Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church

The Bible's view of sexuality is grounded in the Gospel. The heart of sex is a reflection of the permanent, exclusive, covenant that God makes with all who are united to Christ by faith. The revolution of sex is the way the Gospel invariably pulls against parts of the dominant cultural narrative. The power of sex is its ability to either domineer and waste our energy in unfruitful ways – or to dee...

Discipleship Administrator Abrm McQuarters preached this sermon on James 5:7-12.

Elder Byron Johnson preached the sermon on Psalm 46:1-3.

One of the most significant and yet least-talked-about factors in every other controversial national issue right now is class. Whether James is addressing nonbelievers or believers, none of us is immune from the temptations to hoard, exploit, live self-indulgently, and participate in injustice. More important, Jesus frees us from the reasons we tend to seek wealth, which all inevitably backfire. H...

Few issues stir more passionate and politically charged debate than abortion. Job reminds us that suffering lies behind it, pushing Christians to respond in ways that demonstrate both grace and truth. The way of Jesus, we find, is characterized by handmade compassion, handmade redemption and handmade engagement in the political sphere. Ultimately, Christians must demonstrate our confidence in God...

Men and women have more in common than we have different, starting with the Gospel that saves us all by grace through faith. We also have differences created by God. How we exercise our differences in the church calls for much wisdom and discernment, deconstructing false interpretations as much as reconstructing faithful ones. Ultimately, every aspect of our unique identities are tools for loving...

The Christian faith makes exclusive truth claims, and so does every other view of the world. This fact raises several challenging problems, yet we find that the Bible's claims are both necessary and glorious, enabling Christians to relate to the world in a humble, generous, teachable way.

The Gospel of Jesus compels Christians to engage in politics. At minimum, we must pray for all people, especially our political leaders. This affects the peace of society, and the way Christians live together in it. Both of these realities play an important role in how God saves and sanctifies people. And while first-century Christians had no influence over who their political leaders were, twenty...

God wants you to know that you are okay, you can change, and you will be everything you were made to be, all because of Jesus.

Misdirected desires can cause anxiety, but gazing at Jesus can change us. We can have confidence in God’s plan, even when we suffer. This confidence comes when our greatest desire is intimate relationship with God. God invites us to seek him and wrestle with Him. When we wait for the Lord and believe God’s promises, we will have real hope and strength.

Christians’ ultimate hope is not going to heaven, but heaven coming to us. Peter explains why this “new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells” (v. 13) has not arrived yet, why the world must be refined by fire, and how we are to live while we wait. Other parts of scripture reassure us that those who have died in faith are present with Jesus now in the “intermediate state,” but even t...

Former Westside attender Michael Gregory, now planting a church in Los Angeles, shared this message from Psalm 17.

Covid-19 (and many other circumstances) leave us feeling small and childlike. Our tendency is to want to despise feelings of smallness and to move toward places of competency, achievement, and status. But Jesus shows his disciples that the only way into the kingdom of heaven is through childlikeness, and ultimately, it is also the only way to grow into maturity in his kingdom. Jesus himself has no...

The conversion of Saul was dramatic, but it illustrates three universal features of believing in Jesus. Whether we are trusting him for the first time or the millionth, we must experience these three “flashes”: recognizing ourselves, confronting the person of Jesus, and learning dependence. As we do, Jesus transforms us from self-blind, self-righteous law-chasers to self-aware, humble, curious peo...

Luke’s account of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearance on Easter Sunday evening demonstrates the complex nature of faith. Rather than giving us a simple factoid to believe or reject, Jesus invites us into a whole-person process of coming to accept reality and living into it. This process includes at least six stages: Evidence, Personal trust, an Opened Mind, a Story, a Role to Play, and Power. Toge...

Jesus’ question to Mary Magdalene gently challenges her to align her internal sense of reality with the new reality of his resurrection. The Gospels bear witness to this claim in a way that’s uniquely persuasive. Because Jesus ascended to the Father, he has inaugurated the Kingdom of God – the new world where Cosmic Spring is always breaking through until he returns. And because he calls us “broth...

Tomo Ito, our soon-to-be-graduated seminarian and volunteer coordinator, preached this powerful message connecting Abraham's offering of Isaac on Mount Moriah with God the Father's offering of Jesus on Good Friday.

Jesus’ question in v. 12 invites us to consider why he washed his disciples’ feet. We can discern at least three reasons: First and most obviously, so we will wash each others’ feet in humble acts of service. Right now, doing this wisely requires creativity! Second and most importantly, so we will know our own need to be spiritually cleansed by faith in Jesus’ finished work on the cross. As Peter...

Following Jesus creates temporary division until he brings permanent peace. Jesus was separated through a baptism of fire so that we could be Included through a baptism of water. Ultimately, Jesus divides humanity into those who are united to him by faith and those who aren’t. Counterintuitively, this positions Christians to be “us-for-them,” or even “us-for-those-who-are-against-us.” Through the...

Jesus' parable about a persistent widow is not about bugging God till he begrudgingly gives us what we want. It's about praying when we feel helpless, binding us to the heart of God, and liberating us both to cry out to him and to join him in his redeeming work.

Every "desert" season of uncertainty is ultimately a test of our trust in the Lord. This short homily was preached in our first-ever only-livestream worship service, in response to the worldwide pandemic of the coronavirus COVID-19.

When Jesus heals people, it’s always about more than healing. The simple question that punctuates this scene – Who touched me? – reveals his compassion for both the hurting and the hurried. More than healing the bleeding woman, Jesus’ words affirm the value of her faith, and confirm her peace with God, and signal to the town that she is no longer to be treated like an outcast. Jesus calls her “Dau...

Jesus knows that it can be hard for us to trust him, just like people did when John the Baptist got thrown in prison. On top of that, every generation or age has its own unique distortions of reality, bullying dissenters while blind to its own contradictions. To help us navigate these challenges, Jesus gives us two simple, interlocking tests: 1) Is there consistency between how a person lives and...

After hundreds of years of persistent unfaithfulness to God, the Israelites were finally reaping the consequences of their actions—exile is imminent. Even so, the Lord did not abandon his people, but redeemed them and pursued them. He does the same with us: we are betraying him every time we sin, but he keeps loving us anyway. Because God’s heart for his people is unchanging, we never have to wond...

Elijah’s moment of despair illustrates how God relates to us when we do the right thing but things still go wrong. He does not rebuke Elijah but leads him with gentleness and compassion, ministering to Elijah’s physical exhaustion with sleep and bread and water. And when Elijah begins to doubt the effectiveness of God’s Word, God gives him a special manifestation of his word in the form of a “low...