Different Life: 9th & 10th CommandmentsSample

The Hebrew word for “covet” is translated in Greek as epithumeo. The English New Testament translates the Greek in all sorts of ways: lust, longing, coveting, setting our hearts upon. Maybe it’s easiest to translate it as “desire” or “crave.”

Well-meaning people seeking to follow God sometimes wonder if it’s okay to want anything. They’re afraid any desire of the heart that isn’t God is sinful. The result can lead to seeing a passionless existence as God’s highest aim.

Nothing could be further from the truth. God has made a wonderful world filled with wonderful things to be enjoyed. He’s given us passions and desires he wants us to follow. He’s put people in our lives he wants us to delight in. God wants us to delight and desire his gifts. It simply goes off the rails when the gift supplants the giver.

The command does not prohibit wanting things. It prohibits wanting something specific that belongs to somebody else. It’s okay, even good, to want to be married, to want to be with someone, or to see a house or car or outfit or way of life and think, “I’d really like to have something like that.” What the command does prohibit is when the thing we want already belongs to someone else. At that point, God says, “Off limits.”

So enjoy what God has given you. Nurture the passions he’s placed in you. Just be sure they are of him and from him, and not someone else’s.