A Baptist minister is now in hot water after preaching a sermon which allegely called the Ten Commandments sayings or promises rather than mandates. The Huffington Post reports:
In his Christmas Eve message, Senior Pastor Perry Noble of NewSpring Church, which regularly has more than 32,000 worshippers at 11 campuses across South Carolina, told congregants that no word for “commandment” exists in Hebrew, the Old Testament’s original language.
“Instead of Ten Commandments that you have to keep if you’re going to be a follower of Jesus, they’re actually 10 promises that you can receive when you say yes to Jesus,” Noble said. He then proceeded to rephrase each of the commandments as a promise. The first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” became “You do not have to live in constant disappointment anymore.”
Noble told his far-flung congregation that he believed his topic was given by God for a specific people whose struggles over their inability to keep the Ten Commandments were preventing them from “saying yes” to Jesus. But the president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention said Noble had better reassess his position or reassess his affiliation with the state’s Southern Baptist churches.