Sometimes we experience God’s commandments as a pressure from the outside. Thus, we also conform only our outside behavior to them.

At times, we look for opportunities to break the law without being discovered. Some of us adhere to the mythical 11th commandment:

“Thou shalt not be caught!” It is as if everything is moral as long as we can get away with it. This is tragic. God’s law is not a pressure from the outside.

In the book of the Prophet Jeremiah, God says, “I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts” (31:33). Our behavior should be innerdirected.

It must flow from an inner conviction that God’s law is good in itself, and that it deserves to be obeyed because its aim is to ensure our real happiness.

In the end, the law of God is not an obligation to be fulfilled, but rather a relationship to be nurtured. Do I nurture my relationship with the Lord? Or do I simply “perform” his laws when others are watching?

Jesus said to his disciples: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.

“Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.

“But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”