Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church

Six short-ish responses to questions about faith and doubt, and two longer responses about the distinction in the sermon between "struggle doubt" and "straddle doubt."

Whether faith can include doubt depends on what you mean by faith and by doubt. According to James, faith is not just a set of theological beliefs, but a lived, embodied trust in God that can only come through a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This personal faith can vary from weak to strong or from little to great, and it always includes some degree of struggle with what we don't know or ca...

The Bible claims that God speaks true and authoritative words to us through fallible human authors. Peter explains that the Holy Spirit "carried along" these authors, without bypassing their unique personalities, languages, cultures and times. Accepting the Bible as we find it today means accepting the Spirit continued to work through people in history to authenticate, preserve, transmit and trans...

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Christianity claims not only that God exists, but that we can know him — despite the fact that none of us can access him in physical, visible or audible form. Christians believe this knowledge of God is nonetheless real, because we experience him in both indirect and direct ways that progressively change us, inside and out.

Why isn’t God more obvious? Paul addresses a pluralistic audience in Athens with three broad arguments: 1) Because we interpret the evidence differently, 2) because we are more religious than we think, and 3) because our love is out of whack. Thankfully, God not only makes himself findable but seeks us out through the person of Jesus, whom Paul refers to in v. 31 as “a man he has appointed.”

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Hebrews 13:4 teaches that all Christians, whether single, married, widowed or divorced, are called to “hold marriage in honor” and to “let the marriage bed [sex]” be undefiled. This includes the bracing standard that God designed sex only for the marriage covenant between a husband and wife. Closer investigation of the context around Hebrews 13:4 reveals the surprising genius of God’s design, as w...

Paul’s charge to children and bondservants applies to spiritual children as well: We should honor and obey our spiritual parents as if they were the Lord himself. Knowing how easily this challenge can be abused, however, God places firm limits on the authority of mothers and fathers. At the same time, Paul commends the limitless blessings of honoring and obeying them.

Every Christian has both the responsibility and the privilege to build up people who are spiritually downstream from us. Paul's example of how to do that is characterized by God's Gospel proclaimed with God's energy, humble accountability, God-pleasing, gentleness, self-giving, sacrifice, integrity, and muscular mentoring — exactly the way Jesus builds us up!

Faith in Jesus adopts us into his family, giving each of us a vast number of brothers and sisters with whom we will spend eternity. Whatever additional roles we may have, this is the fundamental way that men and women should see each other in the church. Paul’s final greeting to the Roman Christians models ways that we: 1) commit to each other’s adoption, 2) celebrate each other’s differences, 3)...

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The root of all temptation is distrust in the goodness of God. All kinds of circumstances, then, can be tempting – not just obvious enticements to engage in illicit behavior. Tempting circumstances include any form of evil, or the Evil One, which can overwhelm us and lead to cynicism, resignation or despair. For this reason Jesus encourages us to ask our Father to spare us from the worst of both....

God‘s forgiveness of us and our forgiveness of others are related: you can’t have one without the other.

"Give us this day our daily bread" is the most straightforward petition in the Lord's prayer, yet it has multiple layers of meaning. The surface meaning reminds us of our daily physical dependence on the Lord. The social meaning challenges us to help feed other people. The spiritual meaning  reveals that our deepest need is for communion with the Triune God, given to us by Jesus. The eschatologica...

Asking God for his kingdom to come and his will to be done is one of the most comforting and most dangerous prayers a Christian can pray. It's comforting because it validates our experience and invites us to lament; because Jesus prayed it for us in Gethsemane and secured our adoption in his family; and because Jesus has guaranteed that the fulness of the kingdom will come when he returns. At the...

To "hallow" God's name means to honor him as holy, both with our lips and with our lives. Dozens of verbs could flesh out this definition: glorify, bless, adore, exalt, revere, esteem, praise, fear, worship, etc. The more we recognize how singularly holy God is, the more amazed we are that we are able to come near him in Christ.  We can't make ourselves feel God's holiness, but we can cultivate th...

The Lord's Prayer doesn't just teach us to pray. It summarizes the entire Christian life, starting with the terms of our relationship with God. Only Jesus has earned the right to call God Father. By inviting us to call him our Father, too, Jesus preaches the Good News: That all who trust in his death and resurrection can be adopted into God's family. This means he is not only willing to hear our p...

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