Culture Study:
Leviticus 19:17-18 - Say It!
* God is a God of
* He wants you to experience peace in your life and power.
* But you have to honor His rules to do it.
* One of the greatest hindrances to your peace and power is
* Being bitter is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.
* Conflict is meant for connection.
* It’s the opportunity to turn “me” into “we.”
* EX: Cookie Dough.
* Problem - when someone wrongs you, it’s easy to hold it in rather than let it go.
* You can’t simply “let it go” before you “let it loose!”
* Vs 17 - “Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.”
* The way to keep yourself from bitterness is to say what needs to be said.
* If you don’t, you lose your peace.
* The longer you harbor bitterness, the more you lose your power.
* You are to “rebuke him FRANKLY” - cut right to the chase (don’t beat around the bush).
* When you do this you are “loving your neighbor.”
* Vs 18 - “Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
* If you wronged someone you loved and you didn’t know it, wouldn’t you want them to tell you so you could make it right?
* EX: Kristin Wilson at our office.
Psalms 24:4 - Internal & External
* Psalms 19:14 - “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.”
* Rock - trust.
* Redeemer - compensation.
* God is a rewarder.
* God is a vindicator.
* God is concerned about your external actions and your internal motivations.
* When they both line up, look at the result:
* Psalms 24:3 - “Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place?”
* Vs 4 - “He who has clean hands and a pure heart…”
* If you are clean on the inside AND outside, you get God’s presence!
* It’s not just about “doing” right, it’s about “being” right on the inside - having a desire to please the Lord with our attitudes, thoughts, and motives.
Deuteronomy 11:19 - Teach Your Kids!
* Vs 18-19 - “Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.”
* Our job as parents is to pass down God’s Word to our kids.
* We shouldn’t just rely on pastors and Bible teachers.
* We don’t just read the Bible to them (although that’s important).
* It’s teaching them through our own testimony.
* And doing it verbally.
* Skip Moen - “The teaching process of first-hand verbal communication isn’t just for the children. It’s also for the parents.
* For the most part, your brain is a product of the past. It has been shaped and molded to become a living record of everything you have learned and experienced up to this point in your life… . the only place that the past actually exists is in your brain—and it your body… Experiences not only enhance the brain circuitry, but they also create emotions.
* Think of emotions as the chemical reside from past experiences …When a parent recounts God’s commandments to a child, the parent activates the memory circuit in the brain and relives the experience. That process reinforces that emotional value of the past experience. The past experience becomes real again.
* The child learns more than the communicated words. The child senses the parent’s emotional state and participates in the recollection of the experience. A neutral teacher can never do this because the teacher’s experience doesn’t match the emotional connection of the parent.
* Consequently, if the parent doesn’t speak with the child, something irretrievable is lost. God is displaced. The child is left with information instead of symbiosis.
* You will also notice that Moses’ instructions require continuous repetition. Moses is interested in what today we would name “cognitive loop theory.”
* What happens when a particular set of mental and emotional sequences are repeated over and over. “ … you get caught in a loop where your thinking creates feeling and your feeling creates thinking. If thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain and feelings are the vocabulary of the body and the cycle of how you think and feel becomes your state of being, then your entire state of being is in the past.
* Speaking to our kids about God is the process of enhancing God’s personal involvement in their lives. It’s the reinforcement of God’s care. It’s the communicated emotion of witnessing the salvation of the Lord. And that’s why it needs to be done again and again and again. It’s the neurophysical divine connection.