Tim Challies had a great blog post about forgiveness. It was birthed out of an incident in his own life where he had to ask for forgiveness. I found it very helpful for me and as I work on it in my life, perhaps the Lord will let it become the norm in our faith family.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.challies.com/christian-living/lessons-in-forgiveness#more

Just Do It

Just apologize. Don’t let the sun go down on your anger. Don’t let bitterness take root. Forgive as you have been forgiven. Don’t let pride sever your relationships. If there is anything that will keep you from apologizing, it is pride. Your pride will rebel against humbling yourself before God and before other people. Don’t trust your pride. Just apologize. If you’re anything like me, you won’t ever lack for opportunities to practice apologizing. As times goes on it may not get any easier or any less humbling, but it will become something you do sincerely and out of a desire to please God and to honor people created in his image.

Ask for Forgiveness

It is easy enough to say, “I’m sorry, ” but far more difficult to ask, “Do you forgive me?” Asking forgiveness allows both you and the offend party to understand that you are not merely seeking to salve your conscience by apologizing, but that you are seeking true reconciliation. Forgiveness is something that needs to be both given and received. Actually asking for forgiveness invites the person you have offended to extend forgiveness to you.

Don’t Rationalize Your Sin

I try to teach my children that an apology does not include the words but or if. We do not say, “I’m sorry if I offended you.” We do not say, “I’m sorry I did it, but if you hadn’t…” We apologize sincerely and from the heart (or we try, anyway). If we cannot apologize without rationalizing our own sin, we are not truly apologizing. It is a good discipline to examine your heart before attempting to make a true and sincere apology. Do not allow yourself to make an apology that is actually an attempt to rationalize the wrongs you’ve committed. Rather, apologize sincerely and apologize from the heart, not as an attempt to clear your own record but as a step of love and obedience.

Learn to Forgive

And finally, learn how to extend forgiveness. As difficult as I find it to be the one asking forgiveness, I often find it even more difficult and awkward to be on the giving end of forgiveness. You may well feel the same. Far too often, when someone apologizes to me, I am embarrassed and inadvertently excuse that person’s sin. “That’s okay! It didn’t bother me…” I may reply. But it is not okay; sin is never okay. Learn how to forgive!

The Lord has been gracious in helping me overcome sin, but plenty remains. I am still a committed sinner. And this makes me all the more grateful that God is more committed to forgiveness than I am to sin.

I am reading a book by Carl F. Ellis Jr. titled “Free at Last?”. It is about the gospel in the African-American Experience. Carl Ellis is president of Project Joseph, a ministry dedicated to the reformation and renewal of the church. He also serves as director of development for Oxford Graduate School in Crystal Springs, Tennessee. I found this quote from the book very helpful and insightful. Very few people I am around are actively and intentionally racist. The vast majority of the discrimination I see in our ministry is the kind Harold Baron speaks of – it is just a part of a “prestructured choice”. To avoid the natural flow of hatred that is the calling card of those born of the seed of the devil we must actively engage in a non-conforming kind of love that will put us largely out of step with society – BUT that should be no surprise when we consider that we are in a different family – the family of God – whose calling card or defining mark is love (John 13:35).

“Maintenance of the basic racial controls is now less dependent upon specific discriminatory decisions and acts. Such behavior has become so well institutionalized that the individual generally does not have to exercise a choice to operate in a racist manner. The rules and procedures of the large organizations have already prestructured the choice. The individual only has to conform to the operating norms of the organization, and the institution will do the discrimination for him.” Harold M. Baron “The Web of Urban Racism”

Sickness is meant…

1. To make us think—to remind us that we have a soul as well as a body—an immortal soul—a soul that will live forever in happiness or in misery—and that if this soul is not saved we had better never have been born.

2. To teach us that there is a world beyond the grave—and that the world we now live in is only a training-place for another dwelling, where there will be no decay, no sorrow, no tears, no misery, and no sin.

3. To make us look at our past lives honestly, fairly, and conscientiously. Am I ready for my great change if I should not get better? Do I repent truly of my sins? Are my sins forgiven and washed away in Christ’s blood? Am I prepared to meet God?

4. To make us see the emptiness of the world and its utter inability to satisfy the highest and deepest needs of the soul.

5. To send us to our Bibles. That blessed Book, in the days of health, is too often left on the shelf, becomes the safest place in which to put a bank-note, and is never opened from January to December. But sickness often brings it down from the shelf and throws new light on its pages.

6. To make us pray. Too many, I fear, never pray at all, or they only rattle over a few hurried words morning and evening without thinking what they do. But prayer often becomes a reality when the valley of the shadow of death is in sight.

7. To make us repent and break off our sins. If we will not hear the voice of mercies, God sometimes makes us “hear the rod.”

8. To draw us to Christ. Naturally we do not see the full value of that blessed Savior. We secretly imagine that our prayers, good deeds, and sacrament-receiving will save our souls. But when flesh begins to fail, the absolute necessity of a Redeemer, a Mediator, and an Advocate with the Father, stands out before men’s eyes like fire, and makes them understand those words, “Simply to Your cross I cling,” as they never did before. Sickness has done this for many—they have found Christ in the sick room.

