Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota: Recent Episodes
Resurrection City Church
Resurrection City Church exists to minister to St Paul, MN. Our vision is to glorify God by seeing people, our city, and the world made new in Jesus, our Savior and King.
We all hate consequences and will sometimes go to drastic lengths to avoid them. In the story of Genesis we’ve seen humanity turn its back on God, choosing to trust the lie that God is holding out on them and we ought to do it their own way. So far, there haven’t been major consequences as God’s grace has continued to care for people and allow humanity to spread doing life as they see fit.
In the flood story, however, we see that change.
If you grew up in church there’s a decent chance you studied the story of Noah’s Ark in the way children’s bibles often portray it: an all-inclusive petting zoo boat cruise floating happily along in the sunshine. But when you really read the story it’s obvious that’s not what’s going on. The ark was a survival pod, where the small group of survivors of a cataclysmic natural disaster were crammed together for almost a year, simply hoping to preserve society after it had been totally wiped out. And the seriousness of the actual story is directly tied to the seriousness of what caused it: human wickedness and sin. The flood is the inescapable result of consequences.
In this message, Pastor Joel explains how the story of Noah’s ark shows us that there’s always some flood that follows sin, and that in fact sin degrades even our literal material world, making it fall apart. The good news, however, is that we have an ark of our own, Jesus. And when we put ourselves in the safety of Jesus we find ourselves made new and invite floods of the Spirit’s power and blessing on ourselves.
The Bible assumes that Christians are part of a war. The pastor and writer Paul says things like:
“Fight the good fight of the faith.”
“Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes”
“Fight the battle well.”
“We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but…against spiritual forces of evil”
“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world,”
“Share in suffering like a good soldier of Christ Jesus”
The assumption is there is a conflict going on that is not always perceptible to our eyes but still very real, and that we’re swallowed up into it whether we like it or not. In Genesis we get some of the origins of this battle between God and spiritual beings who did what Adam and Eve did: they believed a lie and rebelled against God because of it. All of this leads to a strange story in Genesis 6 about sons of God, daughters of men, and some weird kids called Nephilim. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what’s going on and how it tells us more about our own involvement in the spiritual warfare of being a disciple of Jesus.
“A lie travels halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes.” This old adage continues to show its truth in an age of misinformation and AI deepfakes. Ironically, the saying itself is attributed to Mark Twain, despite there being no evidence the famous American writer ever said it!
Something like this is what happens in the wake of Genesis 3 as the book of Genesis continues on from the story of humanity’s tragic fall. In Genesis 3, we see humans begin to believe a lie implanted into their minds by Satan.We saw what happened to the first couple of people who believed it, and it’s safe to say that it wasn’t pretty. But what does it look like when this lie goes viral? When it starts to be believed and lived at a large scale? When it becomes the default way of thinking and viewing the world for all people?
It’s the question the next few chapters of Genesis seeks to answer, and in this study we’re going to see how the next generation of humans have some ugly consequences from the lie’s spread. While this is a grim story, it also is filled with signs of hope and comfort, too, because it foreshadows the gospel if we know where to look.
Do you have a moment where you felt like something important in your life all went wrong? Something that seemed like the right call in the moment but now in hindsight was a mistake, maybe a terrible one, and which can’t be undone? The story of the Bible has a moment like this, and it comes in Genesis 3. The first three chapters of Genesis, in fact, could be called something like “The Rise and Fall of Humanity.” It’s the story of a crisis, a tragedy. It might seem like something that happened a long time ago and which doesn’t have anything to do with us.
But it’s all of our story. We all have “at the tree” moments, where we have a choice to make. Will we trust God with our happiness and future or will distrust him and choose to trust ourselves instead?
It’s the story of a man who cheats on his wife. Of the city official who embezzles thousands of dollar. The teen who throws her friends under the bus to join the cool kids in school and stains her soul with guilt. The banker who thinks ethics don’t apply to them and breaks all the rules. Of the influencer who edits every photo and every moment until she can't remember who she is when the camera is off. Of the college student who posts what will get likes instead of what he actually believes.
When we realize this the story comes alive and in this message Pastor Joel walks through Genesis 3 shedding light on how it’s all of our story. Like our own stories of sin, it’s a tragedy, but it also is a story of hope. Hope of a tender and forgiving God who says to us at our lowest, “It’ll be ok. I’ll fix what’s been broken. I’ll fix it all.”
Psalm 8 is a reflection on the beginning of Genesis, on our call to reign as God’s image bearers. But it also reflects on a major tension we feel as we try to live it out, too. Verses 4-6 goes like this: “ What are mere mortals that you (God) should think about them, human beings that you should care for them? Yet you made them only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority…” It almost feels like the writer has imposter syndrome. How can people like me—filled with all the flaws and limits and quirks we all have—really do this? That kind of sentiment can keep us on the sidelines and from really becoming who God has made us to be.
Genesis 2 reflects on this tension by explaining two ways God meets us in our limitations: Sabbath to meet our emotional, physical, and mental needs, and other people to help us in our aloneness. The truth is, the more we learn to depend on God and what he’s given us, the better we can be at being human and fulfilling the calling God made us all with. In this message, Pastor Joel explains it all.
Genesis 1 explains that to be human means to reign or govern the world alongside God. We each have a domain, a realm that is uniquely our own and where our will is the (or at least a) dominant one. On July 19th Res City did our Together Weekend Sunday, where we don't have a typical sermon but split the church into breakouts and this year we did four breakouts on this theme. In this breakout, Lisa Trump, Nicole Rohrer, and Catie Heen lead a discussion around how to reign well in the most basic part of us but which we're still called to steward responsibly: our mental health and thought life.
Genesis 1 explains that to be human means to reign or govern the world alongside God. We each have a domain, a realm that is uniquely our own and where our will is the (or at least a) dominant one. On July 19th Res City did our Together Weekend Sunday, where we don't have a typical sermon but split the church into breakouts and this year we did four breakouts on this theme. In this breakout, Joel Stegman leads a discussion around how to reign well in a world more and more saturated with a rapidly growing technology that is becoming a part of many parts of all of our lives, artificial intelligence.
Genesis 1 explains that to be human means to reign or govern the world alongside God. We each have a domain, a realm that is uniquely our own and where our will is the (or at least a) dominant one. On July 19th Res City did our Together Weekend Sunday, where we don't have a typical sermon but split the church into breakouts and this year we did four breakouts on this theme. In this breakout, Heather Lehn leads a discussion around how to reign well in the creation itself, a really important space to think about this concept because the first humans were literally tasked with it.
Genesis 1 explains that to be human means to reign or govern the world alongside God. We each have a domain, a realm that is uniquely our own and where our will is the (or at least a) dominant one. On July 19th Res City did our Together Weekend Sunday, where we don't have a typical sermon but split the church into breakouts and this year we did four breakouts on this theme. In this one, Drew Elrick leads a discussion around how to reign well in our places of work, or vocation.
“The future of the church is ancient.” What a surprising thing to believe, but the reality is God has given us all we need to navigate even the thorniest of issues we encounter. In a new series, we’ll be studying the oldest book in the Bible, Genesis. Genesis is the beginning of the lore, the founding myth, of all humanity, whether or not we, going about our day to day lives now, centuries removed from its stories and characters,are aware of it or not.
The Bible begins by explaining how God has made the world to be the kind of place where humans can be who he made us to be. That’s what Genesis 1 is all about. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks how the world was initially made to be that kind of place, and how it continues to be even now.
It seems fitting for us to end our series on things Christians believe that make us weird with a message about the end of the world. End times fever has been common among Christians, especially over the last 50 or so years. But what did Jesus tell us about our speculation about the when or what of his return? Why might he have worried we would get too focused on it? In this message, Pastor Joel shares some of his childhood trauma around the end times, his personal opinions on the return of Jesus and talks about why it does matter that we hold tight to the expectation that Jesus return but not at the expense of what Jesus told us to keep our primary focus on.
Christians talk a lot about God’s grace, but we less often talk about what is sometimes called the scandal of grace. When we really get the concept of grace, we’re going to actually be offended. It steps on the toes of what we think is right or wrong. For people who are used at deserving or achieving all they get, grace can be a real stumbling block, and our ego can even convince us to say no to it.
In this message, using 2 Kings 5 and the story of a highly competent, rich and well-connected general named Naaman who desperately was looking for a cure for his leprosy, Pastor Joel explains why grace challenges the deeply held beliefs we have about ourselves, and how in allowing it to offend us God is actually trying to heal us of a spiritual disease we all have. It’s a spiritual leprosy, we could call it, using the story of Naaman as an allegory for our sinful arrogance. This is a message for everyone, but especially those who really struggle with perfectionism and achievement.
This might surprise you, but when Jesus talked about sex he said the conservative hardliners of his day actually didn’t go far enough. For many in his day, as long as you jusrt had sex with your spouse, you were good.
Jesus said that true righteousness went a lot deeper than that. Just being good at following rules doesn’t produce the kind of goodness God’s kingdom is meant to bring.
Goodness in sex isn’t tied to rules at all, even the golden rule of sex we have today: consent. Jesus would say the kinds of things we all know are wrong when it comes to sex (things like assault and rape) come from the heart, which means we have to go after lust itself.
This is a problem for today’s world. Lust is normal and celebrated, and we treat sex like it’s ice cream: it’s all good, there’s no such thing as morally bad ice cream, and everyone just has their own specific tastes. We tell ourselves this view of sex is good and represents progress from the backwards ideas about sex people like Jesus had. But the question we never really ask is this: Is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? If we’re really honest, the answer is no. And this brings us back to what Jesus says.
In this message, Pastor Joel helps explain how the sexual revolution overpromised and underdelivered, and how by targeting lust itself Jesus gives what our craving for lust is really all about at the end of the day: real, true intimacy.
Perhaps the defining question of our age is who am I? We are asking what it means to be human now in the age of AI, and we are all asking questions like what gives me value? What is my purpose? Why am I worthy of love, of being known? How can I help bless the world? What will make me feel fulfilled, at peace, truly happy?
God thinks answering this question is incredibly important. So important that he put the answer right on page 1 of our Bibles, in the book of Genesis. The answer he gives there to us is that we are image bearers who are made to rule and reign over the world alongside him. What does it mean to reign? Perhaps a more helpful word is responsibility. We are made to exercise responsibility for ‘what we have say over’, our ‘domain.’ What we have say over includes many things, like our bodies, our time, what we think about, what we steward, our relationships, our churches, and more.
But there’s a massive problem: Sin. Sin takes our responsibility from us and reigns through us when we try to domineer other people’s domains or neglect our own. Both are chronic issues among people, things that if we’re honest we do more than we’d care to admit. But God has not left us hanging. Jesus’s domain is humans themselves: to take them and make them into the kind of people who can do this, by putting their identity in him.
In this timely message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down for us.
There’s a common idea of how it takes a village to raise or support someone. A village is a great way to think of what the church, the community of the people of Jesus, is. But what does it actually take to be part of a village? It’s harder to know than we might think, and even when we do know it can be even more difficult to actually live it. In a time when people are so lonely and desperately need to be part of the community of Jesus, learning better what Scripture says about how to be a villager is increasingly relevant. In this message, Pastor Julie shares some practical, insightful, and challenging suggestions for how you can be a villager at Res City.
We value independence, a lot. And independence might give us a lot of things we want, but will independence really help us grow as people, especially the people of God? In this message, Pastor Julie explains why we only grow when we rely on God, and accountability to each other is essential to how God helps us to become the people he is crafting us into.
Albert Einstein once said you don’t understand something well enough until you can explain it simply. Something similar could be said about the gospel: you may not understand the good news of Jesus well enough if you don’t see the necessity of unity and reconciliation. The good news is all about reconciliation: Jesus bringing us back from our rebellion and sin to God through the cross. The disciple, pastor, and writer in the early church Paul knew this, and he puts it this way: we have been given a ministry of reconciliation.
What might it look like to take this seriously? In this message, Pastor Joel tells the story of Philemon and Onesimus, a slave and master whom Paul worked to reconcile across even the terrible chasm of slavery. For Paul, we find, reconciliation means hard work, and has to flow first out of Christlike character, which Paul describes in detail in another letter and which Pastor Joel practically walks through to close the message.
