Photos by Michael Duncan
ORLANDO–At the opening session of the 2024 Florida Baptist State Convention annual meeting, Adrian Taylor, pastor of Springhill Church in Gainesville, urged attendees to “recognize that God has called us to a higher calling” of walking in holiness.
Focused on the meeting’s theme, “A Holy People: Shining His Light in a World of Darkness,” Taylor recalled that, when he was a young boy playing outdoors with his cousin, his grandmother would warn them not to bring their roughhousing into her home because they might break her “knickknacks and what nots.” Likewise, believers should not take the “actions that they formerly did … into the house of God.”
In Ephesians 4:17-24, the Apostle Paul taught Christians how to “live out our faith in our daily walk.”
First, Christians are called to “walk in a new light” which will give a new mindset and a new heart, Taylor said. The “vanity” that Paul referenced in Ephesians 4:17 refers to a “temporal and temporary” mindset, he said. Instead, God calls His people to a mindset of clarity, conviction and Christ-centeredness.
“A hardened heart blocks us from experiencing God’s love and truth,” while a new heart is transformative in our relationships with others, Taylor taught.
Second, Christians are called to walk as we have learned in Ephesians 4:19-21, Paul reminded the Ephesians that they had been taught to pursue Christ rather than live in the ways of the world. “We are in a dark culture,” Taylor said. Because our natural tendency is in the flesh, instead of “shining light in dark places,” we want to take the darkness into our churches, he said. “We don’t want to try to live by the Book because we are so comfortable. God’s Word won’t change; I need to change.”
“The more we learn Christ,” Taylor said, we will be changed. Such change does not come naturally. Holiness requites “a consistent devotion to an Almighty God. … It takes work to walk in holiness.”
Third, Christians are called to walk as God is leading. Covering up sin, as David did in the Bible, is a clear indication that a person’s life has not been transformed by a holy God. The “former life” of how we lived before becoming Christians is corrupt and deceitful. Although “everyone of us falls short,” Christians are called to put off the old life and put on the new life of walking in righteousness and holiness, reflecting God’s character.
Watch the sermons in their entirety here.