August 16, 2026
Indianola Presbyterian Church
“Love before Law”
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch
August 16, 2026 Based on Exodus 19:1-6; 20:1-2
My baby sister had a baby this week. A little girl. My new niece.
I have spent a good part of the last few days doing what the rest of my family is doing, which is staring at my phone. Not at the news. At pictures. That impossibly small face. Those wrinkled hands. The little cap they put on her at the hospital.
And I keep coming back to one picture in particular. My sister, holding her daughter.
I have to tell you what that picture does to me. Because that is my sister, who, when I first met her, was only minutes old.
I can still remember being a kid, leaning over her the same way our whole family is now leaning over this new baby. And now here she is, all grown up, holding a baby of her own.
And I am already gone for this kid. Head over heels. When I first saw my sister holder my new niece I was so weepy, and I’ve yet to meet her in person.
My niece has done nothing to earn my love. She cannot say my name. She does not know I exist. And I love her past all reason.
Now, I will be honest with you about part of why that love comes so easy.
I am the uncle. I get the good part. I get to hold her and then hand her back. I do not change the diapers. I do not stay up all night, every night, that first hard week. I’ll get to celebrate her from afar as she grows up and skip over the hard parts.
Uncle love is a wonderful thing, partly because it costs me so little.
But even in that easy, cheap, uncle version of love, I catch a glimpse of something real. A love that is simply given.
She did nothing to switch it on. There is nothing she can do to switch it off.
Now, maybe you had someone who loved you like that, and you can picture a face right now. And maybe you cannot. Maybe you have gone looking your whole life and cannot name one single person who loved you without a catch.
If that is you this morning, I am not going to ask you to remember a love you never got. I am going to ask you to watch one. Look at my sister and that baby. See how love can just be handed to someone who has not done a thing to deserve it.
This type of love is real in this world. It happens.
And this morning I want to tell you
that this is the kind of love God operates in most often
This is the kind of love God has for God’s people
And this is the kind of Love God has aimed at you.
Because I found myself thinking this week that if we want to know what God's love is like, we could do worse than this. Love given all at once, for free, before anybody earns a thing. That is where God's love starts with us. Not with our performance. With our arrival.
I say all of that because this week we begin four weeks with the Ten Commandments. And if we are going to spend a month here, we have to start in the right place. We have to start where the text starts. Which, it turns out, is not with the commandments at all.
Listen to what God says before God says anything else.
In Exodus 19, before there is a single rule, God tells Moses to say this to the people: "You saw what I did to the Egyptians, and how I lifted you up on eagles' wings and brought you to me."
Eagles' wings. Lifted up. Carried. That is the picture God wants to remind the Israelites in the desert about.
Before God asks the people for one thing, God has already liberated these people.
God has scooped these people up, carried them out of slavery… into a freedom that has allowed them to make their own society for the first time.
And then, when we finally reach Exodus 20, when we finally arrive at the commandments themselves, look at how they open. The very first words are not a command. They are an introduction. "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery."
There’s a Lutheran Seminary Professor who describes it this way. He says, when it comes to the Ten Commandments, remember that chapter nineteen comes before twenty.
Chapter nineteen, where God carries the people on eagles' wings, comes before chapter twenty, where God gives the law. And the order is the whole point. Relationship first. Rules second. The love comes first, and it comes free, and only then does God say a word about how to live.
God does not say, keep these commandments and then I will be your God. God says, I am already your God. I already carried you. I already brought you home. Now, here is what life looks like for a people I love.
Same as that baby. My niece is not loved because she behaves.
She is loved. Period.
And one day, years from now, she will grow up and learn how to live inside that love. The love is not the reward for good behavior.
The love comes first, and the living grows up inside of it.
Now here is where a lot of us get the Ten Commandments backward. Myself included.
We tend to treat these ten commandments like litmus test for how faithful someone is. We treat them like an entrance exam. Like the test you have to pass to get God to notice you. Keep the list, and you are in.
Break the list, and you are out. We turn the commandments in, and we spend our lives climbing, hoping that if we get high enough, God might finally look down and approve.
And we are not the only ones who get it backward.
You have probably seen the fight over where the Ten Commandments belong. There are people, and whole movements, who insist these ten commandments have to be printed on posters in every public school classroom. Carved into granite and planted on the courthouse lawn. Bolted to the wall of the statehouse. As though God shows up when the stone goes up. As though these commandments were a summons, and if you can just get them displayed in enough public buildings, God will be obligated to come and bless the place.
But that gets chapter nineteen and twenty in the wrong order.
