Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church
The Habit of Evangelism
Habits of a Healthy Heart
Welcome/Hospitality
Commitment
Conflict
Celebration
Yo Soy Libre
Radical Acceptance
To Give Life Abundantly
di Walter Henegar
God has invited us to participate in His global purposes of making Him known. He has privileged us with the opportunity to share the message of the gospel that has transformed our very lives. When we explore the depths of what God has done for us through the person and work of Jesus, we should be motivated and excited to proclaim the gospel to our neighbors and the nations. We should be committed to tell of His glory among the nations, to summon the people to be converted and come to salvation in Christ, and to warn those without Christ of the impending judgment. May evangelism become something that we are excited about!
Habits form us. We make habitual choices that move deeper and deeper into our hearts and eventually define us. We make those choices because of the counsel we take. We take that counsel and are formed by those habits because they feed us in some way. Every habit pays off in a way that keeps us coming back for more. Habits rooted in wickedness and sin will leave us feeling like chaff: hollow and discarded. The habits of the righteous make us bear fruit when it’s time and keep us from withering before it’s time. Christian habits themselves don’t make us healthy. Those habits merely keep us near God, feeding on him and being nourished by him. What’s more, even in our bad habits, God is moving water that comes to us where we are, which he did most pointedly in sending Christ to us. Even when we don’t know the way to him, God knows the way to us.
Welcome and hospitality in community is not just a command, but ultimately it is a response to what Christ has done for us, and it is one of the ways we get to experience blessing in community. Therefore, we should eager to show the same hospitality Christ showed his disciples and continues to show his church today. John 13 reveals the way our pride and fear get in the way of ways of responding to Christ's work appropriately, and the way the gospel gives us the ability to respond rightly.
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 make up the church — and especially those who are different from you in any way. Neglecting this bond with other body parts will cost you, too. When you try to live the Christian life alone or on the fringes of the community, it deprives you of nourishing truth, challenging perspectives, personal encouragement and opportunities to serve.
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 Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This reality frees us to lean toward each other with our inevitable differences in preference and even in matters of substance.
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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