The Pharisees pertain to a group of select laymen who are known to be experts in the Law or in the Torah. They created for them a subculture for Christianity where they excluded a lot of people in the process, even Jesus. The legalism of the Pharisees was an example of a strong but limiting unspoken conversation for that time.

Read Mark 7:1-8 and understand the limiting nature of unspoken conversations during the time of Jesus and the Pharisees.

The legalism of the Pharisees was due to the fact that they placed man-made traditions above the commandments of God. If they followed the Law of God to the letter, they would have placed their love and compassion for the sick and the poor above their adherence to religious tradition. Jesus told his disciples, “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body” (Mark 7:18-19).

We do not usually start unspoken conversations. We usually arrive long after they have begun. They are already ongoing. We tend to get swept up in them. We find ourselves believing things we never really thought through just because the conversation is already ongoing. We also do not see them as conversations, we only see them as the way the world is or how things are.

If you do not recognize or question unspoken conversations, you become vulnerable to being under its control. Awareness is the key. It empowers you to create the space wherein you can change “the way it is. Let me tell you this, you can change unspoken conversations.

You cannot change a conversation if you do not recognize it in the first place. You need to distinguish these unspoken conversations. Unspoken conversations limit you. They place you in a box. You bump into the edges of this so-called box when a new belief or idea is exposed to you. Anything that challenges your worldview disturbs you to the very core.

Recognize unspoken conversations and be aware of the power it holds over you, then you will be able to transform the context of this conversation and then change it. Sometimes this box we are in prevents us from hearing anything new. If you do hear it, you might even reject this information because it is “wrong.”

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