Several weeks ago, the Rev. John Yates of the Falls Church began a sermon series on the 10 Commandments. Here’s an excerpt of the first sermon in the series which provides a really helpful framework for how Christians should understand the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament in moral decision-making:<\/i><\/p>\n
We live in a time where the air the young people breathe is filled with the spirit of autonomy. There\u2019s a great hesitation among young adults today to say that such and such behavior is wrong for someone else if the someone else doesn\u2019t think it\u2019s wrong. Our culture is becoming more and more hesitant to draw moral boundaries. Even young people who follow Christ are hesitant to draw moral conclusions about others because they\u2019ve grown up in a society that says do you own thing, find your own way, question authority. And so the college student who challenged his mom, the college students who challenge their parents\u2019 interpretation of biblical teaching about sexual morality now, it\u2019s not unusual. And, Christians who just quote the Bible in support of this or that moral position are often accused of either insensitivity or backwardness or of selecting out those passages that fit their own predilections and ignoring others. That\u2019s the setting that we\u2019re living in today.<\/p>\n
Now, the question is, how do we know what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong? And another question is how do we make wise moral decisions? Well, we\u2019re here because we follow Christ. We believe he\u2019s the Son of God who came among us to reveal God, to teach God to us, to teach us the way of God. And so we follow Christ to know right and wrong. We believe he\u2019s entrusted to us the scriptures as a reliable, true, authoritative guide in right thinking and right living. He told us to trust and to heed the Old Testament, and he established the New Testament through the apostles who he promised to guide into the truth as they proclaimed the word. And so the church has always believed what the apostles wrote in 2 Timothy 3. You know the words:
\nAll scripture is inspired or breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God [or the woman] may be competent, equipped for every good work.<\/p>\n
The fundamental reason why the Anglican Communion and other communions as well are being pulled apart is that there\u2019s no longer agreement as to what scriptural authority means. Church people are now accepting and approving ideas and behaviors that the church has consistently seen over the centuries as contrary to biblical teaching: the deity of Christ, the atoning death of Christ, the historical reliability of the resurrection, our responsibility to proclaim Christ to all people, and of course certain standards of moral behavior. All this and more is being questioned and even discouraged by many church people, and so we\u2019re divided over these things, painfully divided. How do we read our Bible to discern what is right and what is wrong? We\u2019re about to enter into a series of talks on Sundays in the summer on the Ten Commandments\u201d\u201dGod\u2019s moral foundation for all civilization\u201d\u201dbecause we forget how basic and how helpful the Ten Commandments are and what they teach us. They never go out of date. We\u2019ll try to pitch this in a way that the kids will appreciate it as well as adults. But before we get to that today, I want to help you think clearly about how we view the Bible as a whole in its moral teaching. It\u2019s true\u201d\u201das some people accuse us\u201d\u201dit\u2019s true. We do accept some passages of Leviticus, for instance, as still binding, and others we reject. Why do we do that? Are we just subjective\u201d\u201dthat\u2019s what we\u2019re accused of\u201d\u201dor is there more to it?<\/p>\n