Good morning and Welcome back, church family! Today is not just another Sunday—it’s a Welcome Back Sunday. After a season of scattering, distraction, and even weariness, this is a moment of invitation and re-engagement—with joy, excitement, and commitment. Today is more than just simply a time to return to church routines or restart the calendar of programs. Today marks an opportunity to renew covenant, to re-engage in worship, to recommit to one another, and—most importantly—to resurrender everything to Christ.
God keeps calling us back. Filling our lives with invitations— Some are light and ordinary—“coffee or tea?” Others are weighty and life-changing—“Will you marry me?” or “Will you stand for what is right, even when it costs you?”
Throughout Scripture, God issues invitations through His servants. Whether it’s the voice of Moses, calling for covenant faithfulness … or Paul, urging love in costly action … or Jesus, demanding radical, personal surrender …each inviting us deeper into God’s call. The pattern builds: from covenant faithfulness, to love-driven action, and finally radical surrender to Jesus. But the heart of the invitation is always the same: a decisive, loving, total Yes to God.
A Total YES to GOD is not for the faint of heart. God’s invitation often calls us to places of discomfort, risky situations and a feeling of not fitting in with the crowd.
So this morning is both a celebration and a challenge: Will you say Yes to God’s invitation—not only in your personal walk, but in the life of this church family?
The Scriptures place before us three voices of invitation—Moses, Paul, and Jesus. Each one speaks to a people standing at a crossroads, and each one presses us to ask: What is God inviting me to right now?
Moses’ Invitation: Choose Life
Moses stood before Israel on the edge of the Promised Land. Behind them was the wilderness; before them, the promise. But the choice was clear: “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life.” To choose life meant covenant loyalty—loving the Lord, obeying His voice, holding fast to Him.
For Israel, this meant rejecting idols, even when surrounded by nations who lived by different values. For us, the challenge is no different. We too live in a world full of competing allegiances—nationalism, consumerism, self-preservation. Each one calls for our loyalty. But covenant faith means standing firm and declaring: “My allegiance is not for sale. My loyalty is first to the Lord.”
So on Welcome Back Sunday, Moses asks us: Will you re-engage with joy in worship? Will you re-commit to walking in God’s ways? Will you re-new your promise to be a covenant people—faithful to God, faithful to one another? Choosing life is not a one-time decision; it is a daily Yes to God.
Paul’s Invitation: Love Beyond Duty
Centuries later, Paul picked up that same invitation but pressed it further. Writing to Philemon, he asked for something unthinkable in the Roman world: to receive his runaway slave Onesimus not as a slave, but as a brother. This was costly. Radical. Countercultural.
Paul shows us that Christian love is never passive. Love risks. Love costs. Love reshapes relationships. Where the world clings to rights, status, and resentment, the gospel calls us to costly reconciliation, forgiveness, and mercy.
So what does that look like for us? It looks like loving ICE agents who are abducting innocents—not by excusing injustice, but by praying for their transformation, treating them as humans in need of redemption, and standing courageously to defend the vulnerable. It looks like loving a president who wants to be a dictator—not by bowing to tyranny, but by refusing hatred, speaking truth without violence, and praying for his repentance even as we resist his abuse of power. It looks like loving armed forces patrolling our streets—not by seeing them as enemies, but as people caught in fear and violence, while we advocate for peace and remind them that true authority belongs to Christ alone.
This is Paul’s invitation: Will you let love move you to action? Will you forgive, serve, or reconcile, even when it costs you reputation, comfort, or control? To re-engage in church is not just to show up—it is to show love.
Jesus’ Invitation: Radical Surrender
Then comes Jesus. His invitation is the hardest of all, and yet the most life-giving. He does not call us to safe religion or half-measures. He calls us to radical surrender: “Take up your cross. Give up everything.”
This is not a metaphor for inconvenience. It is a call to lay down everything we cling to—our possessions, our identities, our futures—and place them in His hands. In a culture of self-preservation and comfort, Jesus dares to tell us that real freedom is found only when we release control, safety, and reputation.
That means when the government frightens us, we surrender fear to Christ. When injustice surrounds us, we surrender revenge to Christ. When violence tempts us to hate, we surrender hatred and choose the way of the cross. This is not easy. It feels impossible—until we remember that Jesus Himself did exactly this when He carried His cross to Calvary.
So today, as we re-engage in church life, Jesus presses the question: Are you willing to come back not just with your attendance, but with your surrender? To prioritize worship over busyness, service over comfort, trust over fear? Welcome Back Sunday is joyful, yes—but it is also serious. To follow Christ is to come back with a cross.
Three Invitations, One Decision
Moses calls us to renew covenant loyalty. Paul calls us to love that risks and costs. Jesus calls us to radical surrender of everything. Each one is an invitation, but together they converge into one simple decision: Will you say Yes to God right now?
The question before us is simple, yet searching. It isn’t abstract—it is immediate, personal, demanding. Each of us knows the resistance within: fear that we will lose control, pride that we can manage life on our own, comfort that lulls us into settling, the security of familiar routines, or the illusion that we are in charge.
When God asks us to say “yes,” it is rarely in safe or predictable territory. The yes of faith almost always costs something—our fear, our comfort, our illusion of control. And yet, it is only in saying yes that we step into the life God intends.
This is not just an individual calling; it is a calling we bear together as the people of God. Over the past months, as a congregation, we at St. Hilda St. Patrick have been in deep discernment. We prayed, we wrestled, we asked what God wanted for our future. And together, we chose: we voted to grow. We chose not the easy road of staying small and safe, but the risky road of stepping outward—of planting ourselves more visibly in this community, of daring to share God’s love with a wider circle of neighbors.
That choice has set us on uncertain ground. Growth takes sacrifice, energy, and risk. It is not guaranteed. If by November we discover that we cannot sustain ourselves financially, then we must make harder, more challenging choices. And yet—even that possibility is part of faith. Because sometimes love and obedience do not mean holding on tighter. Sometimes love and obedience mean letting go, trusting that God’s work is larger than our grip.
I think of my own story—last October, when my heart stopped for 24 seconds and I was given back my life. In that moment, I could not cling to security, pride or control. My body surrendered to the unknown. And when breath returned, I knew: life itself is gift. Every heartbeat is grace. I had a choice before me—go back to the status quo, or live differently, live surrendered, live saying yes to God. My “yes” to God can no longer be casual or half-hearted. It is not a concept—it is costly, and it is real.
As a congregation, we are now in that same place. We have chosen the risky “yes.” We have placed ourselves in God’s hands. And whether the future unfolds as growth, or as letting go, or as something we cannot yet see, the calling is the same: to trust, to obey, to love, to say yes to the God who brings life out of death.
So the question before us is not just “will St. Hilda St. Patrick succeed?” The question is deeper: will we keep saying yes to God—right now, right here—even when it costs, even when it stretches us, even when it leads us where we would not choose to go on our own?
So I ask you: what would it look like, this week, for you to take just one step of faith? One act of surrender that costs something? One risky yes to God that places love and obedience above your comfort or your control?
Because life is fragile. I know. And every heartbeat is a mercy. To say “yes” now is to step into the gift of a life that is no longer our own but entrusted to us by the One who raises the dead.
Closing Reflection
Welcome Back Sunday is not just about attending church again—it’s about living and engaging as one in the heart beat of St Hilda St Patrick. Living with joy, excitement, and full commitment. Living as a people renewed in covenant loyalty, reshaped by love, and surrendered fully to Jesus.
This is the invitation before us. Choose life. Choose love. Choose surrender. Choose Christ.