Vulnerability, being real, and authentic—these things are desired by many. We want to be vulnerable and live in the midst of vulnerable community. But we don’t really know how, and it’s much harder than we think. Christians believe the problem with vulnerability is our sin, which leads to shame, which breaks relationships. In this message, Pastor Julie explains how Jesus is the answer to our shame, which allows us to repair relationships and be vulnerable in them. She also discusses the tragic consequences to living without vulnerability.
Jesus wants us to be salty—weird, unique, different in a good way for the good of our world, by offering it the special blessings of Jesus and the gospel. But there’s a lot of reasons we could say that Christians aren’t that weird, and one of the main ways has to do with politics. Many people have walked away from faith in Jesus at least in part because they hoped Christians would be different—and they weren’t!
How might we begin to look different?
In this message, Pastor Joel explains how it all starts with whether or not we see Jesus and his teaching as actually having something to offer not just out political beliefs, but equally as importantly, the kinds of people we are in our politics. Specifically, Jesus talks about how we are not to be controlled by fear or give into anger, which breeds contempt. Fear and anger are both incredibly important compinents of American politics, and Pastor Joel offers some suggestions for weeding them out of how we participate in the politics of our time.
Have you ever noticed how many books and movies are about someone who lives what seems to be a dull life, but then discovers a world behind ours, filled with mystery, wonder, but that is also frightening and dangerous? It seems like we have a sense that the world might actually be like that, but we have been told for so long that is not the way the world actually is. Things that people used to call “demonic” are just the products of unfortunate circumstances and some chemical imbalances in the brain.
But the Bible wants to let us in on a secret: our sense that there is some conflict beyond ours is right. It’s what Christians call spiritual conflict. In this message, Pastor Joel takes us through a study of this world from multiple passages of Scripture. He gives us an introduction to Satan, the spiritual warlord and general of hordes of others diabolical spiritual forces. He explains how Satan has taken control of our world and we’re all stuck in it, and—most importantly—he talks about where Jesus is operating in the midst of it all and how the good news of his death and resurrection is our deliverance from it all.
Faith is one of the most commonly discussed concepts in the whole Bible. Almost every single book of the New Testament refers to it. It’s how we begin and continue a Christian life of discipleship. It’s so central that the author of Hebrews writes, “It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6). What does faith that pleases or delights God look like? In this message, Pastor Joel tackles that question and talks about how we can focus on Jesus to fortify four legs of a stool of faith and be people who can manage through wavering and being of two minds when trust is required.
We’ve been in a series about how what makes Christians weird is what makes them “salty”, people who can make the world much better than it is. Probably the strangest thing Christians believe is that a man convicted and executed as a criminal came back to life again and now we worship him as God and rescuer of our souls. The writer and pastor Paul says in his letter to a group of Christians in the ancient city of Corinth (1 Corinthians 15) that the resurrection of Jesus is at the very heart of what we believe and how we live. It’s because Jesus has ended the dynasty over all humanity that death had, and when he returns all who trust in him will be raised again like him. In this Easter message, Pastor Joel unpacks how knowing what the rest of the world doesn’t yet helps us be people who live out hope and love and fulfill Jesus’ call to be salty.
We’re all pretty aware there is something off with all of us, even if we might not be able to put our finger on it. For centuries, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, artists and more have been trying to figure out what it is. Christians have always understood the problem to be that we have become enslaved to our “flesh”—our primal, deepest and–yes–most most authentic desires for self-gratification. But so often we are told the real problem we face is actually that we haven’t given ourselves over to our deepest and most authentic desires as much as we should! In this message, Pastor Joel walks through the tension between the Christian view and the worldly one and explains Jesus’s answer for what to do about what is wrong with us, and how his answer makes us salt for a world hat badly needs it.
The stats say most people believe in some kind of afterlife. But many who believe there’s something beyond this life struggle to believe in the idea of a hell. It’s a distinct belief Christians have, one which if we’re honest makes us uncomfortable sometimes, too. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through several important passages of Scripture to share what hell is actually going to be like according to Jesus and the biblical authors, which is: the space that exists on the margins of the new creation where what doesn’t have a future in God’s newly restored earth will reside by its own choice. There’s a lot to unpack here, and this message tackles it and explains why we need to talk about it even if it makes us squeamish.
One of the most basic beliefs of Christians, one that is very odd when you think about it, is the doctrine that Jesus is God incarnate, fully human and fully God. This is weird because it works backwards from how we’d expect it to go: normally we’d want to get rid of our embodiedness and the limitations that come with being human, not take it on. Yet, this is exactly what God does, and he does it for several important reasons. As Pastor Joel explains in this message, he does it to show us embodiedness is good, to lead a jailbreak from the prison of sin from the inside, and to show us, as he lives as a human, what it means to be truly human. Taking these seriously helps us to be salt, just as Jesus taught us.
This series has been all about hearing the voice of God and how a life of regularly hearing it leads us into all God wants for us. As we close this series out, it’s important to realize God’s voice is not the only one trying to speak to and influence us. There is also Satan. Revelation 12:9 tells us that Satan is an ancient monster and foe of God, the serpent who was in the garden with Adam and Eve, and who is a “deceiver”. We could say as a deceiver, he’s like a hacker who is trying to convince us he’s God, or at least that what he’s selling us is more noble and good than what God has to offer.
In this message, Pastor Joel explains how Satan’s playbook has been the same for centuries, telling us the same three part lie: (1) Distance yourself from God. (2) Do your own thing. (3) Redefine good and evil based on your own gut and desire.
We see Satan successfully use this lie on the first humans, but then fail to do it with Jesus. What is the difference? Listening to and hearing God’s voice. You won’t want to miss this fitting conclusion to our series on the voice of God.
We’ve spent a lot of time in this series talking about how to hear the voice of the shepherd, which Jesus promised was a reality for his followers in John 10, but the reality is there are times we will miss it. Many people report they have a frustrating experience trying to hear God’s voice. The Bible actually has a lot to say about why we might miss hearing God’s voice, and it’s a common enough experience that it's worth its own sermon.
In this message, Pastor Joel walks through several stories in scripture where we see people struggling to hear God’s voice, considering what we might learn from them. On the one hand, it might have to do with realities in the spiritual world outside of our control that we deal with as we open ourselves up to the spiritual world and listen to the voice of a spiritual being. And on the other hand, sometimes it’s “user error,” issues with our lives or hearts that crowd out the voice of God finding its way to us. The good news is that Jesus has made it so we never have to fear God has shut us out from him for good if we earnestly seek him.
This series has focused on God’s voice in six specific ways that we know he speaks to people, but we can’t ever take it for granted that God does and has spoken to us most strongly in the Bible itself. It might happen more than you think that you’re waiting for God to speak to you through one of the means we’ve discussed in the series already but you might not realize the answer you seek is already there waiting for you in Scripture. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks how Scripture is God’s word and how it has a power to it that is unique among books to deconstruct and cultivate our hearts and minds. He also talks about several important ways to discern the voice of God in Scripture.
God speaks to us through many styles of communication, but perhaps none is so common as what is often called the still, small voice: a voice that comes to us like a thought in our head but that we can recognize to as a thought from God. We see this voice used in the famous story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19, and Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians 2. It signifies a closeness to us from God that indicates his great love for us and desire for intimacy. In this message Pastor Joel explains how this voice works and gets really practical about how we can distinctly tell God’s voice apart from the other thoughts in our head. Get your phone’s notepad app open with this one. You’re going to need it!
When we consider how God speaks, spectacular methods like dreams, visions, angels and more might come to mind. And while God does speaking in those ways—as we’ve studied already in this series—more often he speaks to us in “ordinary” ways, such as the topic of this message: a human voice. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what is happening when God speaks through people, some common ways it happens, and how when God does speak through people like us it’s a parable of the gospel.
It can be hard to hear God’s voice when we don’t know how he speaks. Lots of times people wonder if God is speaking through this or that voice or experience, but can’t know for sure. In this message, Pastor Joel begins to talk about the six ways we see God speak in our Bibles, beginning with the first four, which we could call “supernatural” or “spectacular” means: Dreams/visions, an audible voice, a phenomenon and a voice, and a messenger (angel). He also talks about one way we should not be looking for God to speak to us—through our feelings or "vibes" about something.
Hearing God’s voice is something Jesus tells us is possible for all of his sheep. But if we go into it with the wrong ideas about it, it can cause us to miss the voice of God and become frustrated and quit listening for it. In this message Pastor Joel walks through some guidelines (five of them, to be exact) to consider what will put us in a position to hear the voice of God well in our day to day lives. They have to do with the centrality of grace and God speaking, how God sorts out our hearts when he speaks, why we should be looking for God to speak to us in quieter ways rather than with bright, neon lights, and more.
In John 10 Jesus says that, “The shepherd of the sheep…calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…He goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice…I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me…My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.” He’s saying the normal expectation of being one of his sheep is that we hear and recognize his voice. The problem is, many serious and committed followers of Jesus live without the experience of regularly hearing his voice, and even if they do they might not have a good sense for recognizing it. And what a tragedy this is, because the voice of God has the ability to sort us out, fill us with vitality, put us on the right path, fortify us, give us patience, cut through lies we are believing, put us in our place (if that’s we need) or lift us up (if that’s what we need), and much more. It’s the greatest force in the world, and it’s how God intends to lead us to our destiny as Jesus followers. In this series, we’re going to tackle what it looks like for John 10 to not be just a nice verse to put in a picture frame on our wall but to be a mantra we live every single day.
In this message, Pastor Julie reads the story of Mary and talks about how she relied on God’s faithfulness throughout her journey to Jesus’ birth.
*Note: Due to some technical difficulties the first few minutes of the sermon are missing from this recording.
In the letter of 1 Peter, Peter writes that the prophets announced something glorious that is for our benefit and not theirs. They were speaking, of course, of the coming of Jesus. Do we really take it seriously that something glorious that other generations longed for is here? The prophets, if they were alive today, would tell us to “wake up!” They would tell us to not take it for granted. They would tell us to live as if the world has changed forever. In this message Pastor Joel gets us to consider how we might do that, specifically by cultivating joy this Christmas season.
John the Baptist had a unique calling. He came not to give people what they’d always wanted—the good news of Jesus—but to help people wait well for it. Which, if we’re honest, is kind of weird. Why wait? What good would that be? That’s probably what we think when we hear that. But if we can understand God’s intention, we can begin to understand how necessary waiting actually is. John’s ministry shows us two values in waiting: In waiting we hear God’s voice, and in waiting God prepares us for what we’re waiting for. In this message, Pastor Joel explains how we can learn from John how to celebrate advent this Christmas season, and how we can learn to wait well for Jesus to return one day, too.
Waiting is something nobody enjoys, but it’s the essence of advent, and God works through it when we’re intentional. In this message, Pastor Julie shares from the story of Abraham and Sarah. She talks about their long wait for a child and presents some takeaways for us to consider in our own seasons of waitings, both in this advent, and in any other time of waiting we might encounter.
When we go through trials and uncertainty, it can be easy to just focus on ourselves and the problems we face. But there can be and is more going on in these situations than we realize, and in 1 Peter 5, Peter, the apostle and friend of Jesus, wants to help us understand the bigger picture.
The reality is, in the middle of our uncertainty and troubles there are two other important factors to consider. One of them is a hindrance and one of them is from God as a help. First, Peter talks about the hindrance, which is the devil himself, prowling around like a predator in search of a lunch to snap up, trying to capitalize on our uncertainties and trials by leading us into sin. Second he shares about the shepherd-leaders Jesus has called to care for and protect his people, humbly loving us to help us become more like Jesus. Both are important to understand in our uncertainty and troubles. In this message, Pastor Joel breaks both of them down.
Throughout this series we’ve been discussing what is reliable and can give us hope in an uncertain world. When we dig into the reasons Peter wrote this beautiful letter to the different churches who initially received it, what’s clear is thatpressure and persecution were the mainsourceof the uncertainty they faced and why Peter wrote them. We may or may not experience pressure such as they did, but at some point all Christians are going to feel like a stranger in the world we live in.
So what do we do when we experience this tension? How do we live in peace with our stranger identity? In this message, Pastor Joel walks through Peter’s teaching.
We all are seeking “the good life,” whatever we mean by it. It might come as a surprise to us, but the Bible actually has quite a bit to say about the good life, and in this message we’ll explore how Jesus defines “the good life” and how Peter expands on it in this passage.
