We've been studying the Ten Commandments, which are not mere commands.

There are words of life.

There are 10 ways of thinking about how to be human.

And today, we look at the very last one.

It's usually translated, don't covet. But the word for covet is the Hebrew word for desire.

You will not desire your neighbor's house. You will not desire your neighbor's wife or his male slave,

or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

Desire is such an intimate personal thing, and we often think we can't control it.

Yet the Ten Commandments ends reflecting on it.

And it's quite fitting, actually, that we end focusing on this deep, energizing force of desire. So in a way,

the 10th command comes back and it addresses the thing upstream of murder and adultery and stealing

and bearing false witness. Why would you do any of those things? Probably you have a desire that's

driving your decisions. So in a way, the tenth is actually underneath all of one through nine.

So how do we train our desire?

We'll explore this question as we look at the Garden of Eden story in Genesis.

In the garden, God tells the humans that they may eat of any of the good trees

and that all of the trees look desirable. But there is one tree,

the tree of knowing good and bad, that they're not to eat from. So this is teaching us like the

fundamental grammar, the rules of desire, that many things that are desirable are not good for you.

Yet desire isn't a bad thing. God gave us desires. He wants them to be fulfilled. As it says in

Proverbs 1312, hope deferred makes the heart sick. But desire that is fulfilled is a tree of life.

Desire fulfilled is a tree of life. Desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

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