"You shall not take the name of Jehovah your God in vain, for Jehovah will not hold a person guiltless who takes His name in vain." (Exo. 20:7)
The Lord wants you to pray. Why? Because in life there are evil things that get a grip on your heart and mind that you are powerless to break free from.
In the Ten Commandments, the Lord tells us not to worship false gods, and not to take His name in vain. In simplest terms, this means we should only worship the One True God, and that we should not make light of His names. Looked at more deeply, the Lord is also telling us here—for our own good—that we must avoid creating false gods out of things of this world and out of the desires of our own hearts. When we put material things or selfish things first in our lives, ahead of the Lord, we become enslaved by them. The good news is that the Lord is waiting for us to ask for help, and lovingly and freely gives it to us when we do.
A person's name stands for their qualities, and the Lord's qualities are infinite where ours are limited. We have no strength against our own false gods, but if we pray to the Lord and ask Him to lend us His strengths, He will give them freely so we can return to obeying His commandments. Refuse this gift, and You take His name in vain. To accept it, all you have to do is call to Him by name. Pray every day, and it will change your life.
To see that this is true, read Exodus 20:1-7; Matthew 7:21-23; and True Christian Religion 300. Then listen to or read my second Rise Above It sermon, "How to Call Upon the Name of the Lord".
This is a synopsis of a sermon preached at the Swedenborg Chapel in Cleveland, Ohio, with the Rev. Junchol Lee officiating. The original recording had some bad noise on it, so I redid it. None of the content has changed, though. Click here to listen to the full audio sermon. Also, you can read a word-for-word transcript below:
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Pray. The Lord wants you to pray. He wants every one of us to call to Him by name. Why?
He doesn’t get anything from it. He doesn’t need to hear our prayers. That’s not for His benefit. It’s for our benefit. And in fact everything He does is for our benefit. The Lord is Love Itself. And, as love, He wanted somebody to love, somebody to make happy, and that’s why we exist. So everything He tells us is not for His sake, but for our sake. So why pray?
Well, there are things in life which get ahold of us, which we cannot break free from. Some battles feel like we can win them on our own, but there are some battles we can not win, without His power. Sometimes we’re outnumbered, outgunned, and if we try to fight on our own, we will lose. Guaranteed. When we pray, it’s like calling in air support; it changes the entire battle.
We heard the second Commandment today, from Exodus: not to take the Lord’s name in vain. And the first Commandment: not to worship false gods. Well, as we talked about in the children’s talk, a false god’s not just a statue of Baal, or of Ashtaroth, or some other icon. A false god is anything we put first in our lives ahead of the Lord. And these false gods can get a grip on our lives that we cannot break free from. So the Lord says to pray.
Let me give you some examples of what I’m talking about.
In the book of Judges, the Israelites are plagued by all sorts of enemies, and in one particular story, the Midiantes are harassing them. And it’s so bad for the Israelites that they can’t stand it for a moment. They end up hiding in caves, and building forts in the hills—but you can’t grow crops in a cave, you can’t pasture your animals in a fort. So whenever they planted, the Midiantes would come down and tear it all up. And whatever animals they put out to pasture, the Midianites would kill or would steal. There was nothing they could do about it. All their efforts were frustrated.
That happens in our life, too.
Think of the a, who’s got young children: she loves them, she cares about them, she works hard for their benefit. She makes certain that they have good meals, that they go to a good school, that they have nice clothes. But every morning—every morning is terrible. It ends up with her yelling at them and them crying. Every morning. The oldest won’t get out of bed in time. The daughter doesn’t want her hair brushed. And it turns into a fight, and she finds herself just exploding at them.
And then maybe—maybe in a quiet moment in the evening after they’re asleep—she wonders, “Why do I scream at them? I love them. They’re children, they don’t know any better. Yelling doesn’t fix it. Why do I do that? Tomorrow I’m not going to yell at them. I’m just not going to.” And yet the next day comes, and sure enough she finds herself exploding at them again, and she can not stop.
So that night she wonders to herself, “Why am I doing this?” And if she has a moment of frightening honesty, she may realize that as much as she hates—and is embarrassed, and saddened by—the look of fright she sees in their faces—when she finally lets go it feels good. And there’s a bad part of her that wants to explode. So she says, “Tomorrow I’ll go ten minutes. Ten minutes, and I will not yell.” And the day comes. Five minutes go by. She explodes again. She can not do it on her own.
