Greetings to you all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the alone head and king of his church. It's an honor, it's a delight of mine once again to preach to you from the living word of our God, that which stands forever and can never be broken. Tonight, as it is the first Lord's Day evening of the month, we'll be seeking to have our hearts be prepared by the Spirit of God through his word as we look forward to communing with Christ and one another around his sacramental table next Lord's Day. And this is a gospel ordinance that he has instituted, friends, for us for the further nourishing and strengthening of our faith in him. And we look in faith to the Lord Jesus Christ by his spirit to pour into our hearts further and fresh supplies of his redeeming grace that he has purchased for us by the virtue of his death upon the cross. But for us to do this with a lively faith, our hearts need to be prepared. The soil of our hearts needs to be tilled, we need to be readied, we need to be ready to commune, that we might commune with the living Christ in this way. And a major part that we cannot just simply brush over or leave out, beloved, is self-examination. But let a man examine himself and thus or then let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup, 1 Corinthians 11. And so tonight my desire is to help you in this, brothers and sisters, to help myself so that all of us can come worthily and profitably together to receive the sanctifying graces of Christ and keep ourselves from eating and drinking judgment upon ourselves, which is a real and a terrifying thing that is all too easy to fall into without careful examination of our hearts before the Lord, our God. But even if you won't be here to partake with us next Lord's Day, that's okay, because it's always a good time for us to examine our hearts, isn't it? Besides, the next time you do come to the Lord's table with his people, wherever that might be, the texts we're going to be looking at this evening are ones that will help you tremendously. in analyzing your present obedience to the covenantal vows that have been placed upon you as a child in covenant with God by grace. So in order to begin that process of self-examination tonight, let's first come before our God in prayer, asking specifically that he would reveal to each one of us the ways that we have personally deviated from him in our hearts. And all of us have. in various ways, and that we might confess them to God in a spirit of true, heartfelt repentance, and then desiring for Christ then to heal up those breaches as we come to commune with him in his grace, that we can wait for him expectantly to do so as we commune sacramentally with his body and his blood. So let's pray to that end, shall we? Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for this time that we have together to examine your word and lord we pray that you would pull out our hearts as we look into your word which is living and active sharper than any double-edged sword and so lord we pray that you would humble our hearts that you would reveal those ways in which we have fallen short as your people and so lord god we pray that you would do this powerfully through even Your first a commandment that you have given to us and so Lord open up our hearts and our ears and our minds that we might receive your word to receive it as it truly is not as the words of men. But as the very word of God and so Lord, we pray that you would instruct us in your ways. Get me out of the way. May I be forgotten and may the Lord Jesus Christ be glorified in our midst as. through the preaching of your word and so Lord send your spirit pour out your spirit upon both hearer and preacher that we might truly say God is in this a place and so Lord do so for the edification of our own souls and for our growth and grace but most importantly for the glory and magnification of your great name we pray in Christ's name and for his sake amen Well, my friends, right now I invite you all to take up your own copy of God's word and turn with me in them, if you would, to Exodus chapter 20. Exodus chapter 20, a very familiar portion of the scriptures, which contain the 10 commandments that God gave to Moses to then give to the people from the blazing and flaming amount of Sinai. And you can find that chapter in the Pew Bibles provided for you on page 68, page 68. Tonight, brothers and sisters, we're gonna be looking at the very first commandment. And my intention is not to do a full exposition of it, similar to how we did the fourth commandment. Maybe that will come later on, sometime way later in my ministry. But rather to draw upon the first commandment press it upon our hearts so that we might better assess the actual estate of our hearts before the Lord to whom we owe our very all to. We all owe him, every single one of us in this room without exception, full and perpetual allegiance to him. to all his commands, not as the basis for our justification, for that comes solely, as you know, by Christ's perfect and pure keeping of all God's commandments in our stead, which he has done for us in the gospel. And that's the beauty of imputation. But we are under a moral obligation that we owe constantly to God as we are his creatures. made in his image and that obligation has been even heightened by the fact that God has covenanted with us in his grace through his son, where he's promised to be a God to us. And we have promised that we will be a people unto him. The reason I say this to you at the outset is because in our spiritual dining and feasting upon Christ and upon his graces by faith in the sacrament, we are actually renewing our covenant with God as individuals and corporately as Christ's mystical body. As well, and in the Bible, where you see covenant renewal, and you'll find it quite frequently in the Old Testament scriptures, you will also see with it solemn and authentic repentance that is expressed to God by his people for the specific ways where they have