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CONNIE: The world’s largest Ten Commandments is said to be visible from space. But today we want to consider whether we really need anything so big anymore. Could we maybe shrink the Commandments down to just one?

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. Connie, I’m interested in hearing a little more about your idea for shrinking the Ten Commandments.

CONNIE: Well, I was thinking, you know, this is the age of miniaturization. It seems like everything keeps getting smaller and smaller, at least in the area of technology. But then I read about the World’s Largest Ten Commandments, which are laid out on a 300-foot-wide hillside in North Carolina, and it made me think—is more really better when it comes to laws? Didn’t Jesus say that the Commandments could be summed up in just two laws?

LONNIE: In fact, Connie, I can do you one better than that, because the apostle Paul summed up the law of God in just one commandment. Here it is in Romans 13:8: “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

CONNIE: So, was he saying that we don’t really need the Ten Commandments anymore?

LONNIE: I don’t think we should jump to that conclusion—at least not until we’ve had more time to think about it when we get to my main message for today. But that’s the question we’ll be wrestling with as we consider what the Bible teaches about the law in the New Testament.

CONNIE: In the meantime though, we have an interview with some people who’ve chosen to put that one commandment—love one another—into action through a very special form of ministry.

LONNIE: That’s right; I spoke recently with Don and Yvonne McClure of the Someone Cares prison ministry. Our regular listeners know that we like to talk to them fairly regularly to find out how things are going with their outreach.

CONNIE: Let’s listen in now as Lonnie speaks with the McClure’s about how we can all make practical by reaching out and touching those in need.

LONNIE: Don and Yvonne, thanks for joining us here in the studio today for our broadcast.

DON: Yes! Good to be here!

YVONNE: Thank you for having us!

LONNIE: Now, love one another! You’ve put that into action in a unique way. Through your background, having gone into prison and being a kid on the streets and then on to meeting this preachers kid, Yvonne, Someone Cares Prison Ministry was born as a volunteer ministry with some thing called “Paper Sunshine.” Who is our neighbor and what did He have to say about that in Matthew 25?

DON: Oh Jesus hits us hard! I hear sermons all of the time, “When I was in prison and you visited me,” that’s neat, but it’s a lie! Jesus visited them, but then He turned around on the flipside and says, “I was in prison and you visited me not.” Loving your neighbor can be a lonely person in prison that you can visit via mail from the comfort and safety of your home, which we feel more comfortable with, because not everybody can go to prison. I can and Yvonne can, you can Lonnie, but not everybody can. Somebody listening to this radio from the comfort of their living room can write to a lonely person and contribute to them. You might say that you don’t want a prisoner as a neighbor, but Jesus wants you to have one as your neighbor.

LONNIE: That is specifically why He told the parable of the Good Samaratine. So how does the pen friend program work?

YVONNE: We protect the address and you mail your letter to us and we take the Christians letter and we put it in another envelop so that there is no postmark on it, except Fort Wayne, where we are from.

LONNIE: So, I send my letter to you, if my name and address accidentally get written on the letter you take that off…

YVONNE: We take it off…We put it in a new envelope.

LONNIE: …and then you mail it to a prisoner who has asked for someone….Do prisoners get mail regularly?

DON: No!

YVONNE: One man that I talked to hadn’t received any mail in 18 years.

LONNIE: You said that some of them write letters to themselves, right?

DON: The most abusive thing in prison is inmates will pick on other inmates who don’t get mail. Remember Jesus said to remember the prisoner as if you are chained there with him. Now, what better chain than a prayer chain through mail!

LONNIE: Now, you supply me with a prisoners letter, you send that to me and then I send that back to you. Then you take that and remail in a new envelop and send it to the prisoners.

YVONNE: Right, and we send it to a prisoner and they send their letter back and we read their letters then we put it in an envelop and mail it back to you. We might put some notes on it if we think that they are asking for something.

LONNIE: You match that…Do you always get a perfect match; does the prisoner always get the kind of person that he wants?

DON: No! Often it’s a terrible match, but…

LONNIE: Have you ever had a terrible match that worked out okay?

DON: We’ve got more that don’t work out, but Yvonne and I personally take these.

LONNIE: Does a guy ever get a letter from an old grandma?

DON: We have a grandma Myers, she wrote… Well, there was a guy in the hole, and she said that she wanted to write to somebody, but I don’t write well. Yvonne told her; well just send him a postcard. So she sent him one, the postcard said, “Jesus loves you, so do I,” once a moth for a year and a half and that led him to Christ.

