Hope you are all enjoying this week! Please see below for a few class announcements and for Danny Giffen's Covenant Chronicles. Thanks!
PRAYER REQUESTS:
1- Pray for Rushton and Derek as they are in China adopting Mei Sims. Also, pray for energy and stamina for Rushton's parents who are keeping Rushton's three children for the two weeks Rushton and Derek are gone!
2- continue to pray for Molly Ainsworth and her healing
3- pray for Caroline Woods sister and brother-in-law, Mary Catherine and Travis Pritchett, as they prepare to move to Dallas
4- praise for an amazing installation service for Bill Boyd
5- praise for the wonderful recovery of Ella Hicks
6- pray for Alan Spooner's mom who was having reconstructive surgery on Monday
7- continue to pray for Covenant and our transition
8- pray for Leslie Wood, Marne's sister-in-law in Moblie (Lanier Wood's wife), and her upcoming surgery to remove the cancerous tumor in her arm and back
LOGISTICS: In our quest to get to know each other better, we are looking for 'Fun Facts' about you and your spouse. Please send TWO interesting/fun facts for each; two for you and two for your spouse to cassietonsmeire@yahoo.com. We've already collected some great stuff!
BIRMINGHAM HOSPITALITY NETWORK, a message from Barbara Finch Thompson:
CPC we will be hosting the Birmingham Hospitality Network April 1-8. There will be sign up sheets t this Sunday. CPC hasn't hosted in 5 months so I pray everyone will remember this great ministry! If anyone in your class would like to contact me & sign up before Sunday, they can email me
(bfinch-Thompson@ebsco.com) or call me (999-0003).
COVENANT CHRONICLES by Danny Giffen:
What an exciting weekend we just completed! We pray you are as encouraged as we are in officially recognizing Rev. Bill Boyd as our Senior Pastor. It was a wonderful celebration and service led by Claude McRoberts (Trinity PCA, Montgomery), Wilson Benton (Kirk of the Hills, St. Louis & Christ Covenant, Nashville), Tom Cannon (Red Mountain), Murray Lee (Cahaba Park Church, PCA) and Jeremy Jones (Redeemer Pres, Memphis). Here's a picture of the laying on of hands by teaching and ruling elders of our denomination.
If you have been a part of my Wednesday lunch studies, you know that many of the books we are reading have some convicting pages. This week in our study, Leaving Egypt by Chuck DeGroat I read this which definitely left me in prayer and reflection:
"Let's face it, expediency has become epidemic. I find myself easily irritated when I have to wait, whether it's in traffic or at a stoplight or in a line at the grocery store. I'm frustrated by a YouTube video buffering, or when my cable goes out, or when there's no ATM nearby, or when my wife doesn’t quickly return a phone call. North American culture has institutionalized expediency. The quick and efficient has become an entitlement…Many of the struggles I see playing out in people's lives can be summed up as a failure to wait, to long, to grieve in the midst of the delay.
The Exodus story is predicated on waiting, and the Exodus story is our story too. It is the Christian story. We wait on a God who says, 'Just a little while longer…' And we're waiting not just for God to return, but we wait in the midst of extraordinary difficulties. Ask a woman who is infertile to 'wait a little longer' or to 'trust a bit more' and you witness an appropriate sense of injustice and rage. Ask someone who has cancer to be patient with God for a cure and you many get an angry glare. Tell a victim of abuse that healing will take a long time and they'll likely recoil with self-defeat and despair. In the midst of our pain, the small satisfaction of a golden calf often feels better than seemingly endless waiting…And while we're desperately seeking our own substitutes for security, God's Son, as the carpenter he was raised to be, is building a home for his restless and weary pilgrim children."
What's Happening?
1. Wednesday Night Interactive – Join us tonight at Bill Boyd will be teaching on Genesis 1-3, "Creation and Salvation". Dinner is at 5:30, with worship at 6:30.
2. Spring Forward – This Sunday we will be springing forward on the clocks…meaning we lose an hour of sleep. Set your alarms!
3. Spring Break – March 18th, due to Spring Break, we will have no Sunday School and one service at 10 a.m.
4. WTOP – Women's Time of Prayer, Join Ingram Link each Monday morning at 9:15 a.m. In the Parlor to pray for our church and each other.
5. Children's Musical – This Sunday at 5 p.m. In the Sanctuary our children will be sharing a musical they've been working on for months. The theme is the Armor of God. You will be blessed by their talent and rejoicing.
Theology 101
Forgiveness | Lent 15
MARCH 7, 2012 – chuck degroat
“Unless the fabric of our involvement with others is woven with the threads of forgiveness, love will suffer the corruption of denial, hardness, cynicism, and eventually hatred.” Dan Allender
+ + +
Forgiveness – it’s a significant part of Lent’s invitation to surrender, to relinquish control, to open our hands.
But it’s profoundly difficult. In our culture, forgiveness is trivialized. It’s seen as soft to the hardened conservative, convinced the enemy is outside of himself. It’s viewed as a simple behavioral choice by pop psychologists. It’s limited to a juridical decision among some Christians. Rarely, is it seen as the courageous and costly personal act that it is.
Ask an abuse victim to forgive her abuser, and she’ll feel as if she’s got to give up a part of herself to do it. Why should she? She’s given up enough.
Ask someone to forgive a debt, and he might respond, “He needs to take responsibility. Going around forgiving debts only breeds laziness and entitlement!”
While we often consider what forgiveness costs us, we seldom consider how our heart grows more spacious and free when we forgive. While we might consider forgiveness as something that somehow ‘frees’ the other, it actually frees us. When we withhold forgiveness, we choose to hold anger, cynicism, even judgment. We put ourselves in the unenviable position of being judge and jury.
Now, I get the resistance. Having withheld forgiveness, I know the palpable feeling of power I experienced holding within me the anger, the very real fantasies of revenge, the last vestiges of a self I managed to protect from the one who offended me. Forgiving meant giving up my self, I reasoned. It meant giving away my power, my fragile sense of control over a chaotic reality. Who’d be so idiotic?
I know how revenge can inhabit the body. It feels like a part of you that needs to be retained and held. One client said to me, “All I have over my abuser is my imagination. And in my imagination I exact my revenge.”
Forgiveness means slowly and steadily relinquishing this power. It’s not easy. It’s not sudden. If it can actually be called a ‘decision’, it’s one that you will feel utterly conflicted over.
As we forgive, we declare very courageously, “I release you from my need to exact revenge. I relinquish my futile attempt to overpower you, or humiliate you, or hurt you.”
As Dan Allender writes, “Forgiveness is the light that penetrates the dark and frees the somber, shamed heart to leap with love.”
And as our heart leaps, it also opens, albeit very slowly, to a new and spacious reality where we no longer need to be enslaved to our offender, and no longer need to be enslaved to ourselves.
The chains are broken, not by exacting revenge, but by relinquishing the need for it.
