If You Love Me, Keep My Commandments

Christianity is not a mere list of dos and don’ts. Nevertheless, the relationship we have with our Lord includes loving His law. Today, R.C. Sproul speaks on the importance of God’s law in the Christian life.

So often, we have such a negative attitude toward anything with reference to law. And particularly, we have a tendency to react negatively to the law of the Old Testament because it seems to be severe. It seems to invoke hardship. It seems to involve so many stipulations that we shrink beneath its weight. How many times have I heard, “Christianity is not a list of rules.” “Christianity is not a list of dos and don’ts.”? People are desperately trying to communicate that message to the secular world in our society—that Christianity does not find its essence in law, but it finds its essence in gospel. It does not find its meaning in legalism; it finds it in freedom and forgiveness and all of those sorts of things. And to be sure, the essence of Christianity is found in gospel and not in law. And certainly, we can never think of Christianity or Judaism in the Old Testament as simply being a list of dos and don’ts, or stipulations. That would be a distortion of the Christian faith.

But let me say, just from the outset, there is no Judaism without law. And there is no Christianity without law, even though it is true that Christianity is not, in its essence, a list of dos and don’ts, and rules and commandments, and prescriptions and laws. Nevertheless, at the heart of the Christian faith is a list of dos and don’ts, of rules, of ordinances, of commandments that God gives to His people. Again, Jesus says what? “If you love Me, keep my commandments.” Now, if you love Jesus, you can’t stand up and say, “There are no commandments. There are no dos or don’ts.” There are dos, and there are don’ts.

Even in the new covenant, there is law in the sense of commandments, but that law does not operate in isolation from a broader context of a covenant. Those commandments do not stand in and of themselves as simply a list of rules, as an isolated set of ethics. But that set of ethics, that set of commandments, those principles and precepts come out of a context, and that context has a relationship at its very heart. It’s because I am related to God, because He justifies me and brings me into His gospel, and now I can call Him Father, that He gives me direction as His son. It’s because Christ has forgiven me and loved me that He can now say to me, “You are forgiven. Go and sin no more and keep My commandments.”

And so, the commandments come out of a broader concept of a covenant, of a relationship. But you see what happens? If we just look at the law in isolation from the Lawgiver, that’s what we would call “legalism.” That would be reducing Christianity to the abstract law and missing the whole point of the relationship that lies behind it. But, at the same time, if we claim to have the relationship and throw out the commandments, and throw out the law and the prescripts, we are denying the real relationship. Because the relationship that is accomplished in justification immediately provokes the concern for sanctification. When a person experiences that amazing grace in which we are forgiven, and pardoned, and received, and clothed in the righteousness of Christ, when we experience that, the first question of the person who’s experienced forgiveness after he has said, “Thank you,” is, “What would you have me to do, Lord? What do you want me to do, Lord?” And the Lord responds by saying, “This is My will, even your sanctification. Be ye holy, even as I am holy.”