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“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.” (Exodus 20:7)

Unlike our culture’s ability to uphold the natural and external meaning of the first commandment, using the Lord’s names unthinkingly and disrespectfully is everywhere around us. This influence makes it more difficult to teach our own children the importance of this commandment. But following the commandments naturally and externally is the first step in following them internally and spiritually; unless we are conscious of and thinking about the Lord in our lives, we cannot begin to behave in ways that are genuine worship of the Lord. And that is the goal of this commandment.

It is vital that we use and understand the names of the Lord because it is an important way that the Lord becomes Human to us. Everyone has a name that is used to talk with them, and it is no different with the Lord. Taking His name, in the most internal meaning, is to acknowledge that the Lord is Human and that everything comes from Him, that He is a person we can talk with and relate to through His Word. Blaspheming the Lord’s name, His Word or holy things cannot be forgiven, not because the Lord is especially angry, but because disregarding these things removes the only means by which we can learn of and accept the Lord’s forgiveness. When we take the name of the Lord in vain, whether externally or internally, we are destroying the connection between the Lord and ourselves and making genuine worship impossible.

To see that this is true, read Exodus 20:7; Matthew 12:31-32; and True Christian Religion 299.

This is a synopsis of the second sermon in our ten week Journey to Rise Above It at Pittsburgh New Church. If you missed it, you might want to start with our first sermon, “How to Worship the Lord Only”. You can listen to the full audio message by clicking here.

Stay tuned, the full text version coming soon…

“You shall have no other gods before Me.” (Exodus 20:3)

In our basically monotheistic culture, we often dismiss commandment number one as finished. We never go to satanic rituals, we never bow down to a golden statue, and we don’t burn incense to icons in our homes. Congratulations! This is a success not to be disregarded, but it is obeying the first commandment in only its most natural and external form. This may have been enough for the Children of Israel, but the Lord wants us to be more spiritual. Through the New Testament and the Writings for the New Church, the Lord teaches us about internal and spiritual ways of understanding and obeying His law.

In its spiritual meaning, the Lord is teaching us to worship Him in His Divine Human only—the Lord Jesus Christ. Further, we learn that true worship does not consist solely in standing and kneeling, saying prayers and singing songs. True worship of the Lord is living according to the true ideas that you have learned from the Lord’s Word. It is in life that genuine worship exists. Anything that prevents you from living what you know to be true is also an idol. Evil spirits are skilled at distracting us away from thinking about the place of the Lord in our lives. They want us to pay attention to, and live our lives in dedication to, anything other than the Lord. Drugs, money, and sex are the easy ones to see—partly because they can be so spectacularly destructive. More difficult to identify in our own lives are the subtly destructive things like anger, pride, revenge, control, reputation, and cynicism. These can be idols that we do not wish to abandon as we learn to worship the Lord Jesus Christ with all our hearts, minds, and strength.

This is the first commandment and it is the center of all religion. The acknowledgement of the Lord Jesus Christ as the one God of heaven and earth, Creator and Redeemer, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the essential feature of the life of religion. It is because of this acknowledgement, and only because of this, that the rest of religion contains anything of genuine life.

“Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.” (Revelation 19:10)

To see that this is true, read Exodus 20:1-6, Revelation 19:6-10, and True Christian Religion 294, 295, 296:1.

This is a synopsis of the first sermon in our ten week Journey to Rise Above It, here at Pittsburgh New Church. It was preached by Rev. Amos Glenn. This is just a synopsis. Listen to the full audio here, and you can read the full text version below:

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We start our sermon series on the Ten Commandments with the first commandment which is not to have any other god before the Lord. When we start with this first commandment, lots of people think we are starting with the easy one, then the commandments get harder. Lying, that’s harder; stealing, that’s harder. But worshiping only the Lord, that’s easy. How many people do you know that worship Baal? How many people do you know who have sacrificed a ram to Ashtoreth? We just don’t do that any more. In our basically monotheistic culture, we just worship one god, the Lord. We think, “We don’t participate in satanic rituals, we don’t burn incense to icons in our homes, we don’t bow down to golden idols. Check this one off, we’re done.”

Congratulations! That’s a feat that’s not worth dismissing. Not bowing down to golden idols is important. Not worshiping Baals and Ashtoreths is very important. But it’s really only the most natural and most external way of obeying this first commandment. The Lord, through teaching in His New Testament and through the Writings for the New Church, is pretty clear that He wants us to be more spiritual and more internal than that. This external, natural way of behaving might have been good enough for the Children of Israel at Mount Sinai. It was acceptable for them to behave this way because that was all they understood and so that was all they could do. But that’s not us. The Lord requires us to be more spiritual, to be more internal, to think in ways that aren’t merely natural.

So, no, we don’t worship Baals and Ashtoreths or statues. But do we spiritually and internally worship only The Lord? And that’s the question we take up this morning. How do we worship the Lord only?