YVONNE: He wrote a 12 page letter when he got out of the hole.

LONNIE: You’ve actually known prisoners who have never received a birthday card, nothing! Their families don’t write to them?

DON: We’ve got guys in prison, we’ve got one guy that was in prison for 55 years, he died last year. We met him in the last year of his life. In 54 years before that, he received a draft number during the second world war, other than that he had no visits, no postcards, nothing! Harder than that he was in Statesville and no one even talked to him.

LONNIE: So who is your neighbor?

DON: The person, any person that you can reach out to, however the Lord gives you the tools. Now, Someone Cares has one way and you have another through the Bible School. So, you might want to study the Bible with someone in prison. Take the Discover Bible course yourself, we’ll match it with an inmate with the same course and you can talk about the Lord through the study.

LONNIE: Quickly, how can we get you there at Someone Cares Prison Ministry?

DON: PO Box 15338, Fort Wayne, Indiana 46885 or sdapm@someonecares.org.

LONNIE: Don and Yvonne McClure from Some Cares Prison Ministries teaching us how to love our neighbors, thank you for sharing with us today.

“Love Through Me”, Christian Edition, from Bound for the Kingdom CD.

CONNIE: Amen! That’s what the law of God is really all about, when you come right down to it, isn’t it? Sharing His love with others.

LONNIE: That’s absolutely right, and that’s one of the reasons we always like to invite Don and Yvonne McClure to join us on the program once or twice a year, because of the simple, practical way they have of enabling Christians to reach out and share the love of God with those who need it most.

CONNIE: Friend, you heard Don and Yvonne describe the prison ministry of Someone Cares, and we’d like to encourage you to get involved with them. We’ll have complete details about how to contact Someone Cares in a few moments, but right now I’d just like to mention their web page. It’s at someonecares.org, and if you go there, you can find out how best to contact them.

LONNIE: Help us let someone behind bars know that someone still cares about them. Let that someone be you.

CONNIE: More about how you can do that in a few minutes, but right now, let’s listen as Pastor Lonnie shares today’s message, “One, Two, or Ten?”

One, Two, or Ten

How many laws do we actually need?

If you’ve ever visited a law library to research one of the statutes of your state, chances are you were quickly overwhelmed by the sight of row upon row of volumes all labeled “Statutory Laws of the State of X.” Unless you’re a trained attorney, you probably didn’t have a clue where to start.

I know I wouldn’t. From a layman’s perspective, it seems like the legislators here in California, and those off in Washington, DC get paid to sit around all days writing rules in language no one understands.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all the rules and regulations in the world could be summed up in just a few words?

Well, maybe they can. After all, we’ve spent the last twelve weeks studying and talking about God’s “ten words to the wise,” the Ten Commandments, which sum up the basic rules we need for life. Most of the rest of the laws we have are some sort of refinement of the principles God spoke from Mt. Sinai.

You might remember that in our introductory message, we quoted the words of an attorney who had been converted by studying the Ten Commandments. He testified that: “ ‘I have been looking into the nature of that law: I have been trying to see whether I can add anything to it, or take anything from it, so as to make it better. Sir, I cannot; it is perfect.’ ”

Well, that’s an amazing testimony, but apparently there are a few legislators and attorneys in the world who don’t agree that it’s impossible to add anything to the Ten Commandments. Hence all the volumes of legal codes in the law library!

But our subject today is “One, Two, or Ten.” And by that I mean to ask the question, can God’s law be summed up even more succinctly than He Himself did it at Mt. Sinai?

I’m thinking particularly of the testimony of the apostle Paul who indicated that God’s will could actually be summarized in just one law. Here’s how he explained it in Romans 13:8-10:

“Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’ ‘ You shall not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law” (NKJV).

That’s pretty simple, isn’t it?

Now, I do want you to notice as we consider this text, that the apostle Paul had a great deal of respect for the Ten Commandments. Notice he isn’t saying the Commandments have been done away with or that they’re unimportant. He’s not denigrating the Commandments at all. He’s simply pointing out that genuine love brings one into harmony with God’s law

What he’s saying is that love is the fulfillment of the law. Just behave in a loving way, and the rest will take care of itself. Jesus said something similar, but condensed the Ten Commandments down to two commandments instead of one.

