Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church

When believing gets painful, Christians have a choice: Either let your heart get hardened, which is easy, or hold fast to your hope, which is hard. Thankfully, your heavenly calling was already secured for you by the Father, earned for you by the Son, and sustained for you by the Holy Spirit. This means you only have to “take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of you” (Philippians 3:12...

Jesus was made like us so that we could be made like him. The author of Hebrews reminds us, citing Psalm 8, that we were made to be kings and queens, ruling God’s world on his behalf. At present, however,  sin has made us slaves to the fear of death instead. To remedy this situation, Jesus had to become like us in every respect, forging bonds of shared understanding that help us to trust him. And...

God is speaking to you. Are you listening?  If Jesus is not supreme to you, something else will be. And you’re not paying close attention, the current will carry you away from him. But if Jesus is supreme to you, and if you are paying closer attention to what he has said, you can become an agent of his divine speech.

Elijah was considered the greatest of all the prophets. But despite all his victories, he still runs in fear into the wilderness to escape death, falling into a state of depression, and asking the LORD to take his life. Instead, God sent an angel to comfort and provide for him. This experience taught Elijah that God does not always show up in powerful events. Sometimes, it's in the small whispers.

The Old Testament law of tithing does not carry over neatly into tithing our income today—but it does illustrate that the heart of God is to include us in his generous feast of grace. The more we grasp his heart, the more we give away with more freedom and more joy. God's priorities for our giving start with ministries that support the worship of God's people, especially local churches, and also t...

To live ”not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” includes obeying God’s moral laws, but it never stops there. It also means trusting his commitment to bless us abundantly with literal food and every other material thing we need. Scripture is a feast that orients us to all of life: Who God is, who we are, why we are here, and where it’s all going. Above all, it...

Joseph's dramatic meal with his brothers illustrates the complex currents flowing around all of our tables. In different relationships, we find ourselves in the Guarded role like Joseph, the Guilty role like his older brothers, or the Graced role like Benjamin. Only the sovereign hand of God can steer these stories toward redemption, and that's exactly what God does. Jesus is the true and better J...

The only story about Jesus' childhood in the Bible is bookended by two summary statements which cover about 90% of Jesus' life—from infancy to age 30. Together they remind us that Jesus' entire life was one of physical, spiritual and relational growth. He shared the secret of this growth when his parents found him in the temple after the Passover: "I must be in my Father's house" (v. 49) — or more...

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Isaiah's prophecy of the Suffering Servant suggests that Jesus was not physically attractive, and nothing in the Gospel accounts suggests otherwise. Why? Why wouldn't he be the most beautiful human who ever lived? The answer, Isaiah suggests, lies in his mission to rescue humanity from our dead-end quest to trust in our own beauty. Jesus challenges us to fight to find beauty in the ugly places of...

During Advent, we look back at the birth of Christ and ahead to his return. 

In this passage today, we see that Martha is a lot like us. She is driven and has goals and a plan for the evening; she has an idea of how the night will go. She also knows that she has to take charge because Mary isn’t doing it. Martha is also restless and anxious. What we find, though, is that Martha and Mary have different postures around Jesus, the King of kings. Yet, one has chosen something...

God's call of Abram sets the mold for the entire Bible: One man is chosen in order to bless the whole world. This blessing doesn't just save individuals; it builds a flourishing society. And Abram's participation in the blessing is entirely free, yet it costs him everything.

The tower of Babel is a powerful picture of human cooperation gone wrong—and of God’s overruling grace to make things right. It’s not really about pride and folly as much as the drive to find security and identity apart from God. When we resist being drawn with God into the thrilling diversity of his world, we find that: we’re always exhausted, our fear never goes away, we’ve got company, it doesn...

Noah’s drunken final chapter reminds us that all of us are shaped by the models around us, especially our families, but that God always works through fallible people. Ultimately, Jesus is re-gathering people from all the scattered descendants of Noah into his new family where grace reigns.

After the flood, God leads us to expect that life and blessing will continue to multiply, but in the shadow of death and judgment. This includes a new relationship to animals where we, the “apex predators” are accountable to God for how we treat animal life and especially human life. It also includes God’s covenant to preserve creation until Jesus returns to make all things new. In the sign of thi...

Waiting is hard, but God is at work while we wait. During Noah's long year in the ark, God reconfigured his posture toward the animal world, making him a more humble, cooperative, wondering steward of their lives. Above all, God was training Noah to trust him. We need to learn that same trust today. For Christians, our hope is not just in the "wind" that God uses to blow away the waters of chaos,...

Genesis 7 lingers in the devastating details of the flood in order to deepen our appreciation for the mercy of God. Noah is not the hero of this story; God is. God gathers the animals, God shuts the door, and God preserves every creature within from the rising waters. 1 Peter 3 says the ark is a picture of baptism, which saves us because of the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus himself reminds us in Ma...

In the time of Noah, unrestrained sex and violence revealed that human beings didn’t want to serve God; they wanted to be God. Rather than an angry overreaction, God’s plan to flood the world was a grieving act of uncreation and re-creation, bringing judgment and mercy at the same time. But Noah didn’t earn the right to receive this mercy; as verse 8 emphasizes, he “found favor in the eyes of the...

The book of Galatians is a case study in loving well and loving poorly. Paul’s letter highlights the importance of building, nurturing, and protecting a relational culture shaped by the Gospel.  The Gospel creates a very unique relational culture—a culture that affirms our beauty, acknowledges our brokenness, and anticipates the Day we will “be made perfect in love” (1 John3:1-3). We who love poor...

Human culture always has the capacity for good, for evil, or for some combination of both. The descendants of murderous Cain engaged in good pursuits: city-building, livestock farming, music, technology, family-building and poetry. Yet because they rejected God’s loving rule, the way they practiced them was often corrupted, most heinously by Lamech’s polygamy and violent hyper-retribution. Enosh,...

The story of Cain and Abel shows us ourselves, and more important, it shows us the heart of God: ·      We are stubbornly independent from God, but God is stubbornly interested in us ·      We are half-hearted toward him, but he is relentless in pursuing us ·      We are envious of others, but he is curious about us ·      We are vulnerable to sin’s sneak attacks, but he is powerful to fight with...

Joseph of Arimathea is the patron saint of sharing your circles—all the human networks that connect resources to needs. Even Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary," despite their apparent powerlessness, used their nonthreatening social status to become vital eyewitnesses to Jesus' resurrection. In the economy of God, grace is free and our participation is a gift, opening up limitless possibilities to...

Jesus loves rich people and wants everyone to be "rich"—so that we might share what we have with others. His interaction with a rich young man reveals that stuff is never just stuff, but sits right next to our hearts, often choking out the light of God's face. The only way to find the motivational thrust to release our stuff is by receiving the free grace of God, trusting that in him we have more...

People who share the burdens of others must be willing to share their own. Jesus modeled this habit throughout his earthly ministry, especially in his agonizing night in the garden of Gethsemane. While his burden was utterly unique, Christians can follow his example by first sharing our burdens with our Father, then sharing some things with someone (not everything with everyone). And even when peo...