woefully breached it on their end. And so therefore, we cannot renew the covenant we are in with God. until we have thoroughly, until we have particularly confessed our sins that we have committed against him. For he doesn't turn a blind eye to our sins because sin separates us from him and he will hide his face from all those who will not give them up. Isaiah 59 verse two. And so then before coming to renew our vows we've made with God and Christ at this table, and before we can receive the seal of our pardon that is exhibited to us in the sacramental signs and seals of the covenant of grace, we need to know where we have utterly missed the mark, where we have fallen short in our covenantal obligations to God, which are summarily laid out for us here. In the 10 commandments and then we can bring those specific transgressions of ours against his holy law before him in heartfelt repentance and cry out to our father for forgiveness in Christ, which he will always grant to sinners who come to him through the blood of his son. And then we can pray to God to give us the grace that is needed to walk in obedience to those in those very same places. where we have deviated from him previously as of late. So this is absolutely fundamental, friends, to our personal preparation before we come to the Lord's Supper. And allow me to briefly remind you, beloved, of what our, before we read Exodus 20 together, of what our larger catechism says in laying out the preparatory duties, what they are before our gathering around the table. Remember question 171 asks this, how are they that receive the sacrament of the Lord's supper to prepare themselves before they come unto it? And here's the answer. They that receive the sacrament of the Lord's supper are before they come to prepare themselves there unto. By examining themselves of their being in Christ, that's first, as only those who are united to Christ by saving faith are welcomely received at God's table. But it's the second duty that we'll be honing in on tonight, by examining themselves of their sins and of their wants, that is, what is lacking within us. And where I ask you, are we made aware of what our sins and what our lacks are when it comes to our conforming to God's perfect and holy standard? It is the law of God, which is summarily comprehended in the 10 words, most commonly known as the 10 commandments. The apostle Paul in Romans 3 verse 20 plainly says, for by the law is the knowledge of sin. Furthermore, a couple of chapters later, he says, I would not have known sin except through the law. For I would not have known covetousness unless the law had said, you shall not covet. So we need to go to the law of God tonight and examine it closely. And as we do so, let me assure you that it will expose our sins and our wants and our failing to perfectly fulfill its commands with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. We'll be honing in on just the first commandment this evening, and I'll be using the larger catechism as our guide to draw out the ways, friends, that you and I have failed to own God as our God, especially in the duties that we have left undone. We could spend a whole lot of duties in the ways that we've particularly transgressed But we will be looking at those duties which we have not given unto God which he demands. Now you might think this would be something relatively easy for us to do, right? Have no other gods before the true and living God. That seems easy enough, right? So many people think that. But when you look into the very heart of this commandment and what it perpetually demands of us, all of us here in this room have fallen woefully short of it. Especially when you understand what it truly and practically means for our whole self, our heart, to have God as our God. And as we are made aware of our particular transgressions against Jehovah our God and are meditating upon the first commandment tonight, I would encourage you to take time to confess these before the Lord this week and yearn with a heart of faith for the grace of Christ to heal up those breaches and give you the grace to walk in greater conformity to our chief duty before God. Well, enough of me now. Let's now read together Exodus chapter 20, where the Ten Commandments have been written down for us to reveal, to expose the sin in our hearts. Yet at the same time, these are words that should, my friend, drive you to Christ, to rest yourself in the salvation that he alone has provided in the gospel, as he is the only one who has perfectly obeyed these in every thought, word, and in deed. And I'll be reading verses 1 through 17, even though we'll really just be looking at first three verses, verse three in particular. So, but congregation here now, the very words of the living God who spoke these words from the thundering and smoking mountain, Mount Zion. And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor serve them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me. But showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God. In it you shall do no work, you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who's within your gates. For in six days, the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hollowed it. Honor your father and mother, that your days may be long upon the land, which the Lord your God has given you. You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, you shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's. Amen, so ends the reading of God's majestic, his awesome and perfect word. May he be pleased to write these words on each of our hearts and upon our minds, especially now in the preaching of them. You shall have no other gods before me. Here we have the most important commandment in the entire Bible, from which all the other commandments flow out of. that Jehovah, the one true and living God, that he be expressly acknowledged with our lips as the only God that there is, revered by us in all we do, in all we think, and be sanctified