Sunday message · Spiritual Habits series
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Message Summary
Continuing the Spiritual Habits series, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Acts 1:8 and the habit of gospel witness, which he calls one of the most neglected habits, with the greatest potential to make us look like Jesus. He starts with the power of habit. A family member recently drove on autopilot to the house they had moved out of months earlier. As The Power of Habit observes, once a habit forms the brain stops fully participating in decisions, and the pattern unfolds automatically unless we deliberately fight it.
Spiritual habits are the rhythms of living God uses to transform and conform us to look like Jesus. Most of us build rhythms around personal interests, and because they feel natural we find our identity in them, even when they don’t help us live on mission. Practicing gospel witness starts with two things. The first is the gospel itself: God has come to rescue and restore creation through the work of Jesus on our behalf. Sin is living life my way for me instead of God’s way for God, and when we repent and trust in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, we are restored to a right relationship with God.
The second is what it means to be a witness. In Acts 1:8, Jesus’ last words on earth, he promises power when the Holy Spirit comes and says, “You will be my witnesses.” So being a witness means, first, living a life led by the Spirit. God fills us, but we choose to be led (Galatians 5:16), and the Spirit produces his fruit in us. Jesus grew in favor with God and all the people (Luke 2:52), and Phil says we are practicing gospel witness when we build a good reputation with everyone in our circle of influence, not just people who look, talk and vote like us. As one pastor puts it, people who were nothing like Jesus liked Jesus.
Being a witness also means actually sharing the gospel. The New Living Translation of Acts 1:8 adds “telling people about me everywhere,” echoing the Great Commission in Matthew 28:19–20, and Paul calls believers Christ’s ambassadors, pleading with people to come back to God (2 Corinthians 5:20). For anyone convicted that they have never shared their faith, today is a day to ask God’s forgiveness (1 John 1:9) and begin reorienting their life toward living on mission. Clarity started, Phil reminds the church, so that lost people would be found.
Why practice it? It is essential to God’s mission through our lives, and it is the active way we resist a prideful, self-centered life. We are tempted to live as consumers rather than contributors, and that spills into how we see God and the church until we confess that Jesus is Lord while our actions say we are. Citing Donald Whitney’s warning that without discipline our best evangelistic intentions often go unspoken, Phil closes with his prayer that the church would do all things for the sake of the gospel, and invites everyone to choose to be a gospel witness today.