Fortunately, the first commandment doesn’t say “only worship the Lord” because that would be very hard for us to do in internal ways. The commandment is, “don’t worship any other gods.” If this were a logic class, we would say, “those are the same things,” but they are, in reality, quite different. Worshiping the Lord only would mean willing ourselves to do certain behaviors and think certain thought, which is almost impossible. NOT worshiping other gods is easier because you just have to NOT behave in a certain way. You don’t have to will yourself into loving the Lord, you just have to not love any other false gods. This is much easier—doable, in fact.

The question, then, that we really need to be asking ourselves is this: “Who is this Lord we are supposed to be worshiping and who are all these false gods we are not supposed to be worshiping.” We can’t obey if we can’t tell the difference. Well, in the Writing for the New Church, the Lord says that when this commandment teaches about the One God that is to be worshiped, that is, the Lord God Jesus Christ, Creator, Savior, Jehovah born into the world, the Divine Human, the God-Man. That’s whom we worship.

But don’t we say Jehovah is God? Is worshiping Jehovah equal to worshiping the Lord only? The Writings for the New Church would say, no, they’re not equal. Thinking of the Lord as Jehovah makes the Lord invisible and unknowable, He becomes a cloud with lightning and thunder on top of the mountain. That sort of God is hard to obey, as the Children of Israel discovered. In the moment, of course, they were terrified and perfectly willing to say, “Anything you tell us Lord, we’re going to do it!” But only because they were terrified. And that worked for a week before they forgot their pledge and started worshiping other gods. Then the Lord would send some terrible plague and they would say, “Oh, yeah! We’re worshiping the Lord only,” and that would last another month before they would start worshiping other gods. Most of the stories of the Old Testament are just that happening over and over again until they finally just can’t do it any more at all and Jerusalem is destroyed.

So it can’t be Jehovah that we worship. It has to be Jehovah in Human form. It has to be Jesus Christ who is Jehovah, born on earth to show us the Human form that the Lord is, to demonstrate to us that He and we are the same. We are human because He is human; we love because He loves; we have life because He has life. That’s the sort of worship that we can do. That’s the sort of worship that isn’t worship out of fear but worship out of free and rational choice. That is only possible with Lord God Jesus Christ, who is Jehovah as the soul is in the body.

So that is the one God of Heaven and Earth that this commandment is teaching us to worship. No other gods. We’ve already said that those other gods are not necessarily Baals and Ashtoreths. They’re not necessarily weird, cult-like things either. Worshiping is more than just standing up and kneeling, and saying prayers and singing songs on Sunday morning. Community church is an important part of worship, but it’s not the definition of worship. Worship exists in your life and it exists there only. It exists here this morning because this is part of your life. But if you leave here this morning and you don’t think about the Lord, or His place or your life, or the true ideas taught in His Word until next Sunday morning, you’re not truly, genuinely worshiping. Worship means behaving all the time in a way that agrees with the ideas that you believe to be true. So you read the Lord’s Word and you find some things in it that you recognize as true because they’re in the Lord’s Word and then on Monday you go and you do them and then on Tuesday you do the same thing. That’s what the Lord wants; He wants us to live our lives according to His Word. What good are ten thousand rams or ten thousand rivers of oil or ten thousand Sundays in church if you’re not obeying the Lord’s law?

Obedience to the Lord’s law, from a free rational choice because you acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ to be the One God of Heaven and Earth is what this commandment is teaching. Anything else is an idol. Anything else is not worshiping the Lord. Anything that prevents you from doing what you know to be true is what this commandment is talking about. The evil spirits love to distract us from thinking about the Lord, thinking about his place in our lives, thinking about our actions in comparison to what we know is true. Distractions are all around us. It’s easy to pick out some of the more spectacularly destructive false gods like sex and drugs and money. Those are easy to spot when they go wrong. But what’s not so easy to see are the ones that are more subtly destructive. Things like anger and fear. Things like control. Things like reputation. These dangerous things are not false gods in an of themselves. All of these examples can be examples of good things, too. They become idols when, for example, your reputation becomes more important than your life according to the Lord’s Word. When you have a choice of doing what you know to be true but being thrown out of proper society, then you can really know if you are following the Baals and the Ashtoreths or you are worshiping the One God. That’s the challenge. That’s the subtle destructiveness of worshiping other gods.

