The Ten Commandments – The Sabbath and Blasphemy - 22nd March 2007

Happy Thursday! Some questions today, and a little exercise on blasphemy.

4. Remember the Sabbath Day.

Whatever happened to the ‘Keep Sunday Special’ campaign, which most Christians seemed to support until the shops started opening, at which point we realised that being able to go to Tesco on the way home from church was actually quite useful? (This is not an attempt to justify my actions!)

There are good reasons for keeping Sunday special, not least for the fact that Sunday is the worst day to go to Tesco, and judging by the stressed nature of the customers, they could do with taking some of this on board.

Einstein, one of the world’s greatest scientists expounded the theory that time is relative. Think about this, most of us will comment that we don’t seem to have time any more, why is that? Can I suggest the following. Society, and particularly technology has transformed the western world into a ‘now’ culture. 40 years ago, multitasking didn’t exist (which is a good thing for men). If we wanted to communicate, generally we would write a letter, which required thought, or talk face to face, which required interpersonal skills. We had time to do this because the shops weren’t open in the evening or on Sundays, and there were not 160 TV channels to try and watch on Sky. We didn’t have any emails to answer, we couldn’t surf the internet, so we could invite our friends round to chat which would save us texting them and trying to fit an entire conversation into 160 characters of badly spelt words. Is the communication generation responsible for a breakdown in society? I leave you to reach your own conclusion on that, but go back to yesterday’s thought about the Oxo family.

Rant over, and in answer to my first question, click here

3. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord

I can tolerate a certain amount of swearing and bad language, and occasionally disgrace myself by joining in. But what does affect me a lot is misusing God’s name. What annoys me most is that people don’t even realise what they are saying – blaspheming is accepted because it is such a part of society, why do people do it?

An exercise for you. Take the name of someone you love or your parents for example. Every time you would blaspheme, insert their name instead of God or Jesus. What does the context look like now – I suspect it appears that everything is that persons fault and you probably feel mighty embarrassed about it. – welcome to God’s world!

So then, on the basis of the above exercise, is it possible to restrain ourselves and whilst being expressive, glorify God by including him in our conversation for the right reasons? I encourage you to do so.