You are about to embark on a fascinating and inspiring journey into the heart of God which will change your mind and transform your heart. This journey will change your views about God, His Holiness, and His Ten Commandments, while transforming your life and your church. This journey is about a lifestyle of worship a lifestyle of being in love with Jesus, one that says, I want to please the Lord. If something offends Him, it offends me.

This wonderful lifestyle of Gods love begins by understanding the spirit not just the law of Gods Ten Commandments. God gave the law of the Ten Commandments to Moses so that he and the people of God could know Gods holiness, His love, and the lifestyle that He wanted His people to live by. Recorded in the Bible in the Book of Exodus, Chapter 20:1-17, they are:

1. I am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before me. (Ex 20:2-3)
2.
3. You shall not make for yourselves graven images. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. (Ex 20:4-6)
4.
5. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain. (Ex 20:7)
6.
7. Remember the Sabbath Day, to keep it holy. (Ex 20:8-11)
8.
9. Honor your mother and father. (Ex 20:12)
10.
11. You shall not murder. (Ex 20:13)
12.
13. You shall not commit adultery. (Ex 20:14)
14.
15. You shall not steal. (Ex 20:15)
16.
17. You shall not lie or bear false witness. (Ex 20:16)
18.
19. You shall not covet. (Ex 20:17)
20.

To understand Gods love and the spirit of His word and commandments, it is important to understand the Ten Commandments not only as individual commands, but also in total context to one another. It is important to tie all the commands together to see the whole picturethis is a lesson I learned well from my nursing background.

A key element to being a nurse is to understand the nursing process. Each semester we focused on one of the stages within the overall process. The first stage was the gathering of assessment data, then planning, implementing, and evaluating the data. Its all part of the process. You do this when looking at a patient. You come up with a prognosis or a plan, and then you actively revise it. Each term we studied an area and a stage of the process. We would have psychiatric nursing classes while we were in our Obstetrics section, which was really kind of revolutionary at that time. But what they wanted you to understand was that the pregnant mother had psychiatric needs, basic mental health kinds of things, and that you should be assessing her psychological status as well as her ability to deliver the baby. But, guess what? I didnt appreciate that kind of program until I got into that sixth term. Then I was able to put it all together. I remember being lost in that first term; it was like saying, What are they doing? They are talking about babies, while talking about going out to do public health. And I just wasnt getting it.

Sometimes it can be like that in the things of God. We can be mired in the middle of it and not understand it. When we are looking at the Ten Commandments, I think its neat now to take it apart and then put it all together. It is separated out into parts, into ten parts.

When I was growing up and they were teaching us how to read a book, theyd say, Read the table of contents, read the preface, read the introduction. Dont just run and start reading Chapter One. Read that jacket; begin to understand a little bit what you are doing. And I used to think that was crazy. I just wanted to dive in, Lets go with Chapter One, forget about the rest of it. But now when Im reading a book, Ill go back and look at the table of contents, and see some of the chapters that will be coming. Its really fascinating to learn who the author is, who wrote that book, and to learn about him or her and their background. Nowadays, we have movies, and then movies about the making of the movies. You know, people really get into the process.

Well, just as it is important to apply this process to nursing, to reading a book, and to movies, it is also important to apply this process to the understanding of the Ten Commandments. In this book, we will first take you through each commandment, looking at both the Law and the Spirit of each Commandment, and then in the Conclusion I will recap each of the Ten Commandments.

As you will discover while reading this book, there is something truly special behind each of the commandments teachings which you can apply to your life in this modern-day world. Youll realize, as I did in teaching this message in churches and writing this book, that the life application principles within Gods Ten Commandments are found much deeper than a superficial look at the law of each commandment. There is more to this than simply, Thou shalt not steal. Youll begin to ask yourself, and then discover the answer to, What is God really saying here? What is the deeper meaning in the spirit realm, and how does this apply to me? And why would the author of these Ten Commandments implement each command? This book will help you answer these questions.

You know, we need to go deeper in study as the people of God, as we mature into that solid believer that God desires us to be. For example, what they would tell us in our nursing program was how special we were, and how fortunate we were that we had four years to study this material instead of just graduating in two years, as in a community college.