While these are familiar words to us, frequently they are dealt with in ways that fail to take into account the context and the situation.

God uses the fifth commandment to protect us from selfishness, prevent us from only thinking about our needs, and to drive us to Christ and our neighbors.

Hurricane Florence, or any natural disaster, can serve as a painful reminder of our own mortality, the futility of human ingenuity and strength.

Following him will also mean keeping our eyes locked on him so unswervingly that we don’t have the time or energy to be standing on tiptoes, peeping over fences into other people’s troubles and struggles.

In Martin Luther's Small Catechism he borrows a line from St. Augustine about what defines a "god."

Some have built an entire theology on the false assumption that when God commands us to obey or believe, we have the ability to obey or believe.

Sometimes we try be the bad god, sometimes the good god, oftentimes a freaky hybrid of both. The result is the same: Jesus the savior just gets in our way.

So what's the back side? What's the promise? We shall not have other gods, but we do have the one, true God—the promise of a God for us.

The biblical witness is clear: all the so-called gods and lords and idols who are the object of people’s devotion, to whom they offer their sacrifices, to whom they pray, whom they call God and Lord, are sadly nothing but a front for the father of lies.

It’ll eat you alive, won’t it? We begin to think we’re victims, as if the whole world is conspiring against us to deprive us of what we deserve.

Why, given all the things we wish God had told us, but didn’t, does he “waste our time” by stating the patently obvious? Was there, in Moses’ day, an outbreak of violence against the disabled?