Another example: Consider a husband who loves his wife dearly. He loves his marriage. He loves the idea of marriage; he appreciates that marriage is a sacred thing, and is meant to be a joyful thing, and a beautiful thing. But sometimes, when he’s working late at the office, at his computer, he’s tempted: pornography calls to him. And he has this fight with himself: “Who’s it going to hurt? It’s just me and a machine.” And yet he knows he shouldn’t do it. And sometimes he loses that fight. And as time goes on, he spends more and more time “late at the office”, after his work’s done. Eventually, he gets a separate credit card, so that he can pay for this, without his wife seeing it.
Until one day he realizes, “This is coming between me and my wife.” He turns to it instead of her. He could go home to his wife, but he stays at work with the computer. He’s lying to her; he’s hiding things from her. He realizes, “This has got to stop.” Maybe he even cancels whatever subscriptions or accounts he’s got. Maybe for a week, he doesn’t touch it.
Then one night, he has to work late. An email pops up in his inbox. You know the kind of email I’m talking about. He has that fight with himself again, and he loses. And he’s back there again. And he may struggle with this for months and not get anywhere.
He’s worshipping a false god that will not let him go.
Now, these may not be “false gods” that you in particular are struggling with, but I guarantee you, if not now then sometime in your life you will struggle with something this way.
So what do we do? Does the second Commandment give us an answer to this? Well it does. And you can find the answer throughout the Word. First of all the Lord tells us that all power is from Him. This is why we have the first commandment. All power is from the Lord; none of it is from us.
And He has qualities that are limitless, where ours are limited. In True Christian Religion it says that a name represents a person’s quality. And you can sort of see that, in your own life: how, when you think of a person’s name, that you know what they’re like, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are—it comes to mind immediately.
Well, we’re limited. Our patience has a limit—some more than others. Our capacity for mercy, for love, is limited. Not the Lord’s. The Lord has infinite patience, infinite mercy. He is Love Itself. He has all strength, where we are limited.
[big pause]
So we have to ask for these qualities.
So this is how it’s supposed to work: The husband, rather than try to fight it under his own power—one day, he prays. He says, “Lord. I’ve been fighting this on my own. And losing. And I’ve figured it out: I don’t have the power. I don’t have the strength, the willpower—give me yours. Please.”
And the Lord will do it. This is what the Lord’s been waiting for all this man’s life: for him to ask. He’s not going to force any of His gifts on us. But if you ask for one of his qualities, to help you, in your spiritual struggles, He’ll give it.
And then, he finds himself, again, late at the office. Doing work, another one of these emails comes up—the fight can start up again, but because he’s decided to give this to the Lord, he stops. He takes his hand off the mouse. He takes his hand off the keyboard. And he closes his eyes. He says, “Lord, I need your strength.” And the Lord will give it. The man will know, that this work can last till tomorrow. He can turn off the computer.
He still has to get up some of his own strength, but the Lord will give him just enough strength to push over the edge. He still has his own choice to make, but now he’s free to make that choice, whereas before the false god that ruled over him wouldn’t let him do it.
The mother of the children—she can pray. She can say, “Lord, my patience is so short. I love my children. Help me not terrorize them. Lend me some of Your patience, because I know You are infinitely patient.” And He’ll do this.
And if she’s smart, she’ll start the morning with that prayer. And when she starts to feel that old familiar rage building up inside of her, she doesn’t have to get down on her knees—it doesn’t have to be anything formal—but if she just stops, puts her hands down, takes a breath, reminds herself: “I love my children. Lord, give me patience.” And He’ll give her some of His patience.
She won’t necessarily win every battle. We won’t necessarily win every single battle even with the Lord’s help because we still have to add some of our own to it, but it will get us that much closer, and we’ll win battles we could never win before.
So again, we’re talking about the second Commandment, though none of this sounds like “not taking the Lord’s name in vain”. But hang in there.
One more example: back to the Midianites. The Children of Israel, the way they got out of their problem was they prayed to the Lord. And the Lord sent them a message. He said, “Don’t fear their gods.”
The Lord is more powerful than any false god in our lives, and He’s more powerful than the false gods the Israelites had been worshipping.
And He sent a judge—Gideon—to defeat the Midianites. But He wanted to prove this point: that the power isn’t coming from us; the power is the Lord’s. So He had Gideon put his army through a number of tests. And each time the army got smaller and smaller, as more and more soldiers failed the test, until there were just three hundred—against the thousands of Midianites.
