Congregational Letter about March 30

March 19, 2008
Dear Christ Community Church Family,

One year ago we spent 2 months as a church asking God to:
· Secure us in His love

· Guide us in our role in sacrificing to build a facility

It was a highlight time for many of us. I don’t think we have ever been tighter as a community. Our Father enabled us to trust Him and pledge to give $1.2 million during a 3-year commitment from April 2007 to April 2010. As encouraging as that was, the 78% participation rate, was my most personally encouraging number. We were all stunned and overjoyed!

During the first year of our “above tithe” giving to Journey of Faith, God and you have been faithful and we have corporately given $485,000. This has radically and positively affected the amount of money that we are in need of borrowing to begin construction. Thank you!! And praise God!

Not only has there been tremendous progress toward building from a financial standpoint but also a great deal has been accomplished in other areas during the last few months. Our building plans have received final approval from Alachua County, our general contractor has begun receiving bids from several sub-contractors, and the loan-seeking progress is reaching a conclusion. All of this is possible because of your faith and continued response.

We have much to give thanks for and celebrate. God has been good to us.

I want to make certain that you are aware of what is happening on Sunday, March 30^th.

Both the 9:00 & 10:45 worship services will include:

· Children of CCC coming forward to formally give the money they’ve been collecting all year

· Re-commitments from all who made initial commitments in 2007

· New commitments from all who are newer to Christ Community Church

Enclosed is one pledge card that will serve all of us. Some will use one side to make a re-commitment and some will use the other side to make a 1^st time commitment.

Also, during our “Live Together Time” between services, we will be enjoying a Micro Fiesta complete with cake, punch, and piñatas for the children. This is a wonderful day to bring friends along to help give them a sense of what Christ is doing in our midst. There will also be artist’s renderings and floor plans of the new facilities on display.

Grace to you,
Rob

Packer & SmartyPants notions of substitutionary atonement

It is impossible to focus the atonement properly until the biblical mode of Trinitarian and incarnational thought about Jesus Christ is embraced. The Trinitarian principle is that the three distinct persons within the divine unity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, always work inseparably together, as in creation, so in providence and in every aspect of the work of redemption. The incarnational principle is that when the Son took to himself all the powers and capacities for experience that belong to human nature, and began to live through his human body, mind, and identity, his sense of being the Father’s Son was unaffected, and he knew and did his Father’s will, aided by the Spirit, at all times. It was with his own will and his own love mirroring the Father’s, therefore, that he took the place of human sinners exposed to divine judgment and laid down his life as a sacrifice for them, entering fully into the state and experience of death that was due to them. Then he rose from death to reign by the Father’s appointment in the kingdom of God. From his throne he sent the Spirit to induce faith in himself and in the saving work he had done, to communicate forgiveness and pardon, justification and adoption, to the penitent, and to unite all believers to himself to share his risen life in foretaste of the full life of heaven that is to come. Since all this was planned by the holy Three in their eternal solidarity of mutual love, and since the Father’s central purpose in it all was and is to glorify and exalt the Son as Saviour and Head of a new humanity, smartypants notions like “divine child abuse”, as a comment on the cross, are supremely silly, and as irrelevant and wrong as they could possibly be. JI PACKER