• We celebrate and reflect on 50 years of God’s faithfulness to Covenant Presbyterian Church this Sunday. We hope you can join us for worship (10:30), followed by wonderful food and fellowship.
• Two reminders — please get your pledge cards in this week for the capital campaign. It’s more about the participation than the size of the gift, just as your presence in the Body of Christ is more important than your own estimation of your gifts and contribution. The fact that we need you is not established by the magnitude of your giftedness (or contribution), but by the fact that Christ has called you and placed you here.
• The second reminder is regarding Hannah’s wedding on June 1. We’d love to have you join us. You can RSVP at irwinlutzwedding@gmail.com. It would be very helpful to us if you could do so in the next 10 days. Thanks!
• A few compelling quotes, the first is context for my quote in last week’s sermon on evil and the human heart, and the tendency in fundamentalism to think evil is external to ourselves and so godliness is the same as isolation. This is Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, “ If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us, and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by evil and sometimes it shifts to allow space for good to flourish.”
• Comfort and relative prosperity allow us to wander from God. This is Charles Bridges (1794-1869) urging us back: “Let our confidence in God be uniform. In all thy ways acknowledge him (Proverbs 3:6). Take one step at a time, every step under divine warrant and direction. Ever plan for yourself in simple dependence on God. It is nothing less than self-idolatry to conceive that we can carry on even the ordinary matters of the day without his counsel. He loves to be consulted. Therefore take all thy difficulties to be resolved by him. Be in the habit of going to him in the first place— before self-will, self-pleasing, self-wisdom, human friends, convenience, expediency. Before any of these have been consulted go to God at once. Consider no circumstances too clear to need his direction. In all thy ways, small as well as great; in all thy concerns, personal or relative, temporal or eternal, let him be supreme.”