The Greatest Battles of Your Heart

The Ten Commandments identify the greatest struggles of human experience.

In the first commandment, God said, “You shall have no other gods before me.” We don’t find it easy to let God be first in our lives. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we want to take the place of God ourselves.

In the second commandment, God said, “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” We struggle to worship God as He is and prefer to think of God as we would like Him to be.

When God said, “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God,” He was saying, “You will be tempted to use my name to support your own prejudices and express your own frustrations,” and when He said, “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy,” He was telling us that we would have a battle over giving Him our time.

The first four commandments reflect our struggle to love God with our whole heart. The last six commandments speak to our struggle to love our neighbor as ourselves.

When God said, “Honor your father and your mother,” He identified our difficulty in submitting to authority.

We also struggle with issues of ongoing hostility. God speaks to these in the sixth commandment: “You shall not murder.” Christ tells us that the issue here goes beyond physical violence to the underlying resentment we may feel toward others (see Matthew 5:21–22).

“The Ten Commandments identify the greatest struggles of human experience.”

In the seventh commandment, “You shall not commit adultery,” God tells us that that there will be a battle for sexual purity. Again, Christ made it clear that this commandment speaks to the difficulty of keeping our minds and our thoughts clean.

Then, there is a battle for personal integrity—“You shall not steal”—and a battle for honesty—“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” There will be circumstances in which you will be inclined to exaggerate a story, to misrepresent the way things are, or simply to tell a downright, barefaced lie.

Finally, we struggle over this whole business of contentment. That’s why God wrote the tenth commandment: “You shall not covet.” When you see what other people have, it will create within you a feeling that you should have it, too.

These are the battles of our lives; are they not? They are the great struggles that we all face in some degree or another. The Law is like a light shining into our souls, and when we look at what God says to us, we have to admit that He is speaking directly to the primary battles of our hearts.