by our hearts as our personal God. Essentially, we can break down this commandment into two parts. First, there is the having of God as our God. And then secondly, the having of none other but Him. The first really flows out of verse two from the text, which immediately proceeds it, where God comes after it, where God himself declares who he is in what is called the preface of the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord, your God. who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage, the house of slavery. And because of that, on that basis, therefore, you shall have no other gods, because he is the only God that there is to be had. Friends, Psalm 96, verse five, for all the gods of the nations are idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Not just to have a God, but have the one true God. Or to say it like the worshipers of Baal said it, who came to realize this when they saw fire from heaven come down and completely consume Elijah's burnt offering in an instance. They said, the Lord, he is the God. The Lord, he is the God. 1 Kings 18. Verse 39, and because that's objectively true, God declares in the first commandment, if you therefore give yourself over to other so-called gods, you have made yourself another god. That is not me. That is, you have done this before his all-seeing eye, his all-seeing presence, which is a direct forsaking of him as the only god. This divine command, therefore, that has been written on the hearts of every human being that has ever existed currently exists and will exist in the future. It demands that we must own Jehovah to be our personal God. The God of our being. the God of our hearts, the God of our bodies, the God of our souls, the God who always is to be glorified by us in all the actions we do without exception. Atheism, friends, therefore is gross idolatry because the atheist refuses to take God as his God. And he does this by thinking he's off the hook because he thinks that he doesn't believe such a God exists. But let us not think that we, brothers and sisters, and I'm talking about Christians here, that we cannot grow atheistic in our thinking and in our living. For every time we willfully sin against any of God's commandments, even the smallest ones, we become practical atheists in our heart, as the Puritans called it, acting as though God doesn't see, that God doesn't notice what we are doing. And at that point, our profession of God shows itself to be fruitless. acknowledge God as our God doesn't simply mean that we merely need to confess it with our tongue and that's it. No, but our lives need to perpetually attest to this reality that we confess. Otherwise our words have no meaning and are worthless. We are no better than the atheists at that point. What proceeds from our tongues and out of our hands needs to reflect what Hezekiah prayed in 2 Kings 19 verse 15. Oh Lord God of Israel, the one who dwells between the cherubim, you are God, you alone. Of all the kingdoms of the earth, you have made heaven and earth. And so when we shake off God, from our thoughts when we go about our day living no different than unbelievers, indulging ourselves in whatever suits our fancy without ever stopping to think about God, giving ourselves willingly over to sin, trying to convince ourself that there will be no consequences of our sin. That is a deliberate denying of God. in our hearts, atheism of heart that is directly contrary to our confession. And so I want to think with you of the ways in which we are to have God as our God and walk you through the larger catechism. You would think that this would be Something that would be pretty easy, but when we look at it, it is not. These are the things that we must, this is what it requires, friends, to have God as our God. And the first is having God as our God means that we think about him. Malachi 3 verse 16. Then they that feared the Lord spoke often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name." Friends, to even have a wrong thought about God is a breach of the first. commandment, to misrepresent him, to inaccurately speak about his being, about his person, the persons in the Godhead. For us to even fail to go about our day, to fail to think about a God. Um, is a breach is thinking is thinking about God. Let me ask you in your own heart and my myself as well as thinking about God, his salvation, his love, his grace, his forgiveness. Is that our best and most glorious thought of the day? What about this? Having God is our God also means meditating upon him. Psalm 63 verse six, when I remember you upon my bed and meditate on you in the night watches. What do you spend your time thinking about before you even lay down your head to go to sleep? Is it of God or is it consumed with the things of this world? I look back at even at my own life and I think, oh, how little, oh, how much I wasted of my life. How little I have meditated upon God. Another way that we must have God as our God is by remembering Him. Ecclesiastes 12.1, remember your creator in the days of your youth before the difficult days come and the years draw near when you say, I have no pleasure in them. To remember Him, to remember God is to have God in this world. Unbelievers do not have God in this world. Ephesians chapter two. It is being fully aware of God's special presence in us by the spirit of grace. And that God is everywhere present. Not forgetting that we live, we move, we have our being in him only and that we owe all to him. Our existence and our very salvation is of him. Salvation is of the Lord, remembering him. Having God as our God also means highly esteeming God. Psalm 71, verse 19. Your righteousness, O God, is very high. You have done great things. O God, who is like you? That's your verse. Have you recently prayed those words unto God? Have you said, who is like you? O God, there is none on this earth like you. That could be compared. To have God as our God-friend means honoring Him. Malachi 1 verse 6, a son honors his father