Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church

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...

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When our relationship with God goes sideways, God pursues us to repair it. In the 8th century BC, God sent the prophet Micah to Israelites who had grown spiritually complacent, economically corrupt and socially unjust. Micah’s “covenant lawsuit” called them to clear the air, review the facts, stop bargaining, and sync with the heart of God.

The book of Job is not just about why bad things happen to good people, but about how to trust God in a world where all kinds of things happen that we don’t understand. By asking Job dozens of questions, God presses Job to recognize the natural limits of his own understanding and the necessity of trusting him. Yet instead of making Job smaller, this dependence actually expands his dignity and his...

The strange story of Balaam illustrates four vital principles for how those who trust in God should relate to those who don’t: 1) People change people. For good or ill, the people we spend the most time around will inevitably shape our perception of what is possible, desirable or good. 2) If you belong to Jesus, you are blessed – but only because of grace. Balaam’s prophecies and their fulfillment...

God asks Moses, “Who made your mouth?” to shift his focus from his own limited self-knowledge to God’s own powerful knowing. And so we also see that God knows our story, because he’s the one writing it. We see that God knows our capacity, because he made us and is with us. And we see that God knows our frame, because he is does not leave us alone. All this is only possible because of Jesus, the Gr...

The first question God asks humanity is still the central question for all of us: Where are you? – that is, Where are you in relation to God? To help us answer it, God asks three more questions. The second, Who told you that you were naked? invites us to consider what other voices we are listening to to define reality, other than God’s? We can never silence those voices, but we can pursue habits a...

The incarnation of Jesus transforms our experience of Given Family, adopts us into his Eternal Family, and challenges us to build an ever-changing Pilgrim Family along the way. Your Given Family is the family you grew up in, whether biological, adopted or otherwise. Your Forever Family is the family of God, into which you were adopted through faith in Jesus, and with whom you will spend eternity....

Christians should enjoy stuff more than anyone else in the world, because Jesus shows us the heart of the One who made it all. At the same time, we should distrust stuff more than anyone else, because Jesus showed us what our hearts are capable of doing with it. We enjoy stuff by receiving it as an undeserved gift from the God who made it and by sharing it with others who don’t deserve it, either....

Your body is very good because God made it, Jesus has one, and the Holy Spirit lives there. It’s easy for us to live under a spiritualized worldview—like it’s only the spiritual things that are really good and important to God. But since he is the Good Creator, all of creation, all of this physical stuff, is infused with his goodness. Even though that goodness is damaged by sin, God still cares ab...

What distinguishes the true Gospel from false gospels, and faithful messengers from false prophets, is the cross of Jesus. Just as Paul bears the “marks of Jesus” (v. 17) in the scars on his physical body, so Christians today ought to bear evidence of the death-and-resurrection pattern in our lives. Two ways to uncover the real patterns in our lives are to ask: Whose opinions matter most to us? an...

Believers saved by grace through faith in Jesus have the power of the Holy Spirit to help us grow in actively bearing each others’ burdens. Because God has ordered the world so that we generally “reap what we sow,” he challenges us in at least three specific ways: 1. You should make a habit of helping people carry their burdens, no matter who they are or what they believe, but the category of peop...

Christians justified by faith in Jesus are no longer under the burden of law-keeping, but we are called to fulfill the “law of Christ” – that is, to love one another the way Jesus loves us. To do this, we must recognize the difference between a burden (v. 2) and a load (v. 4). A burden is too heavy to carry alone, whereas a load is a reasonable personal responsibility that must be carried alone. L...

The Christian life is a fight between the desires of what Paul calls the “flesh,” or the sinful nature, and the desires of the Spirit. The desires of the flesh automatically produce ugly “works,” like fungus, that dominate and divide us. The desires of the Spirit, on the other hand, draw out beautiful fruits of character that pull people together in relationship. If you are a Christian, the Spirit...