Cultivate Contentment

The tenth commandment is the most explicitly heart-oriented of the ten commandments, and therefore almost impossible to keep. Powerful forces all around us institutionalize and reinforce coveting as the American Way of life. The alternative to coveting, however, is not to kill our desires, nor even simply to moderate them, but to direct them toward God himself. God never promises to fulfill all of our earthly desires, and there will always be inequality between people in this life, but he always delivers on his promise to give us more of himself. In order to want God more than anything else, we need Jesus to keep God’s Law perfectly for us, to bear the penalty of God’s law, and to replace our hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. All this Jesus has done for us, pouring his own Holy Spirit into our lives, so that we can increasingly experience the Good Life he has made us to live.