Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, September 6, 2026
by Madison Johnston, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: Commandments 9 and 10 sever us both from Creator and from community. Grace assures us that we do not need to fear coveting, but the commandments tell us why we should be wary of it.
We’ve categorized the Ten over the past few weeks in terms of:
1) Context/foundation of God’s law in general
2) Commandments speaking to the connection between God and us
3) Commandments speaking to the connection between us and neighbor
We end by looking at one specific idea: coveting. And that’s intentional, because coveting is what brings us back, full-circle, to the context for, and foundation of, God’s law in general.
To covet is to begrudge or envy your neighbor for the things that they have, or perhaps more seriously, the things you perceive them to be. Put more plainly, to covet is to be consumed with jealousy. To be chronically unsatisfied and unfulfilled.
Coveting kills the trust in—and connection with—God that we hear promised to us in commandments 1-3 because in coveting you paint something other than God as your ultimate source of truth. You deny that God is everything.
Coveting also kills the trust in—and connection with—others outlined in Commandments 4-8, because in coveting, your jealousy doesn’t just poison you—it simultaneously degrades and discredits your neighbor. As you feed narratives of resentment and moral judgment against the people around you, you chip away at their humanity.
Coveting binds you to something that is decidedly not God at your very center. Coveting puts you in a state of obsession, which subjects you to a master. An oppressive, limiting, value-extracting force. Coveting makes you victim to the very things God tries to outlaw for God’s people: death, unfaithfulness, theft and lies. Coveting puts you into a state of slavery, when God’s love is—and only ever has been—calling you into a state of freedom.
God’s love for us may be cosmic in scope, but to be clear, it doesn’t include any black holes. There is no room in God’s love for matter so dense and gravitational pull so strong that violence and suppression prevail.
Commandments 9 and 10 combine to create an opposing inverse to the Greatest Commandment (Matthew 22:34-40), because coveting is so powerful a temptation that every one of us will struggle with it over the course of our lives, For different reasons, in different chapters, and to varying degrees.
But none of us has to worry that the power of coveting will do us in. Paul reminds us in the Book of Romans that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; [and that] they are now justified by his grace as a gift … For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works” (Romans 3:23-28).
Our call this week is to be mindful of this powerful, closing Commandment, and to root in God’s reasoning behind giving all of the Commandments in the first place: our freedom. Our redemption.
