2008 Lenten Study/Discussion & Sermon Series
Forgiving is a very important part of everyone’s life. When we fail to do it well, we are the ones who suffer the most. Forgiving is a complex, sometimes confusing, art; there are many misconceptions about it that need to be overcome, and practical steps can be mastered better each time we need to forgive.
This Lent we’ll be focusing on forgiveness with both a church-wide study and a sermon series. Keith Thompson will lead the study/discussion, and Claire Childress will preach most of the sermons in the series. We are using Lewis Smedes’ book, The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive and Don’t Know How, for our study.
There will be two identical sessions during each of the six weeks of Lent (beginning the week of February 11) on Monday evenings, 7:00-8:30 pm, and Thursday afternoons, 1:00-2:30 pm, both in the Parlor. The book ($11.00, not required) and the syllabus for the study will be available Sundays after worship and weekdays in the office.
Among the false notions that Smedes clears up in this book are “that if we forgive someone we are virtually inviting him to wallop us again. Or that if we forgive what he did we are implying that what happened was not all that bad. Or that if we forgive someone for doing us wrong we are exempting him from the demands of justice. Or that if we forgive we are expected to go back into the old relationship that he ruined.” Smedes says that forgiveness is perhaps the most neglected of the healing arts. He covers an amazing number of practical topics in this relatively short text. He says that to do the healing of forgiveness well, “we need to know: what makes it work, why we do it, what to forgive and what not to forgive, how to know when the time is ripe, whether to resume a relationship again after forgiving, whether to tell the person we forgive that we’ve done it, and above all, how to do it right.”
Plan now to come!