and a servant his master, and then the Lord brings it into his people. And if then I be a father, where is mine honor? And if I be a master of you, where is my fear, saith the Lord of hosts unto you. Some of these I'm not gonna make comment on. I will make comment on some of these. There's no way that I can comment on every single one of these, because we'll be here a very long time. But to also, not just honoring him, friends, to have God as our God means that we must adore him. Isaiah 45, verse 23. I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness and shall not return. that unto me every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear. All our adoration, all our holy reverencing from the depth of our soul belongs to him. We can have appropriate respect for people, for magistrates, for church officers, but God is the soul and only object of our adoration. not saints, not angels, not mortal man, God only. And how zealous God is to receive adoration from us. To have God as our God is also to choose him. Joshua 24, 15 to 22, choose you this day whom you will serve. And then Joshua says, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. It is a conscious daily choice. I will serve God this day. Thomas Watson said, religion is not a matter of chance, but choice. Before choosing God for our God, there must be knowledge. We must know him before we can choose him. Before anyone chooses the person they will marry, he must have knowledge of that person. I mean, hopefully. So we must know God before we choose him. It is our knowledge of him and all of his beauties and excellencies and perfections that should cause us to choose him, that he would be our everlasting portion in this life and in the life to come. Having God as our God, friends, also means loving him. In Deuteronomy 6, 5, and not just some love, but all of our love. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God. with all thine heart, with all thy soul, with all thy might and with all thy strength. Loving him with all we have within us and above all things and things in this world. Not our children cannot have this place, our places of abode, our work, our hobbies, money, stuff, fame, our own life even. No, the triune God is alone our first love, period. If we give our love to any other before God, we, in essence, have taken them as our gods. We have supplanted God. We've dethroned him from our hearts, from the rightful place that he deserves, from our affections. Jesus said it very plainly in the Gospel of Luke, Luke 14, verse 26, I believe. If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brethren and sisters, his own life also. He cannot be my disciple." Having God as our God also means we must desire him. Psalm 73 verse 25 is one of my favorite verses in the Bible. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. As you look back at your life this week, has your life reflected that? Have your words reflected that? Have your thoughts reflected that? None of us, friends, are able to perfectly desire God as we ought to. Having God as our God also means fearing him. Isaiah 8 verse 13, sanctify the Lord of hosts himself and let him be your fear and let him be your dread. That means that you fear his displeasure more than anything else in this world. Fear him to such a degree that you have a holy fear to sin against his holy majesty, that you would rather die than sin. Anselm once said this, if hell were on one side and sin on the other, I would rather leap into hell than willingly sin against my God. When we fear God aright, as is his due, friends, that will cause us to forsake sin. Not just for its dreadful consequences, but because it's an offense, it is an affront to a holy, holy, holy God. And to affront God, to offend God, is a hell in and of itself. Having God as our God means believing him. Exodus 14, 31 of the Westminster Confession cites, and Israel saw that great work which the Lord did upon the Egyptians. He's just wiped out the Egyptians and the people feared the Lord and believed the Lord and his servant Moses. This is our chief duty to obtain a justification by grace. Believe. And it's our duty in our sanctification as well. When our God speaks, we are to believe him implicitly. We also see very similarly to this, to have God as our God means to trust him. Isaiah 26 verse 4, trustee in the Lord forever, for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength. This is a true demonstration of our trust. What does that say about us when we profess with our lips that God is our God and we will not trust him, whatever it might be? By definition, the all-powerful being of God warrants our whole trust at all times. Psalm 62, verse 8, trust in him at all times. You people, pour out your heart before him. God is a refuge for us. Having God as our God also means hoping in him. Psalm 130, verse 7, let Israel hope in the Lord. For with the Lord there is mercy, and with them there is plenteous redemption. All our expectation for good is to be rooted and grounded in him in this life and in the world to come. Also, we must delight in him if we are to have God as our God. Psalm 37, verse 4 says very particularly, delight yourself in the Lord and he shall give you the desires of your heart. Delighting in his attributes, in partaking of his ordinances, not coming to them half-heartedly, but with full hearts desiring to please Him, to draw closer to Him, to see Him as our portion now and forever. Having God as our God also means rejoicing in Him. Psalm 32 verse 11, be glad in the Lord and rejoice you righteous and shout for joy all you that are upright in heart. We are to always be rejoicing in the union that we have with our God through Christ. Having God as our God also means being zealous for his name, for his holiness. Numbers 25 verse 11, we read of Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, hath turned my wrath away from the children of Israel while he was zealous for my sake among them that I consume not the children