Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church

If your faith is in Christ, his Spirit has already made you a vital “body part” of his church: not only accepted, but honored, respected and needed. This is one of the sweetest fruits of the Gospel and one of the primary tools God uses to grow you in grace. Experiencing this reality, however, will cost you. The cost is commitment: not to the church as an organization, but to the actual people who...

Christians expect interpersonal conflict in the church and learn to work through it. Often it is fueled by deeper conflicts between groups within the community. All of us have preferences and “patrons” who represent our particular beliefs, but we must not allow them to encroach on the unifying centrality of the cross. Only Jesus was crucified for us, and we are baptized only in the name of the Fat...

Celebration is essential to community. Before we can work through conflict or strive together toward common goals, we must remind each other how fully God has already provided for us. Here Paul makes at least four celebratory “toasts”: We are already saints, we are never alone, we have everything we need, and we are living a good story.

Yo Soy Libre is not just a Spanish phrase meaning “I am free.” It’s a Christian declaration and motto. A motto for this new year that declares who we are because we’ve put our faith in God who through Jesus has made us free… free to love and free to live with confidence.

Rev. Michael Phillips kicked off our series on Transformative Community with this sermon from Hebrews 3 and 10. He is the Reformed University Fellowship campus minister at Georgia Tech.

The abundant life Jesus came to give is a life full of God, and God is full of abundance: Abundant grace, abundant resources, and abundant generosity. God's abundance does not insulate us from suffering, nor does it cancel it out. Instead, it enlarges our soul to experience life more fully in every respect, both now and in eternity.

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God became human to know what it’s like to be you. Physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, Jesus was (and is, although he’s ascended) a real, normal human being, just like us. Not only does he identify with us in our human-ness, he is not ashamed of us, and is proud to call us his little sisters and little brothers. Even more, he is able to help us no matter what we’re up against; beca...

Jesus came to make God known more than ever before. Christians tend to think we “know” all about God because we’ve heard a lot of Bible stories, especially the Christmas ones. John reminds us that we’ve still barely scratched the surface of who God is. The God who “tabernacled” among us in the glory of flesh comes to us full of grace and truth, which he pours out on us over and over again. We can...

Even in the promised land, God anticipated a world of both accidental and intentional violence. Mercifully, he provided cities of refuge as way to curtail vigilante justice while taking seriously the consequences of death by human hands. New covenant believers no longer live in a theocracy, but we can learn from it in the way we relate to others today. Jesus showed in Matthew 5:21-22 that both act...

God has given his people eyes to see and faith to walk. Often we prefer sight over faith, especially when there’s something hard we just got out of or are about to get into. Walking by sight energizes our individual preferences, even as it runs up against our trust in God. But God, being rich in mercy, has called the household of faith to walk together, having confidence in Him no matter what’s be...

The daughters of Zelophehad demonstrate that we can trust God with our future. Shattering the notion that women must always be responsive, their bold request came from deep faith that God would bring his people into the promised land. God’s affirmation of them and the statutes he enacted illustrate both the necessity and the weakness of laws. And their concern for land and a name speaks to our uni...

The bronze serpent is an unlikely symbol of grace. Like the ancient Israelites, we all have the same tragic impulse to resist dependence on God and choose the way that leads to death. But God had mercy on them, and ultimately, as Jesus explained in John 3:14-15, his “lifting up” onto the cross, and out of the tomb, and into heaven, would provide our permanent cure. Rather than always trying harder...

Everyone experiences exasperation; how you respond to it depends on your relationship to God. The people of Israel had a real need, but they blamed their human leaders instead of crying out to the Lord. Moses and Aaron initially did the right thing – falling on their faces in prayer – but ultimately they failed to “uphold the Lord as holy” (v. 12). Both leaders and followers fixated on human reali...

The Bible’s view of sin is dramatically different than the way most people think of it in our current cultural moment. Biblically, sin can be individual or communal, unintentional or defiant (“with a high hand” v. 30) – with many variations in between. Today’s “cancel culture” rightly identifies communal and unintentional sins, but fails to treat them differently, and also eliminates the possibili...

We all tend to “spy out” our future to predict what we think is possible or likely. Whatever we find, two questions determine how we will respond to it: a) What has God actually promised us? b) How might God expect us to participate in accomplishing it? When we answer these biblically, we experience our future as simultaneously more scary and more exciting than anything we could have dreamed up ou...

We all have areas in our lives where we aren’t content with what God has spoken and we wish we could speak for God. Miriam thought her own righteousness gave her a right to speak for God; Aaron thought the same with his gifting. The irony of this is that in trying to speak for God, we cut ourselves off from receiving what God wants to give us—himself. The good news is that God has already given hi...

Contrary to popular belief, God does sometimes give us more than we can handle. Two reasons he may do this are: a) so we will share our burdens with others, and b) so we will give up idolatrous cravings that will never satisfy us. Moses was right: The burden of leading the Israelites was too much for him. So, God put his Spirit on 70 elders to share Mose’s burden. And because the Israelites’ cravi...

Complaining is the worst way to deal with real hardships. It’s highly contagious, talks to everyone but God, idealizes the past, minimizes God’s present provision, and abdicates our ability to redeem the situation. In short, it breeds mistrust in God. Believers, however, have rich resources to resist complaining – starting with a better mediator than Moses: Jesus himself – who absorbed the wrath o...

God customizes his guidance to fit what he knows that we need. During the Israelites’ 40 years in the wilderness, God guided them with a supernatural manifestation of his presence as a fire-cloud over the tabernacle. Now that the Spirit of God lives within those who believe, he uses multiple means to guide us, including scripture, prayer and providence – all interpreted in community. Whatever the...

Aaron's stunning benediction reminds us that God's heart is to bless us. The blessings from his hand are positive circumstances of provision, protection and peace. The blessing of his face is his gracious presence with us, lit with delight and lifted in attention. Knowing how the two relate is essential to Christian growth, and the Gospel of Jesus is the key. When we seek first the blessing of his...

Satan is the deceiver, the accuser, and the tempter, but Jesus is our teacher, our defender, and our savior.

Busyness is a malaise that affects us all in different ways. Growing in this area of life is a group project that requires multiple sources of wisdom applied in community over a long period of time. At root, we need to see ourselves the way God sees us: as his beloved agents in the world.

Acts 15 doesn't tell us which denomination to join, but it does give us a melody we should hear in every church and denomination. The three main "chords" of this melody answer the questions: What are they guarding? Where do they appeal? and How do they decide? Ultimately every church should guard the unity that Jesus creates in the Gospel; we should submit our interpretations of tradition and expe...

Tribes can bind us together, but they can also blind us to the beauty of the Gospel. Judges 12 illustrates what happens when the normal human desire to belong warps into sinful self-protection and other-harming tribalism. We use “shibboleths” to actively or passively exclude people from our circle of trust. In today’s polarized climate, tribalism also cuts us off from learning ways that we may be...