9. To make us feeling and sympathizing towards others. By nature we are all far below our blessed Master’s example, who had not only a hand to help all, but a heart to feel for all. None, I suspect, are so unable to sympathize as those who have never had trouble themselves—and none are so able to feel as those who have drunk most deeply the cup of pain and sorrow.

Summary: Beware of fretting, murmuring, complaining, and giving way to an impatient spirit. Regard your sickness as a blessing in disguise – a good and not an evil – a friend and not an enemy. No doubt we should all prefer to learn spiritual lessons in the school of ease and not under the rod. But rest assured that God knows better than we do how to teach us. The light of the last day will show you that there was a meaning and a “need be” in all your bodily ailments. The lessons that we learn on a sick-bed, when we are shut out from the world, are often lessons which we should never learn elsewhere.

~ J.C. Ryle

Dr. Jim Hamilton, the guest teacher the past two weeks at Preacher School, wrote a good article about sports. I’m having my kids all read it and plan to forward it on to teams I coach.

Hope it is a blessing to you.

Better to Honor God Than to Win

by JMHon March 8, 2011in Bible and Theology, Discipleship

Here’s the guest post I was invited to contribute to the Family Ministry Today blog:

I love basketball and baseball. I love leaving it all on the court. I love the exhilaration of teamwork, the ball off the sweet spot, the basketball whispering through the net, the discipline to play defense, after-practice ground balls (or free throws), staying in the hitting cage until the hands bleed or the coach can’t throw anymore or the daylight is gone. And I love to win.

These things aren’t on the surface for me. They’re in me bone deep because they’re all wound up with my relationship with my dad. Growing up, my dad was my hero. He was also the high school basketball coach, and I think he worked (and works) harder than anyone else I know. My dad loved me and made sacrifices for me, and I wanted to please him. The best way to do that, I thought, was to lead the team my dad coached to the state championship. At some point, I think 8th grade, I promised I would do it: I told my dad that we would face Corliss Williamson’s Russellville Cyclones in the State Championship, and that we would win.

I failed. We weren’t even close. We didn’t even get to play in the state tournament my senior year. My mom was a great comfort in those days, and she had long been planting seeds, saying things like “basketball isn’t everything.” One day those seeds would bear fruit.

I’m sad to say that along the way I adopted an “anything-to-win” mindset. Thankfully, there were lines that I couldn’t cross, lines that have been obliterated at every level in recent years. Lines that only need the name Barry Bonds mentioned for you to know what I’m talking about.

I failed my dad, but even in failing to win that state championship, he knew I loved him. I said it with words. He heard it more clearly spoken by all those summer days in the gym doing dribble drills, shooting more shots than I could count (counting a bunch of them trying to track shooting percentage—I had this big chart on the wall in my room), running the stairs, working out in strength shoes, doing everything I possibly could to improve. I’d seen my dad work, and I did my best to follow in his footsteps.

One afternoon the summer before last my sons and I were playing wiffle-ball in the backyard with the kid who lives next door. Something happened that triggered a realization in my mind. Seeds planted by my mother, watered by the word of God, suddenly sprouted, pushing up through the soil of my thinking. I don’t remember if the game had ended and my son was on the losing side or if it was just a tight play that went against him, but he threw a fit like the world had ended and all was lost. I recognized the sentiments and the behavior, and I could tell you worse stories about my own actions when I was 15 not 5, things that took place in settings more significant than the backyard. Suddenly I knew, I think for the first time, what my behavior had implied, and what my son’s showed in that moment.

All at once I realized that the antics were announcing that the most important thing in the world was performance and the outcome of this silly game. As I took my son in my arms that afternoon, a phrase came to my lips that expressed something I should have known long before: it’s more important to honor God than to win.

If athletics are going to be anything other than a training ground for thuggery, athletes have to know that it’s more important to honor God than to win. For kids to accept the bodies they’ve been given and refuse performance-enhancing drugs, they have to know that it’s more important to honor God than to win. For us to be able to honor our opponents whether we win or lose, we have to know that it’s more important to honor God than to win. For sports and competition to bring out the best—rather than the worst—in us, we have to go at it like it’s more important to honor God than to win.

It’s more important to honor God than to win. If I love my dad by giving it all I’ve got, but I dishonor God along the way, all I’m left with is an emotional connection to idolatry—and the idol of sports and the relationships associated with it will let us down every time. But if I seek to honor my father and mother because I’m seeking to honor God, the emotional connection is not empty and hollow but solid and everlasting in its shared experience of the two great commandments. We love God by loving people, by playing hard, by soaking ourselves with sweat and disregarding screaming lungs and skinned knees and reaching, striving, straining, winning or losing, for the praise of the one who is worthy.

The great goal of competition is not, therefore, victory. No, victory must be redefined as winning or losing (with all our might) in a way that honors God, because it’s better to honor God than to win.

Come to worship this Lord’s Day, February 19th and hear the Apostle Paul’s answer to this question as he writes to the Corinthians in chapter 8. I am looking forward to worshipping together with you.

