Opinion
Ten Commandments!! Not Enough…
By Dr jalarth Uche Opara
The Ten Commandments are good but not enough.They remain the elementary aspect of our Christian lifestyle, the foundation upon which every authentic relationship with God is built.
Commandments tell us what we must not do, but they do not, by themselves, exhaust what it means to live in the fulness of Christ.
The Christian journey is not meant to end with mere compliance. It progresses from law to love, from external observance to interior transformation, from duty to delight.
A person may meticulously keep every commandment and yet have a heart that is distant from God. This was one of the recurring concerns Jesus raised with the religious leaders of His day: they honored God with their lips, but their hearts were far from Him (Matthew 15:8).
The higher calling of the Gospel is not law driven, but living a life in the Spirit. The believer is invited not to a strict keeper of laws and commandments but into koinonia,a deeper communion with God where obedience is no longer driven by fear of punishment or mere obligation, but by love, revelation, and intimacy with Christ.
In this state, the commandments are not discarded; they are fulfilled naturally because the Holy Spirit writes God’s law upon the heart (Jeremiah 31:33).
The mature Christian therefore does not live below the law, nor merely at the level of the law, but above it—not by ignoring God’s commandments, but by embodying their deepest intention.
Love becomes the motive, grace the power, and communion with God the source of every moral action.
The Ten Commandments teach us how to avoid sin; koinonia teaches us how to delight in God.
The commandments establish the boundaries of righteousness; communion with Christ reveals its fullness. The goal of Christianity is not simply to produce commandment keepers, but men and women whose lives so reflect Christ that obedience becomes the spontaneous fruit of a transformed heart.
A real Christian who understands the fullness of Christ’s grace, lives above the letters of the Ten commandments, operates instead within the spirit of the letters.
Keeping the Ten commandments dutifully is a step for crawling Christian babies to climb into a higher realm of deeper relationship with God, where revelation, instructions and fellowship are born not from laws and commandments but from conviction, brokenness and personal encounter.
If all that one knows as a Christian is the dutiful adherence of the Ten commandments, one by simple and conservative description is a baby crawling Christian.
Ten commandments are the ABC of Christian life, while living a life soaked and saturated with the power of the Holy Spirit is for mature Christians.
Laws are made to check mate and direct the weakling to encourage compliance. To those who live in Koinonia, in revelation, hearing divine instructions daily, laws and commandments are their basic not their ultimate. They live free from the boundaries of laws and operate from freedom which the life in the spirit gives.
What are you? A baby crawling Christian within the straps of laws and commandments or a Christian living daily in Koinonia with the Holy Spirit. Keep the laws and commandments, but above all walk in the Holy Spirit.
Jarlath Opara
jarlathuche@gmail.com