Do Christians have to follow the Ten Commandments?

Ask ten different Christians whether the Ten Commandments still apply and you'll get several different answers, most of them delivered with real confidence. Some will say the law is finished business, done at the cross. Others will say nine of them clearly are not finished business at all, Jesus himself repeats several. Both instincts are reaching for something true. The New Testament actually resolves most of this directly, though not quite all of it.

What Paul means by "not under the law"

Start with what Paul is actually arguing in Romans and Galatians, because it's narrower than "the rules don't count anymore." He's talking about the Mosaic law as a covenant system, the specific legal and ceremonial arrangement given to Israel through Moses, and specifically about whether keeping it is how a person gets right with God. His answer is no. It never was, even for Israel. Abraham was counted righteous by faith centuries before the law existed.

Galatians uses a memorable image for the law's role before Christ: a schoolmaster, a household guardian who supervised a child until they came of age. That guardian had real authority for a season, and real purpose, but wasn't meant to run the household forever.

Galatians 3:24-25

"Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster."

The law's job was to point forward. Once what it pointed to arrived, its specific role as the mechanism of justification ended, which is a different claim than "none of it matters."

Which nine show up again anyway

Here's the part that surprises people who only heard the first half of this argument. When a young man asks Jesus directly what he must do to inherit eternal life, Jesus doesn't say the commandments are irrelevant. He lists them: no murder, no adultery, no stealing, no false witness, honor your father and mother, love your neighbor as yourself. Paul does the same thing in Romans, restating the same cluster and summarizing it the same way Jesus does.

Romans 13:9-10

"For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law."

Paul isn't dismissing these commands. He's restating six of the ten by name and folding the rest into one summary command that Jesus also gives.

Count them and nine of the ten show up, either quoted directly or reaffirmed in substance, somewhere in New Testament ethical teaching: no other gods, no idols, honor God's name, honor parents, no murder, no adultery, no stealing, no false witness, no coveting. That leaves exactly one commandment the New Testament treats differently than the rest.

The one commandment where Christians genuinely disagree

The fourth commandment, keeping the Sabbath, is the outlier, and honest churches have read it three different ways for a long time. Some Christian traditions moved the weekly rest and worship to Sunday, the day of resurrection, treating it as a continuation of the Sabbath principle in a new form. Others read Paul's letter to the Colossians as releasing believers from any obligation to a specific holy day at all, the Sabbath fulfilled and set aside in Christ rather than transferred to a new date. A smaller number of traditions, including Seventh-day Adventists, hold that the seventh-day Sabbath itself remains binding, unchanged.

Colossians 2:16-17

"Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: Which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ."

Sincere, careful readers disagree on how far this passage extends. This page isn't going to settle that argument for you, and shouldn't.

Whichever view a church holds, the underlying instinct behind the commandment, that people need rhythm, rest, and dedicated time for God, rarely gets argued away entirely. What's disputed is the specific mechanics, not whether rest and worship matter at all.

So is it total freedom, then?

No, and this is where "not under the law" gets misheard as "anything goes." John writes plainly that loving God means keeping his commandments, and that his commandments aren't a burden. That's not a contradiction of grace, it's what grace produces in someone who actually receives it. The moral seriousness of the Ten Commandments never left. What left was the idea that keeping them earns a standing with God that Christ hadn't already secured.

A believer who lies, steals, or dishonors their parents hasn't found a loophole because the cross happened. They've missed the point of what the cross was for.

Christians aren't saved by keeping the Ten Commandments, and never were, but nine of them are restated as real moral obligations throughout the New Testament. The Sabbath is the one place where faithful churches read the evidence differently, and that's worth saying plainly instead of pretending it's settled.