In this message, Res City Leadership team member Krista Schroeder shares what God has been teaching her about how we can live as disciples in an uncertain world, especially in the middle of tragedy.
In this message from guest preacher Pastor Adaobi Nduka, we consider how God partners with or “uses” us, and asks us if God might want to do so right now in ways we might not expect!
In this message from guest preacher Pastor Adaobi Nduka, we discuss the importance of the names of God given in Scripture. Pastor Adaobi walks through the name El Roi, “the God who sees” and explains how this name gives us comfort when we need know God sees us.
In this message from guest preacher Joel Nelson, we study the little known but timeless story of Leah, someone who was not thought of very highly by the people around her—including her husband—for reasons that are all too common today, but who God saw and who was important to him. Joel explains how this passage comforts us by letting us know what God values even if we feel unimportant and unseen to the world around us.
In this message, Res City Leadership Team member Miles Trump talks about how, surprisingly, in uncertain times obedience can actually lead to us to find hope.
The letter of 1 Peter offers God’s response to how to live and what to trust when the world feels uncertain. But sometimes even the word of God, which is what 1 Peter is, seems unreliable because of tricky passages. That’s exactly what we study in today’s message. Pastor Julie explains how to handle passages that seem uncomfortable to us by staying curious and trying to understand it according to several important principles rather than being swayed by the shallow takes on some of these passages we see online sometimes.
Peter starts his letter to the scattered exiles in ancient Turkey by giving a dependable identity. Identity helps people in the midst of their uncertainty and hopelessness. In the next part of the letter, Peter expands on their identity, telling them that they are holy, and out of their holy identity they are to live holy. Holy living honors Jesus, but it is dependable, too, able to see us through the trials and uncertainties of life. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks Peter’s description of holy, dependable living and gives the perfect example of someone living it out smack dab in the middle of suffering and uncertainty: Jesus himself.
The world we live in is full of uncertainty, whether in current events casting a shadow over our politics, the people in our lives who let us down, and more. For some, the hopelessness leads them to just focus on the present and try to have some fun to help them forget how hard it is. But simply numbing the pain is not the way of Jesus. In this series, we’re going to study a letter written to a group of people living through uncertain times by the apostle Peter about where we can find hope and reliability in uncertain times. In this first message of the series, Pastor Joel explains how Peter unpacks our identity and inheritance as reasons to find calm in the chaos.
When people talk about TV shows that have well regarded and satisfying endings, they often cite things like finishing off character arcs well, linking up to themes introduced throughout the series, and ending one story—even if another story could be beginning in a spin-off show. As Acts comes to a close, we find all of these elements to a satisfying end of a story be fulfilled. In this message, Pastor Joel explores that end, and explains why to truly understand Acts’ closing message, we have to understand the end of the early church’s story is the beginning of ours. What might it look like for us to take that seriously?
Court appearances, prison stays, riots, speeches full of biographical details, and lots of waiting. The end of the book of Acts can be hard to follow, but when we understand the big picture it all falls into place. The key to understanding the end of Acts is something God impresses into Paul’s heart in Acts 19. Paul is going to take an up and down pathway to the great city of Rome, which is all part of his divine appointment. In this message we’re going to talk about what the book of Acts teaches us about the idea of divine appointments, missions or ministries given to us by God for the purpose of, as Jesus says in Acts 1:8, being his witnesses to the ends of the earth. Pastor Joel talks through how difficulty doesn’t derail our divine appointments, and shares another story in the book of Acts of a divine appointment that might look more like many of ours than Paul’s.
In Acts 17:6, some nonbelievers plainly state the perception of Christians in their time: “These people turn the world upside down!” What a statement! And what a far cry from how the good news is experienced today. In this message, Pastor Joel examines a story from Acts 19 about how Paul, preaching the good news in a city called Ephesus, disrupted two of the main things that people relied on in their everyday lives: magic and idols, which at the end of the day are just means to control our worlds. What do we rely on today that is like magic and idols, and how might the good news of Jesus disrupt our reliance on them? This message is aimed at getting you to think about that question.
Acts is filled with amazing stories of the kingdom spreading. There are stories where people miraculously speak other languages for cross cultural ministry. There are stories about dangerous sea travel, giant storms and shipwreck. There are stories of dramatic confrontations with corrupt, villainous authorities and unjust imprisonment. Stories of earthquakes, riots, and journeying around the world. But for all the seemingly “extraordinary” stories, there are plenty of stories of the kingdom coming through the “ordinary” stuff of life. And in this message, we study one of those: Through someone’s job.
In this message, Pastor Joel explains how we’re all wired for work, and in fact our work—or our vocation—is an essential way Jesus can bring his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Join in—there’s something in this message for everyone!
In the last hours before he was crucified, Jesus prayed to God for togetherness among his disciples that would make us effective in pursuing the tasks he has assigned to us. We all will have opportunities to make this prayer a reality—whether in our church, at our workplaces, our neighborhoods or apartment buildings, on our campuses, and more—with the other believers God brings into our lives. It’s possible he’s done so for a kingdom purpose. But it’s not easy, and lots of things can cause us to be hesitant to move forward.
In this message, Pastor Joel talks about the fight for togetherness we see from the churches of Antioch and Jerusalem in Acts 15 and how they navigated the tricky pressures of politics and tradition to make Jesus’s vision a reality.
This past weekend we had our inaugural Together Weekend--an all weekend long church event with multiple opportunities for fun and growth meant to increase our Togetherness as a church. Instead of our normal message on Sunday, we had multiple breakouts hosted throughout the building and recorded them for people to listen to later on.
In this breakout, Elli Van Zee shares about how we learn about God's transforming generosity in ordinary life from a place we're probably not that familiar with: the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel.
This past weekend we had our inaugural Together Weekend--an all weekend long church event with multiple opportunities for fun and growth meant to increase our Togetherness as a church. Instead of our normal message on Sunday, we had multiple breakouts hosted throughout the building and recorded them for people to listen to later on.
In this breakout, Miles and Lisa Trump share about their own experiences balancing the busyness of their life and how they bring it all back to Jesus in a practical and fruit-focused way.
This past weekend we had our inaugural Together Weekend--an all weekend long church event with multiple opportunities for fun and growth meant to increase our Togetherness as a church. Instead of our normal message on Sunday, we had multiple breakouts hosted throughout the building and recorded them for people to listen to later on.
In this breakout, Pastor Julie Stegman shares a few stories of women in the book of Acts who sometimes get passed over but who made crucial contributions to the spread of the good news of Jesus.
At Res City, we want to relentlessly pursue four key values that we think lead someone to discipleship: Knowing Jesus through abiding and learning, Growing more like him and bearing his fruit, Going in service and invitation, doing it all Together. Sometimes, we like to be clear in a message about those values and specifically highlight some of them when we see them in our passage. And when we see the second recorded church in the history of the kingdom of God, Antioch, showing us these clear values we think it makes sense to take a minute to stop and highlight them. So in this message, Pastor Joel does just that.
We see how the church in Antioch was a church on the Go: Serving and Inviting people. We unpack how we see them do so, what it looks like for us to follow suit, and reflect on some questions we can ask ourselves how we are doing in those areas based on what we see in Antioch.
*Note: Due to some technical difficulties during the live recording, the first few minutes of this message are cut off.
The author of the book of Acts, Luke, would make a lot of high school English teachers happy. He introduces his main idea of the book in the beginning, and traces it through the whole story from there. The big idea is that the power of the Spirit has come and will take the gospel to new places. But, no one ever said it would be easy. In this story, we see how the good news of Jesus begins to brush up against tradition and preferences—and how it continues to do so for us today as we try to take the message of Acts seriously in our own churches and fellowship.
You often hear of someone having a “Damascus Road” moment, where something new is revealed to them and their whole life changes. The phrase comes from this passage in Acts (chapter 9), where a man named Saul, better known as Paul the Apostle—who at first seems like the main villain in the story—suddenly has his whole life change when Jesus interrupts his plans to stop the growth of the church dead in its tracks. It’s a famous story. And it tells us a lot about what is taking place when someone chooses to begin following Jesus. In this message, Pastor Joel highlights four important elements to conversion, which are relevant not just for new followers of Jesus, but also for the seasoned saint to come back to again and again as they continue the journey begun in their own conversion.
In Acts, as the good news spreads and produces people who live differently, it causes tension in Jerusalem. One of the key leaders of this new church, a man named Stephen, gives a speech that really kicks the hornets nest, and it gets him killed. In this message, Pastor Julie examines this speech and the story that surrounds it. The speech goes through the history of the people of Israel and how old, sinful patterns continue to resurface, especially in how the people in his day treated Jesus and now the news of God’s kingdom. Tensions and resistance still exist today. But God works in the midst of them, and he sometimes even uses it as an important way the good news spreads, and in this passage there is encouragement that Jesus stands by us even in the midst of our own challenges to live and preach the good news.
Stats today show a renewed interest in America in belief in God, and one of the main factors for it is the profound need for belonging that so many people have and miss, in the case of those who have walked away from faith. The beauty of the good news of Jesus and the revolution he began is that he creates deep and real belonging among those who follow him. Acts 2 is a famous passage that illustrates a community who belonged to one another. In this message, Pastor Julie helps us understand this passage and explains how community is foundational to the early church described in Acts—though not just for community itself, but for the purpose of the larger mission Jesus gives us all.
Every story needs some event that kicks off the plot. In Toy Story it’s Andy getting a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. In Harry Potter it’s an owl showing up at Harry’s house to tell him he’s invited to Hogwarts. In Acts, it’s the Holy Spirit being poured out on Jesus’s friends and followers at what we now call Pentecost. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks why Pentecost matters so much, specifically because of the way it “hyperlinks” to other passages in the Bible that help explain the groundbreaking nature of this crucial moment in the church’s history. The biggest hyperlink in today's message is the way God’s power breaks down barriers between humans to create a global and diverse church.
Movies and TV are saturated with sequels, reboots, and spinoffs. We love to see how stories progress into new times and settings, how characters grow, and how they respond to the world as it changes along with us. One of the cool things about the Bible is that it has sequels too. Acts is the sequel to the gospels—the four books about the life and ministry of Jesus—written to show us how we, even today, 2000 years later, live in the continuation of the story that started with Jesus. And it’s the story of how the sequel to Jesus turned the world upside down. In this series, we’re going to explore Acts and talk about how we fit into this continuing story. In this opening message, Pastor Joel unpacks how the big themes of Acts—taking the good news to the ends of the earth by the power of the Holy Spirit through ordinary people like us—are foreshadowed right away in its opening moments.
Often, the book of especially Nehemiah is framed as a kind of manual for how to build God’s kingdom, and certainly, there is a lot of wisdom in it for that. But the end of the story told in Ezra and Nehemiah is one of disappointment, of unraveling of all of the work that had been done up to that point. It can’t be treated as a manual for revival.
Instead, it’s a story longing for fulfillment to the problem of the unfaithfulness of our hearts to God and living his righteousness in the world. In this message, Pastor Joel explains how we can find the fulfillment we need to the story by expanding it out into the story of the whole Bible, where one of the descendants of the people in Ezra and Nehemiah, Jesus, picks up where God left off and makes it so we can become people who are transformed by the grace of God.
One of the final things the community of returned exiles we’ve been studying in Ezra and Nehemiah do is take time to confess and repent their and their ancestors sin to God. They admit the ways they had been arrogant, stiff-necked, refused to listen, and failed to remember God’s faithfulness to them in the past. They had wanted to do things their own way, and they’d seen the consequences of that need to control their lives at the expense of trusting God and relying on his wisdom.
This is central for us as followers of Jesus, too. As he began his ministry of the kingdom of God, Jesus called people to do something similar: to repent of their need to control their own lives, admit they were ultimately lost, and trust him. This is hard for people to do, especially in a world that encourages us to believe only we truly know how to live our own lives. But when we do, we are invited into the kingdom of God and a life far better than we could ever have found on our own. Many revivals have been founded on confession and repentance, and in this passage we see why.
Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he tasked his friends with a mission: To go and make disciples, to teach them to obey all he has taught. We are called to make disciples in breadth (new disciples) and depth (deepening existing disciples’ apprenticeship to Jesus). We are most effective when we do this together, using our unique skills, strengths, experiences, passions, and personalities as part of the larger whole, the body of Christ, as the apostle Paul calls it. In this message, Pastor Joel discusses Nehemiah and the incredible work done by the people he mobilized for a greater work, talks about what we can learn from him, explains why our culture’s “narcissism epidemic” is a big obstacle to the larger mission we have, and unpacks Jesus’s antidote for the epidemic, self denial.
In the previous message of this series, we talked about how one of the keys to rebuilding the community of Israel in Ezra and Nehemiah was to place Scripture at the center of their lives. With that comes a struggle, when Scripture might be too hard to understand or even seem to clash with itself. What do we do when we’re in similar situations? In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
At the point Ezra and Nehemiah take place, Israel had a checkered history of knowing and taking seriously God’s word. In this moment of restoration, they decided they would not be like their ancestors, and Ezra—the premier Bible nerd of his day—led the people in not just reading Scripture but living it out. A key part of that was helping them understand the Bible is not just divine information or a list of rules to hem closely to or be punished. It’s wisdom from God himself, meant to dwell in us and turn us into people who are built on the rock. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what Ezra did and how we can learn from his example.
Easter represents a brand new beginning, one that started the entire movement of Christianity that we are part of today. And because of that new beginning, we have the opportunity for new beginnings at all times, because of Jesus. Christians experience renovations of our lives, our hearts, our souls, as we follow Jesus. Maybe you are looking for a new beginning this Easter right now. In this message, Pastor Julie unpacks how we can find renewal and new beginnings in Jesus this Easter.
The book of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals a simple truth to us: Whenever we set out to do a work God has called us to, we should not be surprised at opposition or challenge associated with it. The opposition can be trials and tribulations, it can be spiritual opposition, and it is even often ourselves—our own tendency to get in way and mess things up. This is exactly what happens in the midst of the revival or renewal that God was working for the community in Ezra-Nehemiah, and it will happen to us as we seek to take Jesus seriously and build our lives only on the rock of his teaching and gospel. In this message, Pastor Joel shares the opportunities different kinds of opposition can present to us.
The first thing we see the returned exiles in Ezra-Nehemiah do is restore their patterns of worship, in time and place. In this message, Pastor Joel explains why, and how establishing patterns of worship will help us to love Jesus better, for as St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.”
Whether you go by statistics or just general vibes, many would say the church in America is not in a great spot. But God is always on the move. Ezra and Nehemiah are two books in the Old Testament that show us how God rebuilds. Jesus tells us that if we want to be people who endure, we should build our discipleship and churches on his teaching and gospel, a foundation he compares to a solid rock (Matthew 7:24-27). This series is a chance for us to look at where God is rebuilding his church and ask, “how can we be a part of it?" in a way that lasts. In this opening message, Pastor Joel introduces this series and unpacks three initial ways we see how the Jewish people, irrelevant and small, were led by God to rebuild themselves, and what we can learn from it today.
A popular notion in the world we live in today is that we need to love ourselves to love others. There’s some wisdom in this—we do need to be loved to love others. There has to be something in us to spill out to our neighbors. But far better than any love we can love ourselves with through boosting our ego is accepting a far greater force of love: God’s love for us. When we accept his love for us, we can have the love we need to love our neighbors in the way Jesus calls us to. In this message, Pastor Joel explains it all from the book of 1 John.
Jesus would tell stories to illustrate his points called parables. He tells several about people finding things of great value they had lost, and the joy that they had in finding those things. The stories were told to let us know how much God values finding the things he finds of greatest value that are lost: people. In love, he wants us to help find people who are lost, too.
But do we find the same joy as God when that happens? In this message, Pastor Julie helps us to think about how much joy we do or don’t have when what God finds of great value is found. She discusses how many Christians feel uncomfortable with evangelism, and talks about how we must avoid fear and resentment.
Jesus says that it’s not actually that special to love your friends, the people who you like and who have the same interests with you. Anybody can do that, he says. The challenging part of his call to love your neighbor is to love those who are hard to love—even people you might call your enemy. In this message, Res City Leadership Team member Miles Trump walks us through where to start in terms of living this challenging call from Jesus.
Jesus tells us we respond to his love by obeying him, and obeying him is summed up in two simple but profound commands: Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In our series, we previously spent time studying what it means to love God, and for the next few weeks we will study how to love your neighbor. A neighbor is anyone God gives us occasion and capacity to help, and one group who we have lots of occasion and capacity to help are the family of faith (Galatians 6:1), the church! In this message, Pastor Joel walks through four points based on Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that help us to move in the right direction for living out the command to love our Res City family, or whatever church we call home: (1) Have a We Not Me mindset, (2) Assume the best in each other, (3) Don’t let outside differences affect inside realities, and (4) Pursue our Common Mission.
Jesus tells us to love God with (paraphrasing) our head, heard, and hands. How can we love God with our hands? In this message, Pastor Julie gets really practical, talking about how our habits can become love for God. She shares how we can be intentional to point our habits toward God and become more like him through them!
Jesus tells us that the greatest command is to love God and that one of the ways we can do this is through obeying him. We might not often think about obedience as a form of love, and the word “obey” might even rub us the wrong way. But if we are willing to enter into Jesus’s vision for it, we can see how obedience is all about trusting him. If we trust that he’s the smartest man who ever lived, and that he truly, deeply, and passionately wants our best, obedience starts to become something we want to do—even a pathway to joy. In this message, Pastor Joel shares what it looks like to trust Jesus and why our tendency to make obedience about achievement will let us down.
The greatest command, Jesus says, is simply to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor. It’s really simple, right? Not as simple as we might think. We want to tackle how we can live out this great command in this series, starting with loving God, and specifically, loving God with our heart.
How do we do that? In order for us to love our neighbor the way Jesus desires for us, we have to first sort out how we love God. In this message, Res City elder Brett Ripley walks us through how loving God with our heart not a question of will. It’s a question of listening with radical priority. Join us!
In our last series we spent time thinking about abiding, specifically in prayer. But as Jesus’ teaching moves forward in John 15, we see abiding includes more than prayer. It involves imitation and obedience, and Jesus specifically says it is to look like loving in the way he does.
When we read the whole passage—or maybe better said, let it read us—we begin to ask ourselves some important and maybe difficult questions: What does it look like to love like Jesus? What does he mean by love? Why does loving by giving ourselves away actually help us become our truest selves? How does loving like Jesus offer us a greater joy than we could ever take for ourselves? And are we living with integrity according to the love of God’s grace shown to us?
The answers to these questions are what we want to explore in this series. Join us!
In this series we’ve been talking about abiding prayer, or prayer that helps us make our home in Jesus. In order to produce abiding, prayer must be filled with two-way communication, and to be honest, most of our prayers are one-way: us talking to God. Last week, Pastor Julie taught on listening prayer, and this week, pastor Joel teaches us about meditating on Scripture to help our prayer lead to abiding.
When we think about prayer, we probably think of talking to God. Prayer certainly includes us asking God for things, but to imagine that’s all it is misses the point. Prayer is a conversation, which means we must sometimes be silent and listen to God, too. In this message, Pastor Julie shares how we can do so, unpacking the concept of listening or contemplative prayer.
Christians talk about Jesus in all kinds of ways—as God, a king, the messiah, a prophet, our sacrifice—but we less often relate to him as a rabbi, which is how many people primarily experienced him. He was a teacher, who taught people how to live wisely and fruitfully in God’s world. When we take him seriously as our rabbi, we see how much he has to teach us. And one of his most famous teachings is on exactly what we’re studying in this series: Abiding prayer. Join us as we come alongside our rabbi and learn his wisdom for prayer that connects us to our Father.
It’s the beginning of a new year, and people often get reflective about themselves after the ball drops at midnight. In this short series to kick off 2025, we want to talk about what it might mean to have rhythms that lead us to lives that are fruitful. One of the most crucial passages for discipleship in the Bible is in John 15, where Jesus explains that when we are his disciples, he desires for us to bear fruit. The way we bear fruit, he says, is to abide in him, which means to remain in his presence or make our home in him.
What does it look like to abide? It’s not just a vague word that means “being a Christian.” It’s an active verb, something you do, something you make time for, you can in some ways quantify, even. This series is all about some ways to abide in Jesus through prayer. In this first message, Pastor Joel walks through something called a Daily Office, which is a tool that we can use to daily abide in our King.
Christmas has a lot to do with power, and especially with the idea of power and love combining, but that’s maybe not how we think of it. In this message, Pastor Joel explains how Christmas shows us an absurd kind of power: the power of love, and we see it expressed in the nativity scene. When this power truly touches us, we aren’t the same. Join us for this final Sunday in Advent as we meditate on what that means—and how it might influence how we celebrate Christmas this year.
Christmas is all about an amazingly generous gift from God to us—himself. And so advent has always included an encouragement to being generous ourselves. In this message, Pastor Julie explains what generosity looks like, how it’s rooted in God himself and how we take that serious at Res City.
Advent comes to us in what is the darkest time of year; the sun comes up late and sets early. It’s fitting that so much of the imagery of the season also has to do with light that dawns in the darkness of Jesus being born: “A people living in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).
We live in a world where things often feel dark. What response might we have to the darkness we feel that can prepare us for the light of Christmas? Perhaps surprisingly, advent calls us to repentance. In this message, Pastor Julie explains how how we can deal with the darkness in the world and prepare our hearts for the coming of the light of Christ.
How much time do people spend preparing for a wedding vs. how much they spend preparing for a marriage? The stats show people spend a lot more time preparing for the wedding than what comes after—the much more important thing. The same question could be applied to us and Christmas? How much time do we spend preparing for the holiday part of Christmas vs. how much time do we spend preparing our hearts for the promise, hope, kingdom, and joy of the coming of Jesus? In this message, Pastor Julie explores what kinds of barriers might exists in our hearts to keep us from preparing for the coming of true royalty in Jesus this advent season.
If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you might remember Barry Bot’s every flavored beans. The idea is that some “beans” are good flavors- strawberry, toasted marshmallow, while others are vomit or ear wax flavored. The tricky thing is you can’t tell by looking at the beans which one you are going to get- you have to taste and see- to your horror or delight. The idea of a mixed bag of good and bad jelly beans is good analogy for life. Life is a mixed bag of good and bad all jumbled together. Which means we need to be able to spot God’s goodness.
In this message, Res City Leadership Team member Krista Schroeder shares from Psalm 34 about what it means that God is good, and how the Psalm invites us ‘taste and see’ something that is far better than a bag of jelly beans—God himself!
The God of the Bible is described as an author, one who tells the greatest story the world has ever known, and one we’re invited to join into with our own individual stories. In Psalm 105 we read about one chapter in this great story, and Pastor Julie shares what it looks like for us to see our own story line up with the one told here.
It’s natural for us to praise or celebrate that which feels worthy. It can even feel delightful to do it sometimes. In Psalm 147, we are invited to see God as delightful to worship, and we see why as we read through its twenty verses. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks the Psalm and shares three suggestions for how to build a sense of worth in our hearts for God.
In the Psalms, different parts of God’s nature and character are drawn out for us and when we really think about them, fill us with awe and wonder. In Psalm 90, the key idea is God’s timelessness, the way in which he is not bound by time in the way we are. It’s harder to wrap our heads around this idea than others, but very relevant and wonderful for us when we do. In this message, Res City worship leader Zach Dohmen explains how big God is, how small we are in comparison, and why both of these are good news for us.
It’s easy to get cynical in today’s world. It’s easy to believe that doing the right thing leads you nowhere. But Scripture wants to challenge us away from falling into this bleak way of viewing the world, and offer us one of hope and stability. In Psalm 18, we see that God’s character is righteousness, which speaks to his faithfulness to bless us when we walk in his way and wisdom. In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
In Psalm 18:1-19, God is depicted in a way we haven’t yet seen in this series: A fierce deliverer. He is a terrifying force, but his power is used for the purpose of delivering his servant, David. While we might see someone described like God is here as intimidating, it’s all about perspective. We are the ones God rushes to deliver. But what does God deliver us from? And do we want to be rescued? In this message, Pastor Joel examines all of these ideas.
**Note: There was technical difficulty during the live recording of the sermon, so the audio used here is from a re-recording.