Speaking of lawyers, one of those fellows came to Jesus one day, and according to Matthew 22, “asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying, ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’

“Jesus said to him, ‘ “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets’ ” (verses 38-40, NKJV).

So, there you have it. Paul says we only need one law: The law of love. Jesus broadens the expression of that simple law of love a bit by reminding us that we need to include God as well as our neighbor in our circle of love. So, we really don’t have to ask an “either-or” question about who’s right, Paul or Jesus—they’re both saying the same thing.

And when you take a look back at the Ten Commandments with these “love-colored glasses” on, it’s pretty easy to see that the Sinai law is actually based on the same principles of love. Commandments 1-4 invoke and stimulate our love toward God. Number one calls us to have no other gods before Him, number two guides our way of expressing our love to Him—raising it to a higher plain than the Israelites had witnessed among their Egyptian slave masters. Higher, too, than what they would encounter among their neighbors when they entered the Promised Land. Commandment number three reminds us that our love for God must not be self-serving; we must be totally devoted to Him, not using religion for our personal gain. And of course the fourth commandment calls us to set aside a special day each week for fellowship with God, putting other things aside, resting from our normal activities, and focusing our attention on our Creator.

Commandments five through ten teach me how to demonstrate my love to other people—by giving honor to my parents (and other elders as well), preserving life whenever possible, honoring the commitments I’ve made to my spouse, respecting others’ property, being forthright and honest, and being content with what I have instead of coveting others’ possessions.

So there’s one thing I want to make very clear as we ask the question: Do we need one, two, or ten commandments? And that is that there’s really no conflict between what Jesus said and what Paul said, and the law given on Sinai. It’s all one and the same, and the focus needs to be on loving, caring relationships.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? Just love the world and everything’ll be all right.

The fascinating thing is that the lawyer who came to Jesus was doing what we so often think of lawyers doing: Looking for loopholes in the law. Looking for a way to define just exactly what is expected of me, and just exactly how little I can get away with doing. When we read the story of Jesus’ conversation with this questioning lawyer in the gospel of Luke, we learn something that Matthew didn’t tell us. After Jesus agreed with the lawyer that the two laws of love—to God and to neighbor—were the core teaching of the law, the lawyer asked another question: “Who is my neighbor?”

You see what he was doing, don’t you? He was trying to limit the reach of the long arm of the law. After all, neighbor really only refers to the person who lives right next door to me, doesn’t it? It doesn’t include the people two or three houses down the street, does it?

But of course that narrow reading of the law wouldn’t fly with Jesus. To answer the lawyer’s question He told the story of the Good Samaritan. And His point was that the neighborhood doesn’t even stop at the end of the street. It doesn’t stop at the national boundary. It extends to everyone.

If you were with us a few weeks ago when we spoke about the Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” you heard our interview with Gerry Straub, who’s formed a foundation to help Christians reach out in love to the poorest of the poor in our world.

Well, Gerry came to our offices recently to speak to us at morning worship. He shared pictures and videos that he’s shot while traveling and working among those who live in Manila’s garbage dumps, as well as among the destitute on the streets of Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Afterwards a number of staff members gathered around to give contributions and purchase videos to share with their friends, but one man was heard to say “I don’t dare take this video home and show it to my wife. She has such a soft heart that I won’t have any money left after she watches it!”

Well, he was really just joking, but it’s true, isn’t it? We sometimes wonder how we can truly apply the Savior’s message of love for our neighbor without becoming bankrupt and destitute ourselves. The world is so desperately in need of love. We all must ask the question, “How can I apply that love. Just exactly what does God want me to do for those in need?”

And for each of us the answer is different. But each of us is called, whether by the Ten Commandments, the Two Commandments, or the One Great Commandment, to live a life based on God’s love for all His children.

We could spend a lot of time discussing whether we still need the Ten Commandments in the “Christian Dispensation.” And some would argue that because we’re under grace not law, we can leave Moses’ Tables of Stone all broken and crumbled at the base of the mountain—that we just don’t need them anymore.

We can fight in court about whether or not the Tables of Stone can be displayed on public property.

But in the end, what it all comes down to is whether or not God’s Law of Love is displayed on my heart, and in my life, no matter where I am: whether I’m on public property, or at home with my family.

Wouldn’t you agree, friend? And won’t you join me in resolving to let God write that law on your life, and live that law in larger ways than you have before?

“Unto the Least of These”, Charles Haugabrooks, from God’s Touch Through You CD.