in my jealousy. And then as we looked at this morning, having God as our God means that we call upon him. that we give him all of our praise and our thanks unto him. Two verses, you know them well, Philippians 4 verse 6, be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Psalm 50 verse 15, call upon me in the day of trouble, I will deliver you and you shall glorify me. One of the biggest gripes God has with the godless is that they do not call upon his name. And we make ourselves no better than the godless if we refuse to call upon him. When we go about our days with a prayerless spirit, we are in no way living a different life than the foolish and thankless atheist. We also, in order to have God as our God, we must yield all obedience and submission to him with the whole of our being. Look at this verse, Jeremiah 7 verse 23. But this is what I commanded them saying, obey my voice and I will be your God. And you shall be my people and walk in all the ways that I have commanded you that it may be well with you. We must obey God if we are to have God practically as our God, we must obey His voice. James 4 verse 7 puts it plainly, therefore submit to God. Submit to God. Then we also, in order to have God as our God, we must be careful in all things to please him. That is to be our heart in everything that we do. 1 John 3, 22, and whatever we ask, we receive from him because we keep his commandments and do those things which are pleasing in his sight. Doing all we do chiefly to please God. That if we have done that, we have done our duty. Please God. being meticulous in serving him according to the way that he has expressly laid out in his word. Here's another one, and this is something that I fall short in time and time again. To have God as our God is to be sorrowful when in anything he is offended. Psalm 119 verse 136, rivers of waters run down my eyes because men do not keep your law. That we should be more offended when God is defamed than when we are defamed. But often we care more about ourselves than we do the glory and holiness of our God. And then lastly, and we could obviously look at much more, but lastly, to have God as our God means to walk humbly with him. We read this plainly in Micah chapter six, verse eight. He has shown you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God? If you do not have a humility of heart before God, then that is to practically to deny God as your God. And so as we've gone through these things, and as you've thought of your own self in your own life this week and this month since the last time we've partaken the Lord's Supper. We have all we have stumbled in all of these points. There is much sanctification that God still needs to work in us. by his spirit. We might all attest to these things, but oh, how short we have fallen. But praise God that our right standing is not upon our own obedience. All those things that I said to you, if you are a believer in Christ, are not in a covenant of works. Praise God. But our right standing with God is solely based on the perfect obedience of another, namely the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the glory of the gospel. Yet nevertheless, what is required of us is to confess our transgressions in these areas when the Lord has made them known to you where they may be and ask God in Christ to renew your heart that you might more daily show and exhibit that indeed God is your God. by manifesting our love and our allegiance to Him in all these ways that we've looked at briefly tonight in the Word of God. And so, my challenge for you this week is to go through each of those things and to assess, to ask God, where have I failed to render this to you and how might I render to you new obedience in these ways, to come to the Lord's table desiring that the Lord would show, that would give you the grace to fight those sins and to conquer them by his grace. And so that's what we must do. That's one of our duties we must do before we come to the Lord's table. And so may the Lord reveal those things to you and may you confess them and may you rejoice, friends, that It is not your own obedience that is what gives us right standing. It is holy upon the Lord Jesus Christ, who did all of those things, by the way. All the things that we talked about, Christ has done them perfectly, and so that's why we must be in him if we want to have eternal life. Amen, let us pray. Gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, in seeing all of the The duties that are required of us in the first commandment, what it truly means to have you as our God, Lord, we are very aware that we have not rendered to you what you have required as your law. Your holy law demands a perfection, and Lord, we have fallen so short. of your glory, of your perfect standard, of the perfect standard of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so for that, we lament and we bemoan ourselves before you, and Lord, that you would forgive us of these ways. And so Lord, as we seek to examine our own hearts this week, Lord, would you make known these ways in which we have fallen short and that you would see, you would change us, that you would even, of course that you would forgive us of those, but Lord that you would give us new grace to obey you in these ways that we might truly in our hearts, in our minds, in the ways that we live from day to day manifest that you indeed are our God and there is no other but you. And so, Lord, we know that this is a work of progress. Sanctification is little by little. And so, Lord God, we pray that you would indeed grow us in these things, that we might be a people who have you as our God practically in our hearts, not just in our head, not just saying the right things, not just believing the right things, but living in accordance with those things that we profess with our lips. And so, Lord, only you can do that. Unite our hearts, direct our hearts into the love of God and into the patience of Christ we pray. In Jesus' name, amen.