The commandments were never a device for making God present. God was already present. God had already come down in smoke and thunder and cloud. God had already carried these people out of Egypt on eagles' wings. The commandments do not produce the relationship. They come out of a relationship that is already there. So when you carve them into stone to mark your territory, when you use them to sort the righteous from everybody else, you have taken the house rules of a loved family and turned them back into an entrance exam. You have made the love conditional again. And the whole point of the text is that it never was.
So if they are not an entrance exam, and they are not a spell for summoning God to the courthouse, what are they?
I mentioned at the start that I’m calling this series “The ten best ways to live” after our Godly play curriculum.
I love that title for the commandments. Because it is closer to the truth of what they are. They are not God fencing us in. They are God showing us how to live so that life together actually goes well. How to be a people. How to keep one another safe and honored and rested and free. The best ways we have found, so far, to live with each other.
God does not love us because we keep the commandments. We keep the commandments because God already loves us, and because this is how a loved people learns to live.
So what does that free us to do?
It frees us to stop climbing. It frees us to stop treating our whole faith like an audition. You are not on trial here. You do not have to earn your way into a love you already have. That work is finished. It was finished before you walked in this morning.
And once you know that, the commandments change. They stop being the price of God's love and start being the shape of it. They become the answer to a different question. Not, what do I have to do to get God to love me, but, I am already loved, so how do I live? How do we live, together, so that it goes well for all of us?
That is what the rest of this series is about. Over the next few weeks we are going to walk through these commandments, and I want us to hear them the way the people at the foot of that mountain heard them. As the ten best ways to live, given by a God who has already carried us home.
Because here is what I hope you take with you this morning. Long before you did anything right, and long after you have gotten it wrong, there is a love holding you the way my sister is holding that baby. Given all at once. Given for free. Given first.
Chapter nineteen comes before twenty.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE
PRELUDE “The Love of God” arr. Rafael Griffin
WELCOME Rev. Trip Porch
One: This is the day that the Lord has made
All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
*CALL TO WORSHIP
One: We come this morning looking for God.
Many: But before we ever went looking, God came looking for us.
One: Before there was a commandment, there was a covenant.
Before the law, there was love.
Many: We belong to God, and God belongs to us.
One: So let us worship the One who found us first.
All: Let us worship God.
*HYMN 43 “You Who Dwell in the Shelter of the Lord” ON EAGLES WINGS
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION Mary Rebekah Fortman
Faithful God, you came to us before we came to you. You set us free before you asked anything of us. But we forget the order of things. We try to earn what you have already freely given. We treat your commandments as a ladder to climb instead of a life to live. We use your law to measure our neighbors and to excuse ourselves.
Forgive us. Remind us that we are yours. Free us again to love you, and to love the people you have set beside us. Amen.
*ASSURANCE OF PARDON
*RESPONSE OF PARDON582 “Glory to God, Whose Goodness Shines on Me” GLORY TO GOD
*PASSING OF THE PEACE
One: The peace of Christ be with you!
All: And also with you.
WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD
MUSICAL OFFERING “God of the Deep” Dan Forrest
CHILDREN’S MESSAGE
PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
SCRIPTUREExodus 19:1-6; 20:1-2 The VOICE
The Israelites entered the desert of Sinai on the day the third new moon appeared after the Israelites left Egypt. After departing from Rephidim, they entered into the desert of Sinai and set up camp out in the desert. The entire community of Israel camped right in front of the mountain of God.
Moses climbed the mountain to meet with God, and the Eternal spoke to him from the mountain:
“This is what I want you to say to the house of Jacob—to all the people of Israel: ‘You are eyewitnesses of all that I did to the Egyptians. You saw how I snatched you from the bonds of slavery and carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Myself. Now if you will hear My voice, obey what I say, and keep My covenant, then you—out of all the nations of the world—will be My treasured people. After all, the earth belongs to Me. You will be My kingdom of priests, a nation holy and set apart.’ Tell the Israelites exactly what I have told to you.”
Then God began to speak directly to all the people.
“I am the Eternal your God. I led you out of Egypt and liberated you from lives of slavery and oppression.”
One: Holy wisdom, Holy Word,
All: Thanks be to God
SERMON Rev. Trip Porch
WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD
*HYMN 419“Lord, Who may Dwell within Your House” RIDGEMOOR
PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.
TIME OF OFFERING online giving is available at www. indianolapres.org/give
OFFERTORY “Eternal Love” James Michael Stevens
*OFFERTORY RESPONSE “God, We Honor You” ABUNDANT BLESSINGS
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Generous God, everything we offer began as a gift from you. You gave first. You always do. Take what we bring and turn it into love our neighbors can feel: food, welcome, justice, rest. We give because you first gave to us. Amen.
*HYMN 291 “Spirit, Spirit of Gentleness” SPIRIT
TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING
CHARGE & BENEDICTION
POSTLUDE “Postludio Maestoso” Ellen Jane Lorenz
Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452