Romans 10;10. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

We misunderstand the heart here. It means the CORE of your being. It’s not emotional or physical. The inner you. Your programming.

There can be genetic predispositions, but your cells are not what governs your life. You can end up in a victim mentality if you think you are controlled like that. Your cells actually respond to YOU! How you view life. So it’s possible to say, ‘You can have a change in your life’ without even necessarily a change in your circumstances.

Your belief systems are in place by the age of eight. How many things were formed in you in your most formative years? Whether you’re optimistic or stingy or funny or intense or insecure, structured, how you view other ethnicities, or authority – are determined up to age 8 – unless we challenge them.

Some people come to your church first time and hate it. They let you know what they didn’t like. The person who sat in the next chair loved it. That has nothing to do with us, its to do with the belief system with those people came in with. In our nation people don’t have the church-going culture some other nations have.

The way people enter our buildings is not governed today – is not about today. The things I like and don’t like came in with me. You will find evidence to underline what you thought, real or imagined.

God loves you, and everyone else has a great plan for your life.

People are unwilling to adapt, because our ways, our styles are sacred and it’s become all about us, and we’ve made things really matter to us that don’t matter at all to God. And that limits the amount of people we can reach.

cf the 1950s, 12 million Painting by numbers sets were sold. It was massive! But people were not necessarily creative, because someone told them, ‘this number must be orange.’

Jesus questioned the status quo of ‘Why is 8 always orange?’ He’s still doing this. Most things can be reinvented BETTER. But you’ll lose some people if you put yellow in 8…

Proverbs tells us about a stingy man who appears to be generous, but on the inside he’s not generous. A stingy man is eager to get rich and is unaware that poverty awaits him.

Because in his heart he has a fundamental system that s not in line with his head. You can change your mind many times, but changing your belief system is different.

Do we really mean it when we pray that broken people will come along. Do we mean it? We show that when they turn up?

We don’t want to deal with the smelly fish.
We want to clean the fish before we catch them. Or to clean themselves first.
We have assumed that faith and belief are the same thing – they are not.
Faith is the manifestation of what you’re believing for.

We have all heard the name and claim it version of faith, yet many of those who subscribe to it have broken lives and are broke. You can’t have faith for something you have a flawed belief system about.

Rather than diet again and again, change your belief about food.
What was the thought about race, about money, about food – from 0 to 8, in your background, growing up.

You can be told in many ways that God loves you, but if you don’t know that IN YOUR HEART…You can only know the love that you believe in.

Your subconscious mind is running all kinds of things in you without cognitive thought. Your inner core of believing is fixed – for good reason. It can be changed just like that. Like a church culture can’t be changed by going to one conference and copying someone else. We try to bolt new things onto old things that haven’t been tackled and it doesn’t work.

Peter had three years 24/7 with Jesus and yet on many levels didn’t get it. We shouldn’t assume that we do. Then when Jesus is gone, he’s standing and preaching like he gets it. As he’s speaking though from Joel about the promise being for everyone, he has a problem with Gentiles. He remained so fixed on this Paul that had to confront him on it. He doesn’t socialise with non-jews. It’s there from his youth! Paul understood that Peter had an inclusive theology but an exclusive practise. We can have the language of reaching all, and kid ourselves.

God had to tell him over and over, ‘Don’t call anyone i love unclean.’ Has to take him to the enemy’s house! Then he says, ‘I NOW realise…that God does not show favouritism..’

NOW? You were three years with Jesus!

He had been exclusive all that time because he had faith for exclusive love, but not belief for it. In the 1940s there was a Hollywood boulevard restaurant/club called the Magic Castle. Magicians from all over the world. They had a great Cary Grant lookalike on the door. Nobody knew… it was really him. He was going out with a someone there.

People walked right past him because they didn’t expect to see him THERE. He was there but nobody saw him/ asked for his autograph. Their belief system didn’t allow them to see him.

Jesus was the Cary Grant of his day… they didn’t expect God to be there and then where he was/ who he was.

We can be seeking the breakthrough and not know it’s THERE!

The church were fervently praying for Peter to be released, AS he was knocking on their door! 2 Lessons?

God will never open for you what you can do for yourself.
It’s such a big thing (for us) we thin, ‘God can’t have answered THAT easily.’

Only 2 in 3 million of the children of Israel were able to change their slave mindset and possess the land. They preferred the comfort of bondage.

Changing your MIND is not enough, change, ‘WHY do we think like that?’