And the Lord told Gideon, “I’m doing this to show you: it’s not your strength that’s going to win the battle, but Mine.”
And that’s what the Lord’s saying to us.
So, second Commandment—let’s put this in context. There are these two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Sinai. Now on the first tablet, we have these first Commandments: worship no other god, don’t take my name in vain, and keep the Sabbath. In simple terms it means: don’t bow down to statues of Baal or whatever; don’t use My name casually, in jokes and in swearing, come to church on Sunday.
But looked at more deeply He’s also saying, “Don’t put up things, at the front of your life, that can’t help you, and that in fact hurt you. Don’t worship these false gods. Don’t worship your own need to be right. Don’t worship food…” There are all sorts of things that we worship—put ahead of God. He’s saying, “Don’t do that; it’ll hurt you.”
And He’s saying, “Don’t take My name in vain.” And His name—remember, names represent qualities—He offers us His patience. His love. His strength. And when we say, “No, Lord, I’ll get this on my own,”—that’s taking His name in vain. And we do that, don’t we? He offers us His qualities, for us to receive, and to make good use of.
And then the third Commandment, keeping the Sabbath? Well we know that we’re here to worship the Lord, Sunday morning, in this building. But real worship is really what we’re preparing for—real worship is when you go out and you live your life, according to His commandments.
Now these three parts are also the parts of the life of repentance that we’re meant to live. We’re supposed to examine ourselves, to see what false gods we’re worshipping—what things have taken ahold of our life that don’t belong there. We’re supposed to pray to the Lord, to ask for what He’s got, that we need in order to get rid of these things. And then we’re supposed to go out and live a new life.
So that’s where this commandment fits in. Now, it’s important to note that it’s not the praying itself—it’s not the words coming out of your mouth that does the magic. “Not everyone who says, ‘Lord, Lord’” goes to heaven, “but he who does the will of the Father”—he who does the Commandments.
So when you pray, it’s not just enough to say the words. You have to sincerely intend to follow through. You’re praying to the Lord, not so He can just “make things better” for you, but so that He can give you the strength, so that you can go out and live according to His Commandments.
Because if you only just say the words, that’s the same thing as coming to church on Sunday, reading the Books, and then going out and living however you want to live. That’s faith alone. That’s not going to get you anywhere. But if you marry it to a life of charity, the Lord will help you with that.
So, we have no power. We have no power against the false gods. And that can feel terrible, and it can feel frightening, when you realize, “I can’t win this struggle.” But the good news is, the power of a false god compared to the power of the True God—there’s no comparison. He has all power. And He’s waiting for you to ask for it.
Every false god can be defeated by one of His qualities. And when you pray, it’s useful to be specific. It’s one thing to say, “I’m a sinner. Help me.” It’s another to say, [long pause], “I get something out of blowing up at my children….I’m attracted to lust….I love to hear myself speak….I think all day about when the next drink is going to come—Give me Your strength…Give me Your patience…Your love....Your mercy.” Be specific.
The Lord is the One True God, and He alone has the power. And He tells us to pray, and He offers us His name. We carry His name: we are True Christians; the New Church is a New Christian Church. And when we don’t live according to the Commandments—well, we’re weak. But when we don’t try to live according to the Commandments, when we don’t ask Him for these qualities—well, then we are taking that name in vain.
So here’s something to do. Practice a prayer life. If you don’t already, see what it’s like to pray once a day. Pick a time of the day. Maybe first thing in the morning. You can pray in the shower, right before you go to sleep, or whatever time works for you. But commit yourself to praying at least once a day. And pray specifically. Talk to the Lord.
And if you’re already doing that, that’s great. And all of you, whether this is a new habit, or an old habit, when you pray, pray that the Lord can give you what you need to defeat the false gods that rule over you. And as you go through your life—over the next several days, especially—just try to be very, very conscious of these false gods. Put a watch over your mind. Put a watch over your heart. See what comes up. And then when you pray next you’ll know what to ask for.
And do this, and it will change your life.
Amen.
that the story of Noah has an internal sense which describes the reestablishment of the Lord’s Church at a time when His very first Church was coming to an end. The letter tells us of a great flood, and of a man who was spared by means of an ark; the spirit tells us of a period of temptations, followed by a spiritual rebirth, or regeneration.