The Captive Mindset

We started a series at my church called Out of the Wilderness. We are looking at wilderness narratives to help us understand where God is leading us in the future. This past week the senior pastor gave a sermon on Numbers 13 and 14. This is the story of spying out the promised land and how the people rebelled against God. You might know the song about it. It involves twelve men who spy on Cannon. Ten were... scared and two were not.

Well anyway, I have been thinking a lot about this sermon. It's really good. You can watch it here. My thoughts have been focused on this idea of a captivity mindset. This is something that is touched on in the sermon, but I have been thinking about it through the lens of trauma.

Forgive Us Like We Forgive Others

It has taken me quite a while to write this. Not because I have nothing to say about forgiveness, but because I have already written on it and I wasn't sure what I could add. When I actually went back and read my previous article I realized that I had left out the very passage from the Lord's Prayer that we will deal with today. In talking about this section of the Lord's Prayer I will of course go over some of what I have said before. But enough disclaimer. On to the intro. (Well that didn't take long did it?)

When we recite the part of the Lord's Prayer about forgiveness, we often focus on the first half: forgive us our sins. We gloss over the second half about forgiving others. It's understandable. Everyone wants to be forgiven by God. Isn't that what the Bible is all about? The issue is that what Jesus actually taught us to pray was a petition to God that was contingent on our forgiveness of others. Said another way Jesus taught us to ask God to only forgive us if we forgive others.