In the book of Revelation, we read about John seeing his visions in the spiritual world. An angel was showing him all the things he was to see. Near the end the wonders were overwhelming to him and he falls down at the angel’s feet and begins to worship the angel. But the angel says, “See that you do not do that.” The angel compares himself to John’s brother rather than John’s Lord. They are brothers because they both have the testimony of Jesus. Then the angel says, “worship God for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophesy.” The Writings for the New Church reveal the really beautiful meaning of these words. The “testimony of Jesus” is the true acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus Christ, not just with the mind but with the heart and the life. That “testimony of Jesus” is the “spirit of prophesy.” The “prophesy” here represents all of the Lord’s Word and the “spirit” represents it’s life. The angel tells John to worship the Lord because the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophesy. We might use correspondences to translate this phrase into “Worship the Lord because when you acknowledge the Lord to be the one God of Heaven and Earth, all those truths that you have learned from the Word are filled with life.” When truths are filled with life from the Lord they become part of our lives and we leave behind spiritual struggles—your life becomes filled with Life.

This is the first commandment and it is the central commandment. We read the two great Commandments and this is one of them. On this commandment hangs all the law and the prophets. On this commandment hang all the teachings of the Lord’s Word. If you are doing all the other things that the Lord says but not worshiping the Lord only, it really doesn’t matter what else you’re doing. Living your lifeaccording to the Lord’s commandments because you acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ as the Divine Human is the essence of the life of religion and the guide on the path to heaven

Welcome to the Journey!

The Pittsburgh New Church has almost 60 people signed up for a group meeting in Pittsburgh (plus several Pittsburghers signed up for the General Church’s online group). And that number does not include all of the children in Sunday School groups. The Pastor and his leadership team are thrilled by the response to this program offered to you all. We are confident that the Rise Above It! campaign is going to change our church community for the better, at least a little bit.

Not signed up? There’s still time! It’s never too late to purchase a book and sign up for a weekly discussion group meeting. There are already 8 groups available in different parts of the city on four different days of the week. Hopefully you can find a group you can attend. If you want to join a group, or just have questions, please contact the pastor or DeNese and Matt Olson.

Have Fun and God be with You.

It’s not too late to sign up for the Rise Above It program. The following groups have formed, so far:

• Sunday 12:15 after church in Point Breeze
  299 Le Roi Rd, Pittsburgh, PA 15208
• Monday Evening in Penn Hills
  148 Sunset Dr, Wilkins Twp, PA 15235
• Monday Evening in Point Breeze
  314 Le Roi Rd, Pittsburgh, PA 15208
• Tuesday Evening in Point Breeze
  7426 Ben Hur St, Pittsburgh, PA 15208
• Thursday Morning in Aspinwall
  48 S. Collinwood Dr, Ohara Twp, PA 15215
• Thursday Evening in Edgewood
  206 Beech St, Edgewood, PA 15218

Call DeNese Olson at 412-829-2691 to register now.

This Saturday evening at 7pm we will be gathering to celebrate the kick-off of the Rise Above It campaign. It is an open-to-everyone event (including kids.) There will be entertainment, games, prizes, and of course…dessert.

Come. Anyone who shows up will be welcome. Even if you are not planning on participating in the program, come anyway, to see what you’re going to miss!

The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who were sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost; but with force and cruelty you have ruled them. (Ezekiel 34:4)

The Lord gives a sort of job description to His New Church priests in Arcana Caelestia 10794 when He says that…

It is their duty to teachpeople the way to heaven and also to guide them. They must instruct them in the teachings of their Church and guide them to lead lives in keeping with those teachings. Priests who teach truths and guide people by means of them to goodness of lifeand so to the Lord are good shepherds; but those who teach yet do not guide people to goodness of life and so to the Lord are bad shepherds.

In Latin, the language the Writings for the New Church were written in, the same word is used for “pastor” and “shepherd”. To be a good pastor, then, requires that a priest teach the truths of the Church, not what he believes to be true. But that’s not all. These truths are to be taught in such a way that those learning the truths are led to the goodness of life, like sheep are led to green pastures and clear water. Just telling the sheep that there is such a thing as green pastures and clear water is not enough to be a good pastor. As the Lord said in Ezekiel, “The weak you have not strengthened, nor have you healed those who are sick, nor bound up the broken, nor brought back what was driven away, nor sought what was lost” (34:4). A pastor doing his job justly, faithfully, and sincerely, will be doing all of these things.

Why do you care what the pastor’s job is? There may be many reasons, but one of the biggest is so that you recognize what your pastor’s goals for the congregation are. Pastors are in unique positions to see the weak, sick, broken, driven away, and lost in the congregation. And it is the goal of a good pastor to strengthen, heal, bind, bring back, and seek, both individuals in his congregation and for the congregation as a whole. And he does this by teaching the truths of the church and leading by them to the goodness oflife. A good shepherd cannot lead “with force and cruelty” but can only suggest, encourage, and challenge. And then get out of the way! People have a direct connection with the Lord, not one through the pastor. The Lord is the door of the sheepfold through which both pastor and congregation must pass.