It seems like when we see the news, it’s always bad. Psychology tells us that humans are just more interested in bad news than good news, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of good news out there. In Psalm 65 we consider that God is like a king who travels the whole earth, leaving tracks like from a chariot behind him that “drip fatness”—his goodness and blessing pooled up in the track marks and evident for all to see. When we see good news in the world—whatever it looks like—it is a track mark of God’s goodness.
In this message, Pastor Joel helps us consider three responses to this wonderful God’s overflowing goodness—to extend common grace like he does, to live in the abundance of today, and to make it our mission to see God’s tracks even when it’s hard. Join us as we study this incredible Psalm.
We all want control. We try to control our lives and everything around us, but we can't, and in fact all we end up dong is making ourselves anxious. But we find in Scripture reassurance, or wisdom, that reminds us God is in control, and we can trust in him because of it. In this message, Pastor Julie explains why this is good news for us.
We naturally admire people who aren’t helpless when the world doesn’t work like it should, and we should have the same admiration with God. In Psalm 82, we read about what God does for those who are helpless in the world, though he does it in a way we might not expect. In this message, we’ll be taken into a mysterious and often avoided concept in Scripture: the divine council, a group of spiritual beings who resist God’s calls for justice and mercy in the world. What we find is that God is working behind the scenes to help those who are helpless.
Do you ever wonder why Earth is not like other planets? On other planets the conditions are so extreme that no life can ever live, but on Earth life is everywhere and we don’t just have to try and survive; we can thrive. We might just chalk it up to random chance, but in the Bible there’s another answer: God’s active care of creation.
In Psalm 104, as the writer surveys all of creation, from the seas to mountain goats, we find three themes that fill us with awe and wonder of God: How fully alive he is, how he restrains and redirects chaos, and how dependent we actually are on him. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through this delightful Psalm and gets us to examine how seriously we actually take God’s action in the world and in our lives.
One essential piece of discipleship is awe. We need awe, but awe is not something that comes naturally to us. One way we can cultivate awe within us is by reading the Psalms, which is what we’ll be doing in this series: reading selected Psalms that tell us about who God is in order to inspire awe within us.
In the first message in this series, Pastor Joel leads us through Psalm 139, which presents God as omnipresent (everywhere at once) and omniscient (knowing all things). But the Psalm doesn’t just present God in this way like he’s a giant Google machine that can spit out information to you about anything. It presents God as aware of these things because of his intimate knowledge of us. And it’s not just his knowledge of us; it’s his deep and abiding love for us. God knows us so he can call us to even greater things, more and more. Join us as we spend some time meditating on all of this!
In the final chapter of Jonah, we finally get the conversation between God and Jonah we’ve been waiting for. This is a chance for both to speak honestly to one another and for us to finally find out exactly what made Jonah run from God in the first place. What Jonah tells God—and us—is a stunning admission that God is not the God he wants to worship. Jonah is offended by God’s grace. In this final message of our Jonah series, Pastor Joel talks about how we can find ourselves also offended by God’s radical grace—but also why it’s so amazing and necessary for us.
The story of Jonah is not really about a man who spends some time in the belly of a fish. Instead, it’s the story about a man who runs from God. In this message, we finally get into why Jonah ran from God—and it might not be the reason you expect.
Jonah, from what we can discern of him, was an intensely patriotic Jew, one who put his love of country ahead of God. This is the gap that existed between Jonah and God, and it remained even after he decided to follow through on what God asked him to do in the first place. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks what we can learn from Jonah’s own struggles with identity and unhealthy love of country, and the deeper insight we can find from any gaps between God and ourselves we might have.
In the first chapter of Jonah, we read about Jonah’s flight from God. Jonah is so relatable because we all run from God, but when we choose to stop, we have to complete the process and return to God. In chapter two, we see Jonah return to God from the belly of a great fish, which the Bible often calls repentance. What does it look like to return to God? In this message, Pastor Joel explains three dimensions of repentance and why it matters so much for kingdom people, not just runaway prophets.
Leviticus can be a difficult book to understand, and people who skim through it might find it to be one of those irrelevant parts of the Bible they hear about. But if we hear what the book is saying to us over and over to help make sense of it, all the hard to understand parts make a lot more sense. The phrase “Be holy for I’m holy” and variations of it recur eleven times in the book, and it’s here that we start to make sense of what’s going on. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what holiness actually is and why, despite seeming irrelevant to us today, Leviticus and holiness are so important in our own discipleship walks.
In this special message, Res City Leadership Team Member Miles Trump offers some reflections on hospitality.
Leviticus is one of the hardest books for a modern Western person to understand. Full of ancient rituals, rules, and regulations, it’s hard to understand, especially when we so firmly believe in the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus: where faith and grace are the foundations of our relationship.
But despite the fact that it seems opposed to those foundations, Leviticus has a lot to say to us about how we can get close to God in very practical ways. In this opening message to a five week series, Pastor Julie explains how relationship is essential in Leviticus, and why that matters for us today.
In this special baptism service message, Pastor Joel offers some reflections on baptism from a story in Acts 8:26-39, where we learn about what God does behind each baptism as well as the nature of discipleship. We find in this story that baptism and discipleship are intimately connected.
Sometimes, the most extraordinary thing is right under our noses. In this final message of the series, Pastor Joel talks about the ordinary is good, but we must be careful to not let ourselves believe the good news we believe and the Savior and King we give our allegiance to is ordinary. He walks through the story of the transfiguration of Jesus to talk about how we need these reminders from time to time, but also that they come in glimpses.
Sometimes, we find ourselves in seasons of deep goodness—refreshed, our needs met, nothing burdening us, vibing. As Dallas Willard writes, “God has yet to meet anyone except for where they actually are,” which means even in these seasons, just like any other, God is looking to meet us. How can we be intentional to give those times of goodness over to God? In this message, Pastor Joel walks through why gratitude and alertness are so essential to disciples of Jesus. As summer starts and you hopefully enter a season of goodness, this might be the perfect message to kick it off!
Many Christians go through a period of their life where they walk in what feels like a spiritual wilderness: A season where we feel lost to God and our faith and many other things. Our spirit is crushed, and we feel unable to hear God’s voice. Depression might be part of it, but it’s more than that. God feels hidden to us. Some call this season a dark night of the soul.
Has God abandoned us? Is he hiding from us in these seasons? Does he even care? The truth is, God is always looking to draw us deeper into his love, and so if he seems hidden then there must be a reason—and it must be to draw us deeper into his love.
In this message, Pastor Joel preaches about how how we can walk off these seasons by using Jesus’ time in the wilderness in temptation as a model.
Friendship is one of the most vital parts of a healthy life as well as faith, but it's increasingly harder to do well in ordinary life. In this message, Pastor Julie shares some wisdom from Proverbs on what we should seek in a friend--and how to be a good one ourselves!
Have you ever had a day where something happens and it just throws off your day? One of those emails, a conversation with a co-worker, something your kid says to you, whatever it is. Productivity, peace, patience, just gone. And worst of all for us who follow Jesus, our ability to bear fruit is out the window too.
Usually when this happens, it’s because some fear has been triggered: I’m worthless, I’m helpless, I’m unlovable. Should followers of Jesus have this happen to them? What do we do in those moments?
In this message, Pastor Joel talks about how when we abide in Jesus, we can take those emotions and deal with them in a healthy way.
Humans love stories, and the main places we tell stories in our modern culture is through movies, TV shows, and increasingly, video games. In our ordinary lives movies, video games, and TV shows are some of the places we go to find something special, to find, as actress Nicole Kidman says in a well known AMC Movie Theater ad, “magic…to laugh, to cry, to care, because we need that. To find that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim, and we go somewhere we’ve never been before, not just entertained, but somehow reborn.” The stats bear out the feeling Kidman is describing. Various studies all say the average American watches around three hours of TV a day, and that doesn’t include time spent watching movies or playing video games. We come to stories looking to be inspired and find meaning in our own ordinary lives.
But what if the hope of finding some magic in the stories we tell indicates a longing in the human heart for a greater story, one as old as time put there by God? In this message, Pastor Joel walks us through Acts 17 to show us how this is the case, and encourages us to be thoughtful about the stories we take in.
For many of us, caring for others like children or family or friends with needs is ordinary. How do we do so with gentleness, like Jesus? In this Mother's Day message, Pastor Julie shares how from the book of Hebrews.
In this series, we’re talking about the ordinary. Something that is ordinary for Americans is elections, and we have another contentious one coming up in a few months. We’re hunkering down for the fear, the anxiety, the conflict seeking, the black and white, back alley, bare knuckles, street fighting with the other side nature of it all. It’s exhausting. Is it how we should approach it as Christians? The answer is emphatically no, and in this message, Pastor Joel talks about why Christians have a whole different agenda when it comes to politics than we normally are told. Join us as we study 1 Peter and find out what that looks like.
Most upper and middle class Americans are uncomfortable with suffering, and we often think of our faith in terms of the triumph and success we can get from it. But when we read Scripture, we find stories of suffering are a lot more common than we think, and we need to be exposed to them so that we can learn how to speak and think about our seasons of suffering.
Suffering is ordinary. What are we going to do when we enter it? In this message, Pastor Joel walks through how to speak the language of lament, looking at the book of Lamentations.
Having a body is a lot of work! It requires a lot of ordinary maintenance, and we can get annoyed by it or view our body simply as a machine. But according to Scripture, our bodies are spiritually very significant to God. In this message, Pastor Joel explains why that is the case, from why it has significance, the stories it tells as we maintain it, and the sacredness of how God dwells in us and when we engage it in worship.
On this special Res City Commissioning Sunday, Angela Hermanson preaches on what is most ordinary about the work we do: it never seems to end. As she focuses on the story of Nehemiah and the efforts of the Jewish people to rebuild the city walls of Jerusalem, she notes different encouragements to remember when our own work feels repetitive and ordinary.
We tend to view maturity as being the opposite of a child—someone who is independent, can make their own decisions and get what they want without help. Someone with willpower and assertiveness is someone we look up to. But at the same time, Christians pray a prayer that says of God, “Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done.” The mature Christian, if we take that prayer seriously, is someone who can surrender their will to God because they are surrendered to the love of God.
To be honest, we struggle with this. In this message, Pastor Joel talks about why, what happens when we try to use all our willpower for the purpose of kingdom of self, and why surrendering to God’s love first is the key to surrendering to his will. Come check it out!
Easter weekend is sacred because it’s the interruption of what’s ordinary: death. There is perhaps nothing that is as ordinary as death because it’s something all people do, no matter who they are. Except for one man, Jesus. By definition, the resurrection is extraordinary, and disciples of Jesus are people who come into an encounter with the extraordinary, risen Jesus. Yet, as we’ve been talking about recently as a church, we also are ordinary, and ordinary is good. What is the relationship between the ordinary faith Christians often have and extraordinary treasure we have within us? In this Easter message, Pastor Joel walks through it all.
Imagine this: You get poor feedback at work, or you get a poorer grade on a test than you thought. You are more winded after a workout than you thought. You find out something you said a week ago actually rubbed a friend the wrong way. Bumping up against the truth like this is ordinary, but how often do we make confessing and surrendering to the truth ordinary? Those are not the same thing. In reality, we often find telling the truth to be a nuisance. It contradicts our self-image, or it gives us something to fix. We often would rather suppress it than surrender to it. But what if ordinary moments of being confronted with the truth are more than just annoyances, but are good for our soul? What if those moments can become sacred because they draw us into God’s love in a way we can’t do when we ignore them? In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about why we need to make telling the truth ordinary, and how it opens pathways of healing to us when we do.
One of the tensions Christians live with is how to sustain their spiritual life of discipleship with the often chock full, fast paced life of their ordinary, which fills up their schedule and can squeeze out the time necessary to have a robust life with God. While God finds the ordinary good, our ordinary can lead us away from him too. We need to learn how to be intentional with our ordinary, because the truth is that the disciplines needed to sustain a flourishing life of discipleship are not going from spiritual high to spiritual high, but are ordinary, repetitive, and quiet.
In this message, Pastor Joel talks about two ways to sustain a flourishing life of discipleship in the midst of the ordinary.
Author and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren writes that, “We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out. Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God?” In this new series, we will talk about why these things matter to God and look at how we can live our ordinary lives in such a way that what seems ordinary becomes extraordinary as we find where God meeting us in the routine. Pastor Joel lays the foundation for the series in this opening message by exploring why ordinary matters to God, how a desire for the constantly extraordinary can crush us, and more.
