in us. It is not magic. The sin, the wrong, the offense hasn’t gone away. But the grace of God is that sin, that wrong, that offense that we have done doesn’t have to be the only thing that we are known for in the rest of our life. Forgiveness opens up the possibility of repentance, which opens up the possibility of change and a new heart and a new mind and a new spirit. In Christ, the apostle Paul writes to the Galatians, “we are new creations”. That is the grace of God. Grace and truth.

“The law indeed was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” Grace and truth and law. We are going to be saying the ten commandments together in a call and response kind of way. Think of them as guardrails and guideposts for living a life worthy before God. But also remember that Jesus Christ has forgiven you and freed you and gives you a new heart, mind, and spirit to obey his commands.

Works Cited

“An Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism.” The Online Book of Common Prayer, https://www.bcponline.org/. Accessed 1 January 2026.

Robinson, Anthony. “As the Year Ends: Delights.” What’s Tony Thinking?, Substack, 29 December 2025, https://substack.com/@anthonybrobinson747/p-182868222. Accessed 02 01 2026.