In the church community of the Pittsburgh New Church, I hear about and see many examples of people who are feeling weak or sick or broken. And I try to bring them the strengthening, healing, binding leaves of the tree which are the Lord’s truths. But most of all, I see and talk with people who are feeling distant and separated, peoplewho feel like the sheep are wandering away from each other, or are being driven away from the flock. And this issomething that is not best addressed on an individual level. Instead, it is the pastor’s responsibility to teach the whole church community about what holds a community together like a flock, and then to use those teachings to guide the whole into re-strengthening the ties that bind them together. Remember what the bishops told the priests in Conjugial Love: church communities are bound together and filled with goodness by working on bringing forth the fruits of love, that is, doing the Lord’s truth. Working as a community to bring the Lord’s truths into your individual lives is how congregations are really made because then people are performing a common use: helping each other find the green pastures and the clear waters where they will no longer be prey but will dwell together in security and peace.

To see that this is true, read John 10:1-6, Ezekiel 34, and Conjugial Love 9.

(This is a synopsis of the sermon preached by the Rev. Amos Glenn at Pittsburgh New Church at 11am on September 10, 2006. Listen the audio version of the full sermon by clicking here.)

While the earth remains,
Seedtime and harvest,
And cold and heat,

And summer and winter,
And day and night,
Shall not cease. (Genesis 8:22)

In life we go through alternating states of cold and heat as we are being spiritually remade. What is more surprising is that even the angels in the highest heaven go through alternations of spiritual summer and spiritual winter. So, too, can we expect the Church to continually pass through such spiritual seasons. When we are in winter, it is not our failure but an opportunity for learning. Have faith in the coming of summer.

To see that this is true, read Genesis 8; Mark 4:26-29; and Secrets of Heaven 935.

(This is a synopsis of the sermon preached by the Rev. “Mac” Frazier at Pittsburgh New Church at 11:00am on September 3, 2006. You can listen to the full version and also read a full text version of on Mac’s site.)

As the summer has been winding down, I’ve been getting more and more excited about the upcoming Rise Above It campaign. As you know by now, we will be kicking it off September 17th and will continue with our focus on the Ten Commandments through November 19th. This is an opportunity to come together as a congregation and reach out to our community. It has three core elements: 1) Sunday worship centered on a theme; 2) discussion group participation and 3) daily reading.

This campaign uses the book Rise Above It: Spiritual Development Through the Ten Commandments, by Ray and Star Silverman. It takes the Ten Commandments and relates them to daily life. The book is strongly grounded in New Church teachings while also bringing in complementary teachings from different major world religions. It is a book filled with heart, depth and personal application.

During the campaign we will have the opportunity to commit to strengthening our spiritual life, to commit to coming to church for the ten weeks of the campaign, to commit to being involved in a weekly discussion group and to commit to daily readings from the Rise Above It book and from the Word.

It is an exciting opportunity to experience the power of our whole community coming together to work on really following the Ten Commandments, on all levels, in our lives. Each of us will find new dimensions of each commandment that we can work on and that will help us to be healthier, happier people. As the Lord tells us, “If you want to enter life, keep my commandments.”

In addition to us in Pittsburgh, congregations in Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, Cincinnati, Sarver, Ivyland and Bryn Athyn are participating in this effort. As other congregations watch us, we are leading the way in a new approach to studying, sharing and living the Lord’s Word.

So what can you do? If you haven’t already, please join in this exciting new endeavor by filling out a Discussion Group Sign Up form. That’s the easy part. Setting aside fifteen hours over ten weeks to read the Word, go to church, and participate in a discussion group isn’t so hard. The next step, however, takes more courage: invite your friends.

Inviting friends and neighbors to church can be a daunting task. Even some ministers can find it challenging, sometimes, to try to share the faith with non-members. We’ve taken steps to help you, though. We have materials–brochures, invitation cards, a special edition of New Church Connection–that you can give your friends, co-workers and neighbors. We’ve put up posters and are running newspaper ads and sending postcards to the areas you live and work in, so there’s a chance they’ve already heard of the program when you bring it up.

The Lord in His Word frequently calls us to share our spiritual wealth with the world, and not just as individuals. The Lord’s kingdom is a community of communities, and as we strive to be a part of that kingdom, we draw closer not only to the Lord but to one another. And as we do, the Lord is always there with us, lifting us up even when it seems to us that we are risking “failure” of some sort. He protects us so that we can take spiritual risks.

What I love about this campaign is that it gives us a powerful structure within which to follow the Lord’s commandments not just as individuals but as a community of communities, all in support of one another, and of course under the protection of the Lord. I see this as good for us as individuals, as a congregation, and as a church, and I also see it as good for our neighbors and friends.

If there is interest, I would like to offer an opportunity to get together to discuss the challenges of sharing your faith with your neighbors. If this sounds like something you would benefit from, email me at mac@pittsburghnewchurch.org.