Jesus offers to all his disciples a simple portrait of what it means to follow him, and at Res City we believe the words Know, Grow, Go, Together helps us to keep this portrait in front of us. In this message, Pastor Joel takes those four ideas that we’ve been covering in this series and walks through them all in Luke 5, a simple story of discipleship to wrap up this series on the core concepts that drive us at Res City.
As we talk about what it means to KNOW, GROW, and GO, we want to do all of those things TOGETHER. We’ve all been adopted into the family of God, and as a local church community, we are an extended family. Even though we may all have different backgrounds, interests, and life stages, we come together to follow Jesus and support one another along the way. In this message, Julie explores practical ways we can act as a family in the local church.
At Res City, we believe a healthy disciple of Jesus is someone who is Knowing, Growing, Going. When we are Knowing and Growing, we desire to Go, which means serve the needs of the world around us and invite others to be disciples. In this message, Res City member and former campus evangelist Nathan Van Zee shares why Invitation is so important but also why we must be very thoughtful about how we do it in a very practical and approachable way.
Ever hear the advice to dress for the job you want, not the job you have? Christians look forward to a time when Jesus will return and restore and make whole all things. In the present, disciples of Jesus are people who dress for the world we want Jesus to bring, not the world we currently live in. This is the heart of service. Service in our city and of those in need is important at Res City because we believe disciples of Jesus are people who take seriously his final command to us in Matthew 28:19: Go!
In this message, Pastor Joel talks about a vision for what service now—tending to the unborn, refugees, migrants, beggars, diseased and suffering, etc., and partnering with the organizations whose primary concern is these people in giving aid, jobs, relief, medical care, etc.—can look like and how and why we do it, along with what kinds of pitfalls to avoid. He talks about how service can help you Grow, and why hope is so essential.
As we continue our series on discipleship and specifically look at what it means to Grow, Pastor Julie talks about how we must deny ourselves in order to grow spiritually. Spiritual growth holds that the presence of God and his Spirit are the things that change us, AND we can take practical steps to move toward growth in our own lives. In this message, Pastor Julie walks through both of those ideas.
Christians are not always that well regarded in society, and we often find people to be uninterested in our good news. The truth is, people outside the church don’t care that much about the good news of Jesus if they don’t encounter goodness when they meet Christians. Eternal life is not something that starts in the future, it’s supposed to be something that starts now, and it’s supposed to be something that changes us. And that leads us to the idea of growth. At Res City, we often us the language of “bearing fruit” to describe growth, and in this message Pastor Joel explains what bearing fruit looks like, why it matters, and how we can partner with God to see fruit grow in our own lives.
In this series about how we understand discipleship at Res City, we build off of last week’s message on what it means to Know God. While it starts with knowing him through new birth, having an emotional awareness of God’s love for us, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to grow in knowing God with our minds. In fact, Jesus expects it by telling us to love God with our heart, soul, strength, and mind (Mark 12:30). When we refuse to do that, we have a stunted and unhealthy discipleship. And we have lots of important sources for seeing our minds grow in the knowledge of God to help us grow as disciples. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through some of the ways we can do this.
At Res City, we use the language Know, Grow, Go, Together to describe what it means to follow Jesus and be made new by God’s Spirit. In this series, we want to take an extended look at them all, giving us a shared understanding of what they mean and something to come back to, spending two weeks on each word. We want this series to be foundational in how we think about the Christian life in a ordered, simplified sense, something to come back to and for us to build off of as a church in the future.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through Know, explaining how to Know is all rooted in what God has done: Produce new life in us, or as Jesus puts in in John 3, to give us new birth. What does that mean, what does it look like, how is it different than knowing things like doctrine or Scripture, and how does it influence how we look at others Christ followers? This is such a foundational concept to understand if we’re going to follow Jesus, and we tackle it all here!
This Sundays’s advent candle is the candle of joy, and pastor Julie talks about where we find true and lasting joy during the holidays and all year long.
One of the most famous Christmas passages of Scripture is in Isaiah 9, which speaks of a coming child-king who will be a Prince of Peace. Why is peace such good news for all generations? What does the Bible even mean by the peace that we receive from Jesus? It might not look exactly how you think. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through this essential Christmas tradition.
In this sermon, guest preacher and Res City member David Jahnke shares about how we can find hope in the coming of God this advent season through thinking about the story of Christmas from Joseph's vantage point.
What happens when your faith is running on empty? Emphasizing that the gospel is the core foundation of Christianity, this sermon explored how it serves as the lens through which believers must understand their faith. Guest preacher Brett Ripley underscored the transformative power of the gospel, urging christians to stop doing the "should's" of life. Throughout the message, we are encouraged to connect the various aspects of our lives to the gospel flywheel that gives us energy and purpose.
Understanding Jesus’ Parable of the Talent, we see how Jesus calls his followers to live and act while they wait for His return. In this sermon, guest preacher Joel Nelson reminds us that we are responsible to God for what he has given us, no matter where we are at in life. We are challenged to evaluate how our actions and attitudes keep us accountable to the expectations Jesus has for us.
In Jesus' parable about the prodigal son from the gospel of Luke, we are reminded of the different perspectives that each of the individuals in the parable had and how we are all members of God's family. This message by guest preacher Miles Trump delves into the emotional journey of the prodigal son, the unwavering love and mercy of the compassionate father, and the complex response of the other son who remained faithful. We are challenged to examine our own thoughts and beliefs in comparison to the prodigal son, the running father and the other son in the parable.
In Jesus' parable about an unmerciful servant, he reminds us of the necessity of forgiveness in His kingdom. Jesus cancelled a hefty debt for all of us, well beyond anything we are capable of paying back. If we separate our experience of his forgiveness from the rest of our life, that's when we risk acting like the unmerciful servant. In this sermon, guest preacher Michael Bolland reminds us that we are forgiven much so that we may love much!
The idea of 'fairness' is woven into all of our lives. We learn rules of fairness as kids, and expect our hard work to pay off as we grow older. Even when we see someone's hard work not getting the reward it deserves, our anger about that proves the place we think fairness plays in the world. When someone gets something we think we deserve, we feel it's unfair and become jealous. In this parable, Jesus speaks to our notions of fairness and asks us to consider that God operates according to a different standard: goodness. He is simply good. In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
In a special Sunday morning Res City service, Pastor Joel takes a moment to commission Res City's first missionary, Andrea Kidder, and talk about two parables in which Jesus explains how God's kingdom (including in missions work!) grows: unexpectedly and through God's power and direction.
“Where joy is absent, the kingdom is absent.”So says New Testament scholar Klyne Snodgrass about Jesus’s preaching of God’s kingdom’s coming. Joy is supposed to spill out of those who live in it. How many would say that joy characterizes their discipleship? In this message, Pastor Joel explains why this is the case, how joy comes through the kingdom, and we do an extended Question and Response to close the message out.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is maybe the most famous of Jesus, and also his most annoying because it challenges us to love and serve people who we might really despise. In this message, Pastor Julie explains what love is and what it looks like to live this parable in our everyday lives.
For our sermon the wheat and weeds in Matthew 13, we had originally intended for it to be a Question and Response-driven message, with dialogue between Pastor Joel and the congregation in the from of an extended Q+R time at the end filling up a lot of the time. Unfortunately, we had some issues with the questions coming through, and so here they all get responded to! We're sorry if you submitted a question and didn't have a chance for it to get responded to in the sermon, but here we do our best to remedy it! We look forward to future Q+R-driven sermons in the future.
Jesus, like his followers today, seemed to field a pressing question from people on a regular basis: “How can the kingdom of God be present when there’s still so much wrong with the world?” Jesus was preaching that kingdom had come, God had done an amazing work, we should have joy—yet so much still seems to be wrong. Evil and injustice and the general crumminess of life on earth didn’t go anywhere. What gives?
In this message, Pastor Joel walks through a story Jesus tells to respond to this question, how it opens us up to a more complex world than the one we think we’re often living in, and how it invites us to patience, trust, and to Jesus’s most definitive statement about evil at all: the cross. Included is an extended time of question and response at the end.
Jesus sometimes used parables as tools of discomfort, to put us in a state of unease and self-reflection so we can grow. In Luke 14:27-35, Jesus gives one such parable. It’s about people who have tried to do something but haven’t counted the cost, and are foolish because of it. The question Jesus asks us is, “have we counted the cost of our discipleship, or do we treat it like someone who lives in an unfinished house?” In this sermon, Pastor Joel guides us through these challenging words from our King.
One of Jesus's favorite teaching methods is parables. Some estimate that these stories make up 1/3 of his teachings! So as we seek to follow Jesus, we want to make sure we understand this form of teaching. In this week's sermon, Julie talks about how Jesus's parables are stories to help us understand truths about the kingdom of God. The parable of the sower helps illustrate this point and helps us think about our expectations and priorities as we follow Jesus.
Christianity is unique in the it’s not just good advice, like a wisdom to live by, but a recognition of something that happened in history: a dead man named Jesus who had seemed like a special person in God’s purposes who all of a sudden came back to life. Everything we do is because of that mysterious surprise smack dab in the middle of history. If we take that piece out of the Jenga tower, the whole thing comes toppling down, and the pursuit of holiness that 1 Corinthians is all about is revealed to be useless.. In this final sermon in the series, Pastor Joel walks through this powerhouse of a passage to wrap up the first letter to the Corinthians.
Communication is vital. Think about how much it matters to hear words like “I’m pregnant” “I love you” “Will you marry me?” “Not guilty”, “You’ve got the job”, “I believe in you.” It can totally fill someone with life and save them from despair, or even death! Communication is vital. And it matters to God, too. In this sermon, Pastor Joel shares how the Corinthians were misunderstanding the gifts of tongues and prophecy and God’s words for them as a church as a result, and why it matters we understand God wants to speak to us…and what can happen when we don’t care.
1 Corinthians is a famous passage about love that you often hear at weddings. In this sermon, Julie walks through why love is the true mark of the Holy Spirit and why it matters that we show this kind of radical love to our church family. The message ends with practical ways to grow in love by reflecting on God’s love for us as shown through Jesus.
Res City is four and half years old, and has gone through several phases in our life: from the church plant launch stage, to the survival stage of covid, and now to a spot where we can start to think about the future. But how do we think about the future? What counts as success? Do we have any goals?
In this conversation among the Res City Leadership Team--made up of Krista Schroeder, Miles Trump, Brett Ripley, and pastors Julie and Joel Stegman--we ask these questions and explain the vision behind how we define "success" as a church and how that directs our goals for the future.
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about how the church is designed to function with unity in diversity. Even though those ideas seem to contradict each other, Paul shows how true unity comes through a diversity of spiritual gifts and diversity of people all working together in the church body. In other words, the church needs YOU, and you need the church! We encounter threats to our unity through diversity in multiple ways: uniformity which creates a monster, not a body, self-focus which pulls us away from proper focus, and hierarchies which subtly fracture the church. Pastor Julie walks us through this idea and how we can avoid threats.
“Your worship gatherings do more harm than good.” Yikes. Not what you want to hear if you’re a leader in a church, but it was true in Corinth. As the letter goes along, we’ll explore all of the reasons this is the case, but in this passage we see two reasons for it: theological problems between how men and women viewed themselves, and a total meltdown of the Lord’s Supper. In this sermon, Pastor Joel tells us what we need to keep in mind if we want to keep ourselves from worship gatherings that do more harm than good by making them all about ourselves.
At the beginning of the gospel story of Jesus, we’re told about another prophet who gave up the celebrity and authority he had so that Jesus and his kingdom might grow instead. This small but important story sets a pattern for all who follow Jesus—the same Jesus who went even further and gave up not just comfort, authority, rights, and freedom for us, but his very life. In this passage in 1 Corinthians 9, the apostle Paul explains how he too does the same, and invites us to consider how we can follow him in being not amateurs about our faith, but serious professional “athletes”. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through a couple of examples for what this might look like for us to follow suit.
It can be fun to be knowledgeable about something, but it can also present a real challenge to our holiness when we let knowledge replace love. In this passage from 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul talks all about how being the smartest person in the room can make us poor at having a more important knowledge than just facts: the knowledge of love. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
Despite stories that have been told in church and in the world at large for a long time, the gospel is good news for single people because of who we are in Christ. Together we can cultivate a high view of singleness that is founded on a holy identity in Christ. In this sermon, Res City missionary Andrea Kidder guides us through how to have a deeper understanding of singleness than the ones we are regularly fed.
