Free to recalibrate

What Jesus was saying when He said, “This do in remembrance of me,” was, “Appropriate the reality of our connection; appropriate the reality of your connection with me.”

What we’re doing with the Lord’s table is we’re RE-membering; we’re affirming by faith that we are inseparably joined to Him and to one another, and we’re demonstrating that in our life as an assembly, says Richard Jordan.

Putting it under the blood is to think about it the way God does. He says, “I will remember your sins no more. I will never allow the sins to be reattached to you.”

So when Paul says “forgetting those things which are behind,” and that context, by the way, is not all about bad things . . .

There’s things in your past that you used to think were good and now you look at them and you say, “Wow, what a fool I was.” You realize, “I used to think serving God looked like that, with all that religion, and now I think what a fool I was.

Paul says, “You know what, I’m not connected with that anymore.” What forgiveness is is you release a person. You say, “The Cross paid for that.”

When you release those failures and those hurts, and the people who hurt you from all the obligations to you, and you refuse to join those offenses again to them, and you refuse to take those offenses and join them to you again as offenses, that’s forgetting the past; that’s putting it away.

Listen, don’t beat yourself up because you’re not able to erase your memory; your recall. As you walk in faith, what you’ll discover is that as you live in forgiveness it will lessen the emotional impact of all those things from the past.

And when you think about them, instead of the emotion and the hurt being there, they’ll be a recalibrating of your thinking about them and the hurt gets to be less and less and finally it’s gone altogether; the pain just goes away because you’re really healed.

Did you ever have a wound and eventually it heals over? And where the wound was maybe there’s still scar tissue? When the wound is healed, then the hurt goes away. It doesn’t mean you don’t have the scar, or you don’t remember how it happened.

Don’t beat yourself up about, “Because I can remember these things I must not have forgiven,” because the first thing you do is you put it under the blood. You think about it the way God thinks about it.

“I’m going to let the offense, the hurt, the guilt, the failure go to the Cross; I’m not going to get the sin of the event and put it back to the event. I’ll let Calvary cover it. God thinks the Cross paid for it and I’ll say that’s enough. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt; doesn’t mean it wasn’t right. It just means that the guilt and the sin isn’t going to be attached to me anymore, or to others.”

You’re going to be free to do the second thing which is to “renew your mind.” Recalibrate your thinking, because once you’re free, you can begin to think differently about it.

You can think differently about your failures, because when you see your failures, or the failures of others, when you apply forgiveness to it, you take the sin and you send it to the Cross and that’s an act of faith that you choose to do because God said you can.

And when you make that choice of forgiveness, it transforms your ability to think about your failure, looking at it as an opportunity to grow.