Yesterday, I was recording a new series that will soon be posted on my mobile app, which by the way you can download here for free and begin to enjoy hours of teaching videos on purpose, creativity, and leadership—among other topics. During the recording, I was talking about how important it is to get in touch with your heart and not just your head or intellect if you are going to discover your purpose. It is the heart where God writes His commandments. It is the heart where the Spirit of God communicates with His children. It is the heart that fuels the mouth as Jesus informed us: ". . . For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of" (Luke 6:45b). This is a perfect introduction to the next Memo I had scheduled weeks ago, which is the story of Jesus instructing His disciples about forgiveness in Matthew 18. Let's go there now.
HOW MANY TIMES?
In Matthew 18, Jesus taught His followers how to confront sin in the church: If a person sins, go to him, and if they don't listen, take a delegation, and so forth. It is interesting Peter rightly concluded Jesus was not only addressing church discipline but forgiveness, for he asked the Lord some time after His teaching, "Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?" (Matthew 18:21). It seems Peter was coming to the Lord expecting some kind of commendation for his question since in his mind he was proving he had figured out how to do what Jesus had taught them to do.
Why would Peter have asked what he did, assuming he would win Jesus' approval and affirmation? It is because the rabbinical teaching of the day was there was to be no forgiveness extended for a third offense. Peter, therefore, was showing Jesus how far he was willing to go with His teaching, forgiving three-and-a-half times more than the rabbis had suggested. In modern terminology, Jesus then "blew Peter's mind" by putting a damper on Peter's show of magnanimity, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times" (Matthew 18:22). Let's take a quick look into Peter's mind to see what we can learn to help us with our current theme of how to unlock the power of our thinking.
UNLEARNING
Peter had probably heard for most of his life, "Forgive once, forgive twice, but no more." He thought about it and that "truth" had taken root, so to speak, in his mind. Think of that teaching as a thought missionary. The concept took up residence and began to build a community of thoughts around it, just like a missionary who goes to another culture to make or teach converts. Eventually that forgive-twice thought built a village and then eventually a town and a city of similar, supportive thoughts.
Therefore, when Peter heard Jesus' teaching, he was looking for a way to add His teaching as a friendly neighbor to his existing cluster of forgiveness thoughts. However, Jesus would not allow Peter to do that and closed out his teaching by taking Peter out of his head and into his heart: “This is how my heavenly Father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart" (Matthew 18:35). In this case, Peter needed a new heart thought that would become another thought missionary, going into Peter's mind to displace the old thought about limited forgiveness. That new thought would then need time to create its own village of supportive thoughts to help apply and live out Jesus' teaching.
In other words, Peter had to unlearn what he had learned and with the help of his heart, re-educate his mind to think anew. He needed to send new thought missionaries that did not make sense based on what he had been taught but would in time equip Peter to express and flow in Jesus' new directives. You are in need of the same thing. When you read, "Be generous," if you don't unlearn what you think you know about generosity, you will do what Peter did. You will go to the Lord with the new "percentage" level of your giving, thinking you are being magnanimous, only to hear the Lord say, "I don't want 10%, I want it all!" If you don't unlearn your assumption that you are too young or too old to do God's will, your mind will also be blown when the Spirit says to you, "I want you to go here or there." If you don't send some new thought missionaries to convert your old thoughts, when you read that Jesus commands you to forgive your enemies who hurt you, you will say, "No way!"
Are your heart and mind working together to renew and re-educate your mind? Are you sending thought missionaries in the power of the Spirit from your heart to your head? Are you willing to have your mind blown with new thoughts that can then take up residence and ease out the old to create a new colony of beliefs that will lead to new actions? I hope you are for there is no other way but to unlearn and then relearn what you need in order to be transformed into a new creature conformed to the image of Christ. Have a blessed week!
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