Please plan on joining us for worship this Sunday. I can not remember a passage that has been as difficult as 1 Corinthians 7 and yet has yielded as much practical food for my soul and what I believe will be much benefit for our faith family. Pray that we will get all that God has for us out of this passage.

Also – at 6:00 tomorrow night is an important prayer time and men’s advisory meeting.

Then at 7:30 is the first of two teaching sessions by Jim Hamilton on Skull Crushing Seed of the Woman. You will benefit tremendously by coming.

Please join me in prayer for the success of the programs in Indianapolis aiming at rescuing those caught in the sex slave trade.
Sex trafficking and the Super Bowl

By Ann Oestreich

On the Catholic liturgical calendar, February 5 is the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time. In the U.S., where professional football is sometimes referred to as a “religion,” February 5th is the highest holy day of the sporting year: Super Bowl Sunday.
The Super Bowl attracts tens of thousands of fans to the host city, and millions of television viewers, making it the most watched broadcast each year. But it also attracts a sector of violent, organized criminal activity that operates in plain sight without notice: human sex trafficking.
Human trafficking is defined by the United Nations as the “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of threat, use of force or other forms of coercion, for the purpose of exploitation.” Sex trafficking is particularly heinous: Young women are abducted and sold into an underworld network where they are forced to engage in sexual activity for no pay, and from which it is extremely difficult to escape.
There is evidence that human trafficking increases where major sporting events are held.

Exact numbers are hard to come by, as trafficking is an underreported crime, but host cities, law enforcement, and civil society are becoming increasingly more aware of it. They are promoting educational campaigns and strengthening laws against trafficking to send a strong message to traffickers: You are not welcome here. If we find you, you will be prosecuted. There is a message for trafficking victims as well: If we find you, you will not be arrested; you will be rescued.
In preparation for Super Bowl LXVI in Indianapolis, 11 congregations of Catholic women joined the fight against human trafficking in a unique way: They decided to use their investments as a means to address human trafficking with Indianapolis area hotels. These 11 congregations belong to CCRIM, the Coalition for Corporate Responsibility in Indiana and Michigan.

CCRIM members bought shares of stock in major hotel chains in order to address the issue of trafficking as shareholders with hotel corporate management, as well as with the local franchises in the Indianapolis area. As shareholders they have a stake in how the business is run, and they decided to work with the hotels to help them recognize and report any incidents of human trafficking.

The sisters set up a database of 220 hotels within a 50-mile radius of Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis. On January 5, the managers of these hotels received a fax from CCRIM that said, your shareholders want to know: Have your staff members been trained to recognize the signs of human trafficking? Do you have plans in place so your staff members can safely report any trafficking incidents? Do you know who to contact in the Indianapolis area in order to protect the victims and prosecute the traffickers? Would you be willing to make educational materials on trafficking available to your staff and your guests?

For the next 10 days, 40 sisters called the managers to get answers to those questions. Although 20 managers were reluctant or refused to speak to them, they did speak with 200 hotel managers. The results? Seven hotels requested help in setting up a training session, and the sisters linked them to trainers.

Forty-five hotels already had conducted training for their staff members. Ninety-nine hotels asked for the local contact list, which includes the Attorney General’s Office, the Indianapolis police department’s Anti-Trafficking Division, safe houses for victims and 24-hour hotline numbers.

They also asked for informational brochures, provided by the Polaris Project (an initiative of the Department of Health and Human Services) to help their staff and guests recognize the signs of human trafficking. The sisters delivered this information to each manager personally and thanked them for their cooperation in stemming the tide of trafficking at this year’s Super Bowl.

Eleven congregations joined together in prayer and action against human trafficking. Eleven congregations, 200 hotels, and state government officials all worked together to educate themselves and others about a crime that depends on ignorance in order to continue. Together they hope their efforts will “shine a light” on human trafficking and reduce its numbers to a bare minimum during the Super Bowl and beyond.

They hope that Super Bowl Sunday can be a celebration without exploitation. And they hope many others also will view human trafficking as the tragic injustice that it is and feel compelled to take action to end it.
Ann Oestreich, is co-chair of CCRIM and organizer of the Super Bowl Anti-Trafficking Initiative. She serves as congregation justice coordinator for the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Notre Dame, IN

6 Ways You Can Fight Human Trafficking
1.Get informed and inform others. A recommended reading list can be found here.
2.Read Rid of My Disgrace to learn about the effects of sexual assault and sex trafficking and the hope and healing for victims found in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
3.Support organizations fighting trafficking:
International Justice Mission
Not For Sale
Unearthed Pictures
Abolition International
4.Get involved
5.Be an informed consumer
6.Join a local or state anti-trafficking group

http://theresurgence.com/2012/02/02/sex-trafficking-at-the-super-bowl?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheResurgence+%28The+Resurgence%29

This is a helpful article giving some things to do in relationship to sex trafficking

http://theresurgence.com/2012/02/02/sex-trafficking-at-the-super-bowl?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheResurgence+%28The+Resurgence%29