Coveting Leads to Every Other Sin – The Kingdom Curriculum XIV (7)

Coveting Leads to Every Other Sin

“You shall not covet.” Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21

And He said to them, “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.” Luke 12:15

The Gateway of All Sins

In many respects, covetousness is the gateway of all sins. When we give in to covetousness, we are sure to fail in love for God and our neighbors in various ways.

In loving things more than God we affront His holiness and scorn His grace. In loving ourselves more than others we rob from them to indulge our selfish desires. Covetousness seems like such a small sin because, we reason, it’s just between me and the thing or experience I’m hankering after. No one gets hurt when I indulge a little coveting.

Your soul gets bruised, however–mind, heart, and conscience. And when your soul is wounded, your life must follow where it leads. Make no mistake about it, coveting leads to every other sin as surely as night follows day. Take Jesus’ advice: guard against all covetousness.

We need to seek the Lord to enable us to know when we are beginning to covet and to empower us to resist this temptation with all the strength of my soul (cf. Ps. 73). Rather than covet things or experiences, let us train our affections to covet the Lord, that we might love Him more, and to the needs of our neighbors, that we may be made more perfect in love and avoid the wasteful and disappointing way of the fool.

The truly happy person is the one who meditates on the Law of God day by day (Ps. 1.1, 2). Order your copy of The Law of God today and take up this discipline with joy. Go to www.MyParuchia.com, point your browser to “Publications,” then click on the drop-down option, “Waxed Tablet Publications.”

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In the Gates is a devotional series on the Law of God by Rev. T.M. Moore.

T.M. Moore is editor of the Worldview Church. He serves as dean of the Centurions Program of the Wilberforce Forum and principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He is the author or editor of twenty books, and has contributed chapters to four others. His essays, reviews, articles, papers, and poetry have appeared in dozens of national and international journals, and on a wide range of websites. His most recent books are The Ailbe Psalter and The Ground for Christian Ethics (Waxed Tablet).

Scripture quotations in this article are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, (c) copyright 2001,2007 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editor’s note: The use of a translation other than the Authorised Version in an article does not constitute an endorsement in whole or in part by The Christian Observer.