On Res City's baptism Sunday 2023, we study a passage in 1 Corinthians where Paul responds to the idea that someone getting baptized and partaking in the Lord's Supper could keep them immune from the effects of partaking in regular idol feasts. Paul's response invites them to think back on the history of Israel in the wilderness, and Pastor Joel challenges us to ask ourselves if the path we take after baptism lines up with baptism itself.
We love our freedom and authority to do what we want in America. It’s a the heart of how we think about so much of our lives. The Corinthians loved their freedom in Christ too, but Paul has learned they are using it in a way that is creating lots of issues in their church, namely in how they thought about sex. In a New Testament vision for how we view our bodies, while freedom is very much a part of it, there are other very important factors to consider too, and in this sermon Pastor Joel breaks down what they are.
“The church puts business before matters of faith.” This is a real(ish) headline from a newspaper about two pastors who have a dispute between their churches and their feud went public. Not a good look for those who read the newspaper and who a church might want to invite to know Jesus. If we follow a Jesus who has given us the tools of his Spirit and his own example, shouldn’t we be able to figure most conflicts in the church out ourselves? That’s Paul’s contention in this section of 1 Corinthians. Pastor Joel unpacks that as well as commenting on Paul’s reference homosexuality in this passage.
**Note: There was technical difficulty during the live recording of the sermon, so the audio used here is from a re-recording.
In this recording of the main session of our 2023 Res City Summer retreat, Joel walks through a short but very pregnant topic in 1 Corinthians 3: Do we take seriously that we, the church of God, are God's temple? And what does that even mean? How does it shape our corporate identity, and how would it change our seemingly "normal" interactions with one another? What does it mean that God "dwells" in our midst? Joel walks through all of this and more in this session.
The Corinthian church wanted something out of their leaders that didn’t fit the gospel they’d received from Paul. Paul’s response to them is really incredible and instructive for us, whether we’re a ministry leader or not, because all Christians are called to do ministry. Paul uses two analogies to describe the work of Christian ministers: working in a field and building a house. When we deeply meditate on these analogies, it can truly transform how we think about ministry. Join us, as Pastor Joel leads us in a reflection on this amazing passage from 1 Corinthians.
**Note: There was technical difficulty during the live recording of the sermon, so the audio used here is from a re-recording.
The church in Corinth has a problem with valuing status gained over being like Christ. In short, you could say they have an issue with confusing celebrity with holiness. Instead, Paul reminds them, the gospel is predicated on a form of anti-celebrity: the cross. When the modern American church reads this passage, it has to grapple with its own celebrity problems, and in this sermon Pastor Joel asks what it would be like if we valued a focus on the cross—cruciformity—over celebrity.
In this series, we want to draw together themes from our last three series on the Spirit of God, Sin, and Grace. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church is the product of a deep frustration at a church that has become far too much like the city they resided in, rather than becoming like God. How does Paul respond?
Not by getting angry at them, not by canceling them, and not by shaming them. Instead, he encourages them to become who they already are: God’s holy people. Therein lies the key to their issues. As we start a summer series in 1 Corinthians, we will come back to this idea over and over: are we making holiness our deepest identity? Join us!
During some tragic events in Israel’s story, in the midst of disaster, God allows a group of leftovers, or a remnant, to survive. These are people who, by God’s grace, ensure God’s people press on. In the present, we see in many ways a fading of the church and Christianity, but if God acts according to grace then there is a remnant that survives. If you’re still here, you’re part of the remnant.
In this sermon Pastor Joel explains how we can embrace this grace by adopting a “remnant mindset” and thrive throughout a season for the church that could otherwise destroy it.
Moses is one of the most important figures in all of Scripture, and he is seen as a great liberator and titanic personality in history. Yet, when we really look at his story, we don’t see someone who succeeded in an incredible effort by his own will, but through God’s grace. We find someone who initially tried to do it his own way, but who had to learn to turn his discontent with the world into a holy discontent from being transformed by God’s grace. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks Moses’s story and where see God act according to his pattern of grace.
We love to learn about the patterns of successful people, seeing what they do that leads to their success. In this new series, we want to answer this question: What is the pattern that makes God who he is, and that he operates in to accomplish his goals?
There could be many ways we answer this question, and the way we answer it is a projection of who we think God is. But when we really look at Scripture, there is one clear pattern: God operates according to grace. In this sermon, Pastor Joel looks at the story of Abraham to get a clear sense for this pattern, and learn what kind of response God asks of us in return: trust.
Why does it matter if we believe in the resurrection or not? This Easter, Pastor Julie talks about why it matters that we worship a living, resurrected God, specifically how it gives us purpose, power, and a personal relationship with Jesus. As the angels say in Luke 24:5-6: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!"Why does it matter if we believe in the resurrection or not? This Easter, Pastor Julie talks about why it matters that we worship a living, resurrected God, specifically how it gives us purpose, power, and a personal relationship with Jesus. As the angels say in Luke 24:5-6: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!"
Taking a deep look at sin in the world and in ourselves, as we’ve been doing in this series, is tough. It’s uncomfortable. It makes us grapple with parts of ourselves we don’t like, something we don’t often do.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about some biblical wisdom around how we deal with uncomfortable looks at ourselves, including not just our sin but our other weaknesses as well. Incredibly, as we write our “anti bio”, the list of our weaknesses and shortcomings, we find God’s presence meets us in deep and profound ways as we come to learn what it means that his grace is sufficient for us.
Sin is described many ways in Scripture. It’s not just described as actions that fall short or miss the mark in some way, but also as something bigger than us, something that we can’t manage or corral or educate or work ourselves past. It’s described as a kind of tyrant or invading force, “increasing,” “exercising dominion,” “seizing opportunities,”“working death in us,” and more. It’s bigger than us.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how sin becomes Capital “S” Sin, locking us under its power, but also how we have hope through Jesus because of forgiveness, which frees us from the cage Capital “S” Sin puts us in. As Desmond Tutu says, “Without forgiveness, there can be no future.” Join us in this sermon to find out what that means.
“You are what you eat!”
“Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.”
These truisms that people say to make the point that what we take into us previews who we become. The biblical way of making this point is saying, “You become what you worship.”
What we worship—what we call worth greatest value, what gives us hope and assurance—we take on the characteristics of and become like. And when we worship something that isn’t Jesus, we start to act in a way that doesn’t honor God, often outright sinning. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains the connection between sin and worship, and talks about how when we worship God we are refreshed and made like Jesus.
God created the world, good, in harmony and peace with itself, expressed in the Hebrew word shalom. Sin is vandalizing God’s shalom, and we can understand sin a lot more more deeply when we understand it in this way. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
Sin is a word that makes many uncomfortable. Often it’s associated with shame and judgment, a means to destroy self esteem and create anxiety within people.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel asks us to consider if our understanding of sin goes to the biblical depth, and if as we go to the heart of it we actually can find hope, liberation, and grace for ourselves and each other that the world desperately needs.
In this follow up podcast to our series Walking By the Spirit, Pastor Joel is joined by Res City members Krista Schroeder and Luke Sandstrom to go deeper into the Holy Spirit. They discuss their experiences of the Spirit and very charismatic settings, what they are processing through because of those experiences, what Scripture passages frame their thinking on the Spirit most, and much more!
In this follow up podcast to our series Walking By the Spirit, Pastor Joel is joined by Res City members Krista Schroeder and Luke Sandstrom to go deeper into the Holy Spirit. They discuss their experiences of the Spirit and very charismatic settings, what they are processing through because of those experiences, what Scripture passages frame their thinking on the Spirit most, and much more!
In 2 Timothy 3:16-17, Paul tells us that the Scriptures are “breathed out by God…so we may be equipped for good work.” The biblical idea for God’s Spirit is that it is his breath, so Scripture and God’s Spirit are intimately tied to one another. A large part of our spirituality, walking by the Spirit, is reading, studying and having the Scripture taught to us. The Spirit works through all of this to grow us.
How does this happen? And how does the spiritual gift of teaching play into it? Pastor Joel closes this series on Christian spirituality by tackling this question!
he Spirit of God pours out on Christ’s followers, not just for themselves, but to connect them to one another, a body of the Christ. This includes being given gifts to be used to love the body. Christians needs to keep this vision in mind to truly walk by the Spirit!
In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through the gifts listed by the Apostle Paul and help us understand them, so that we might know how the Spirit has been poured on us and how we can use it to love the body.
The right words spoken to us have the power to bring life. The God of Christianity is a speaking God, who fills us with life through his word. He speaks to us in many ways, but sometimes he will speak to us by giving another person a word to share with us, a word to strengthen, encourage, and edify us. Scripture calls this kind of word prophecy.
What we learn in Scripture is that prophecy is a form of deep spirituality, but one that must be used with accountability. When it isn’t, people can be left at best confused, and at worst, hurt in significant ways. In this sermon, Pastor Joel dives deep into the Scripture to explore prophecy, how it can help our church, why it matters we do it in the right way, and how we can test it.
For four years, Res City has been sustained by God’s grace and his Spirit. We celebrate our birthday every year to worship God. We truly believe God’s Spirit has graced us with uncommon blessings!
In this sermon Pastor Joel takes a look at one of the most pivotal churches in the New Testament, the church at Antioch, a church where the Spirit of God moved to make it uncommon—unlike any other gathering of people previously known. In what ways do we see the Spirit moving similarly at Res City? And how can we continue to grow in the work of the Spirit in our midst? We dig into all of this and more here!
One of the most essential ways we walk by the Spirit is through prayer. Praying is so basic to our faith that sometimes we need to pause and remind ourselves of how we should pray. In this sermon, Leadership Team member Krista Schroeder talks about simple but powerful prayer that focuses our hearts on humility and thankfulness as we approach the throne of God through the Spirit.
We live by the spirit of God, Paul says, and since we do, we should take every step of our life in harmony with the spirit of God. But what does that mean? When we don’t know where to start, we might just do nothing, but if that happens, we miss the fact that being a mature follower of Jesus means cultivating sensitivity to God’s spirit.
To kick off this new series, Pastor Joel helps us understand the Spirit of God by observing how it works in the Old and New Testament—how it guides and empowers and influences people—and explains why it’s important for our faith that we start taking steps in the Spirit!
When we left Zechariah, he'd had the mute button hit on him and was stuck in silence until his son, John, would be born. When we step into Zechariah's shoes, it's understandable that he wasn't sure about what the angel said. But he still needed to truly hear from God to comprehend what was happening.
What we see when the story picks back up with him is that God had been doing something in the silence. In this final advent sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how this Christmas season, we ought to learn from Zechariah about how much silence matters for us too to embrace the coming of Jesus.
When we meet Mary, she’s engaged and excited to live out her plans, of a new husband and children and community.
But then an Angel show up and disrupts those plans with the announcement that she is part of God’s story to give birth to a son she never expected. This would totally derail her plans.
This happens to us sometimes too. We can learn a lot from Mary’s response. We get 3 things when we embrace God’s story instead of clinging to our own: Joy, Significance, and Jesus. Hope Leadership Team member Brett Ripley preaches on this incredible story in this sermon, reflecting on his own story.
This Advent, we are looking at how people in Scripture respond to hearing the good news of Jesus's coming. First, we look at Zechariah and how he responds to the news with cynicism. Through tracing God's faithfulness through the story of the Bible and seeing how God always keeps his word, we see that hope is a better response than cynicism. Pastor Julie ends the message with some thoughts on how we can have hope in our own lives.
Gamophobia is “the fear of commitment.” It’s common for us to fear truly committing to things, for lack of certainty, for the belief that keeping our options open leads to more happiness, and because we want to try and have it all, thinking sacrificing other options isn’t necessary.
But Jesus says it doesn’t work like that if you want to follow him.
To truly follow the Way of Jesus, we need to sacrifice other options sometimes. We need to be willing to walk the narrow, well-defined path that constitutes Jesus’s teaching, which Jesus says is light and leads to life. How can we do this confidently when we fear commitment? Pastor Joel breaks it all down in this second to last message in our Sermon on the Mount series.
