SGBA Ladies' Retreat

This weekend the Sovereign Grace Baptist Association Ladies' Retreat was held at our church. What a wonderful experience! Our speaker was Carol Trahan. I highly recommend her to any other ladies seeking a godly speaker for such an event. Her testimony is truly a "life message," her term for the results of experiencing trials at the hand of God. Her speech is laced with scripture continually. Her day job is science teacher in a Christian high school in Wisconsin though she describes her science class as "more of a Bible class" because she applies principles of science to the students' lives.

Carol spoke to us about brokenness, forgiveness and suffering. As I reflect on the messages she gave, I thought there were some tidbits that were worth repeating. Among the many interesting things she shared were:

Regarding brokenness...
Without being broken, a horse is a wild, unusable beast, the fragrance from Mary's bottle of perfume could not have filled the room, and the little boy's lunch would have fed only himself rather than a crowd.

Regarding forgiveness...
We are never more like Jesus than when we forgive. The Bible does not say that God 'forgets' sin; He is omniscient and chooses not to remember. "When Satan brings up your past, remind him of his future." (She said this is not to be irreverent for we are commanded not to speak of what we don't know, but we can quote Scripture to Satan.)

Regarding suffering:
Sufferring is part of God's curriculum. She quoted Elisabeth Elliot's definition of sufferring: "Sufering is wanting something you don't have or not wanting something you do have." As Americans we immediately ask, "Why me?" when trials come. We question God's wisdom and His love for us, but God chastens those He loves. When we are sufferring, we need to go straight to Jesus as Mary and Martha did when Lazarus was sick with the attitude that they had in their message, "...the one whom you love is sick."

I could go on and on, but I don't want to be up all night. If you want to hear her messages, they were recorded and copies are being kept in the church library. I shall have to find out if they will be uploaded to SermonAudio as Pastor's messages are.