Hi COTC Family,

This Sunday is a fifth Sunday of the month. As is our custom, in our corporate worship we’ll be devoting some time to prayers for healing. In addition to extended sung worship there will be the opportunity to pray for the restoration of our bodies, souls, relationships, families, and world, both by ourselves and with available pray-ers. This is one of the ways our community seeks to live out an expectation and hope in the Spirit’s active presence and movement among us - corporately we cry, “Spirit break out!” 

In his "Homily on the Paralytic" the early Christian preacher John Chrysostom points out that Jesus first forgives the sins of the stretchered man before healing him. Chrysostom makes the point that the forgiveness of sins is the more difficult and profound of the miracles that Jesus performed. It may not feel that way to us, but Chrysostom invites us to submit our priorities to the Lord's and receive first his healing of the "more dangerous disease" of our sin. 

From some pastoral visits, and even my own experience these past weeks, I have sense that many of us are concluding the first month of 2023 feeling hard pressed. Some of us are suffering, and many of us simply seem weighed down with the burdens of life. Showing my age, I’m reminded of Ben Harper’s lyric “everyone I know is in the fight of their lives,” perhaps a bit melodramatic! 

In all that we face I believe the invitation of Jesus, our tender healer, is to consider the reality of all that he has accomplished for us with the forgiveness of sin. This is the prior and greater work, preceding the provision and restoration we need for today. Knowing that Christ has accomplished this for us, we can approach him confident of his glorious power, confident he is able to touch and mend the broken places of our lives today. Remembering that in Christ we have been forgiven, be encouraged to come ready to offer up the areas of your life that need healing this Sunday, and expect to receive the grace of God. 

In Christ, 

Peter+

PS. Join us for our first COTC Essentials class this coming Sunday after worship! Sign up here.