Lesson 5: Welcoming One Another

Now, we turn from the heart to the hands, built on Romans 15:7: "Accept one another, just as Christ also accepted you, to the glory of God." His command is a welcome that does not audit — the original word means to take someone toward yourself, and it comes first, because God has already accepted the very brother we might keep at a distance (Romans 14:1, 3). The pattern and the cost come from Christ, who welcomed us while we were still helpless, ungodly, and sinners, tearing down the dividing wall to bring us near by his blood (Romans 5:6–8; Ephesians 2:13–14).

Because that welcome puts mercy on display, it glorifies God and becomes a sermon the watching world cannot otherwise explain. Jesus modeled it for three years — the children, Zacchaeus, the woman at the well, Saul on the road — and the call to Cornerstone is not to invent that welcome but to extend it across every threshold the gospel has already crossed.