We had so many questions after our sermon on Matt. 6:25-34 and the concept of worry that we decided to continue the conversation on the podcast!
Julie, Lisa, Drew, and Catie talk about what it looks like to follow Jesus when you're battling anxiety, how to deal with regret and decision paralysis, and how the church is called to care for others. There is so much wisdom in this episode; you don't want to miss it!
“Well, sure, maybe I made a mistake, but what about them?” We say and feel this more than we’d care to admit. Jesus tells us this impulse does not fit his kingdom. When we pivot blame off of ourselves onto someone else, we’re helping no one. Jesus calls us to something higher than that in our lives if we’re going to follow him.
In this sermon, Joel unpacks this passage and explains how it connects to a deeper theme in Scripture, that of our shared complicity with sin. How does understanding this unfortunate truth about ourselves help us to navigate the situations where we fear someone noticing our problems? Listen and find out!
In Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus calls his followers not to worry. Easier than it sounds! But Jesus walks us through why we don't need to worry – because he is our creator, provider, and sustainer.
He also invites us to consider what worry might be saying about the state of our heart and which master we are following, and he ends with a challenge and encouragement to seek him first above all else. Pastor Julie walks through it all in this sermon.
Would you rather acquire treasure for right now or treasure that lasts forever? That’s the question Jesus puts to us in the passage Pastor Joel unpacks in this sermon. It goes to the heart of what many consider the most essential part of their safety: their bank accounts. The world runs on money, and we live the story where money is the author: having no money, then as we grow, gaining more and more and all the ‘stuff’ that comes with it: the big house, the fancy car, the lavish vacations, etc.
But what if Jesus says being a disciple means living in a different story? Instead, he tells us we should seek out treasures in heaven, so that we might not be mastered by money. In this sermon, Joel talks about what treasures in heaven are and why they are essential, as well as consider what it means for us to respond to Jesus’ message with our own money and resources.
We had so many great questions come in after our sermon on Matthew 5:38-48, where Jesus calls us to turn the other cheek, that we had to go deeper than a few questions after the sermon. So, we recorded a conversation between Joel and Julie and Res City members Andrea Kidder and Luke Sandstrom, sharing thoughts on some of the harder questions around living these words of Jesus out truly and practically. Questions ranged from war, abuse, the death penalty, violence in the Old Testament, what does turning the other cheek actually mean, and more!
The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most famous sections in the Sermon on the Mount. But something we can often miss is that in the context of Jesus’ sermon the prayer is, as commentator RT France points out, a “literary digression.” In other words, the point of the passage is not merely, “this is how you ought to pray.”
The context is about the principle that the radical obedience Jesus calls us to cannot be measured by how good we look to people around us. We struggle with that all the time, however, and so like a physical or occupational therapist giving us exercises to heal from an injury, Jesus gives us this prayer to help us pray in a way that keeps us focused on obeying Jesus. In this sermon, Joel walks through the prayer to show us how it helps us to live radically like Jesus has called us to.
It’s normal to love those who love us, and require an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth for our enemies. Jesus says this will not work if we want to follow him, however. All that is is flirting with the same fire that caused our enemy to do evil to us in the first place. Instead, we are to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give them the shirt off our back. These are famous words, but do we take them as seriously as Jesus meant for us to?
In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through one of the most famous passages of the Sermon on the Mount, and also one of the most radical. What does it look like to love our enemies like Jesus does? Why must we be careful so that we are not overcome by evil? And how does it all connect directly to the gospel? Listen and find out!
Those who follow Jesus are given an impossible standard to meet: “Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). When we read the Sermon on the Mount, we find how radical it is to follow him. Jesus’s expectation is not that we would meet this standard—this is why he offers grace and forgiveness to us free of charge—but he does want us to constantly have growth and humility as our targets.
To that end, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus gives some examples of how following him doesn’t mean just getting by but going to new, radical depths in our discipleship. The examples we study in this sermon are hatred, lust, divorce, and our integrity. People who have familiarity with this passage regularly gloss over it, but if we are serious about living in Jesus’s countercultural kingdom we have to let ourselves brush up against the radical words of Jesus. Pastor Joel breaks it all down here!
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. What does that mean for us today? Pastor Julie talks about how Jesus reveals the full meaning of the law, ultimately fulfills the law on our behalf, and how the wisdom of the law is still something we should follow today.
In the ancient world, without electricity, darkness was common and food would go bad easily. Two things, salt and natural light were both very important because they helped survive in a world without electricity. Light helped people see, and salt helped preserve food.
Jesus says our role in the world is supposed to be like light and salt. We Christians who understand the gospel and seriously live out its implications in the world, are supposed to make it a better place. When we look at the impact of the church in the world, while we can certainly find much to lament and repent of, we also can’t miss the fact that the message of the gospel lived out in people’s lives have also completely changed the world in ways we can’t always fathom.
In this sermon, Joel unpacks this famous passage and talks about how we can continue to live as salt and light.
Plus, stay for the Q + R live after the sermon at the end!
We live in a world that was changed forever by Jesus announcing that the kingdom of God had come. We can gloss over it, or we can take it serious. Many people, including a lot of Christians, don’t take it very serious. In this new sermon series, we’re talking about how we can take it seriously!
The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ message for how to live in the kingdom. To start off this revolutionary message (and our new sermon series), Jesus identifies who is blessed in the kingdom. We might think we know who is blessed by God by the life they get to live, or the material blessings they have, but Jesus wants us to flip our understanding upside down, which will prepare us to understand and receive the rest of this message.
Plus, stay for the Q + R live after the sermon at the end!
In 1 Peter, the recipients of the letter are referred to as “exiles,” a word that describes Christians in all times and places. Our home is where God’s presence and glory are all around us, and we don’t live in that place yet, so we need to remember our identity and take seriously our state as exiles.
But wisdom is required to know what it looks like for us to live in this world now. Jeremiah’s letter to the Jerusalem exiles has God’s wisdom for us. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down: Buying instead of renting, seeking shalom, being not afraid, and staying distinct. This is an important sermon for all Christians as we navigate our own exile well.
In 1 Peter, the recipients of the letter are referred to as “exiles,” a word that describes Christians in all times and places. Our home is where God’s presence and glory are all around us, and we don’t live in that place yet, so we need to remember our identity and take seriously our state as exiles.
But wisdom is required to know what it looks like for us to live in this world now. Jeremiah’s letter to the Jerusalem exiles has God’s wisdom for us. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down: Buying instead of renting, seeking shalom, being not afraid, and staying distinct. This is an important sermon for all Christians as we navigate our own exile well.
A new community of Israel has been created through exile in the book of Jeremiah. This lost and lonely people, ripped away from what is familiar, has an uncertain future. What will God do for them?
When we are the midst of similar seasons, often God brings renewal. He brings new life out of our exile. But like the birth of a child, there are birth pains and growing pains as we grow into the new reality. In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how we can believe God has a hope and a future for us when this occurs.
A major moment in Jeremiah’s ministry gives us something deep to ponder: that God works his future through those we often don’t expect according to our culture’s systems of worth or value or our own biases. We must remain humble and remember God is not trapped by how we label or categorize people. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains how we can remember God’s ways are irregular in our minds, and that is something we should praise him about!
Major crises don’t spring up out of thin air; there’s always a story behind them. The crisis of Judah in Jeremiah’s time is no different, and when we go back to the beginning of the story we find Judah had forgotten God’s holiness and because of that had forgotten who they were.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel explores the connection between God’s holiness and our identity, why it matters that we take holiness seriously, how we define holiness, and more!
Jeremiah 18—comparing God to a potter and Israel to clay—is a famous passage used in debates about free will and God’s sovereignty. But to think of it only as that misses the point, and Pastor Joel explains how that approach to reading Scripture (squeezing it into debates and ideas about God) causes us to miss what Scripture actually is. It’s not a zoo where we observe God and learn information about him for our own enjoyment. It’s a safari where his word is on the loose, and we are forced to react to it.
When we approach this passage, we see God as the potter, working with us the clay. We have responsibility, but this passage asks what we will use it for. To drift from God, or to trust his design as the potter? Pastor Joel walks through this question, and then explains why God the potter is good news for us.
“The heart wants what it wants.” This is a famous line, but Jeremiah said essentially the same thing centuries before someone else said it. Unfortunately, the heart often wants what is not in tune with God’s law. It is deceitful and a puzzle, Jeremiah says, with sin written on it that overrides our ability to do God’s will. What can we do?
God’s answer is to write his will onto our hearts through his presence. This is simple but incredibly profound and necessary. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains why this matters and how we can let God write his signature onto our hearts.
Scripture compares baptism to the global flood in the story of Noah’s Ark. One of the ways it’s similar is that choosing to follow Jesus changes us, our world and our community. We die to our old selves, interact with the world differently, and join the church family to help us navigate those changes. Baptism represents the work that God has done in our hearts and is something we should celebrate!
In Jeremiah 14, we read a prayer offered to God to deliver the people of Judah from a drought, and boy, is it a good prayer. But God tells Jeremiah he won’t listen to it.
Why would God not listen to their prayer? Because he knows that the people don’t mean it, and he isn’t interested in them presenting themselves to be righteous, signaling to him that they were the right kind of people he should save. He knew that wasn’t true of them.
Pastor Joel talks says when we meditate on this passage, we see what God truly desires: not for us to project ourselves to be the "right kind of people" by letting them know we have the right opinions or complain about the people it’s popular to complain about, nor to try to trick him with it either. All we do is condemn ourselves by failing to live up to our own standard. Instead, he wants us to come to him as we are—in vulnerability and humility and repentance. That is where God meets us and dwells with us. Why would we not have that posture?
In Jeremiah’s time, God’s people had fixated their hope on the temple in Jerusalem, assuming that since it was where God lived he would never let anything bad happen to it or the city it was in. Because of this, they didn’t see listening to God’s warnings through Jeremiah as very necessary. So, one day God tells Jeremiah to go and tell everyone God would let the temple be destroyed.
We often attach our security and safety to something like the temple, something good and that God has given to us, but when we make whatever that is an end in itself, God isn’t afraid to let it fail, and replace it with Jesus. In this sermon, Pastor Joel discusses what it looks like to search ourselves and see if we’ve got temples in our own lives.
In this talk from the 2022 Res City Summer Retreat, Pastor Joel walks through 1 Corinthians 13 to talk all about love: its necessity to mark us out as Christ's followers and the tragedy of when we don't; its character, which we must discern when love is often just a marketing strategy; its permanence, which causes it to be more important that gifts of charisma we might try to focus on to build God's church; and its superiority--how it is what truly causes God's power to be set loose in the world.
One of the issues for God to build and plant in Jeremiah’s time is that Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet. In fact, there were many of them, and they didn’t all speak for God and often gave a message that was contradictory to Jeremiah. What were the people to do?
We also have people who claim to speak for God in our time, yet we don’t always have wisdom to know who does and who doesn’t. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what we learn about prophecy from Jeremiah to help us to have wisdom in discerning those who speak for God—when to take them serious, and when to ignore them.
In chapter two of the book that bears his name, Jeremiah gives the people a message from God that is still relevant to us today. He urges people to stop abandoning God and running after empty idols that lead to the people feeling empty themselves, living in a different story than the one the gospel at their time called them to live in. Instead, God calls them to turn to him, the stream of living water that will always satisfy. Pastor Julie explains how similarly, we can turn to Jesus and experience freedom and true life in him.
The Old Testament prophets can seem like vestige of a long lost era, but they have enduring relevance to the church today still. That’s because they continue to challenge us and speak into the moment we live in, where the church’s warts have been on full display and many are leaving the church because, as Russell Moore says, “the church doesn’t seem to believe what the church says it believes.”
The prophet Jeremiah is commissioned by God to speak to the nation of Judah in his day and ‘uproot and tear down, build and plant.’ In other words, pluck the weeds in the garden of the church and our hearts out so that God may plant what he desires and have a full, lush garden that bursts forth his glory to the world. In this series, we’ll be exposing our hearts to the words of Jeremiah, ask what we need to uproot in our own lives and church, and build and plant so we may follow Jesus fully.
Matthew 28:18-20, known as the Great Commission, is a well-known passage of the Bible for inspiring missionaries to cross-cultural service. But how should other members of the church respond? The Great Commission is an invitation for all Christians to know the heart of God for his people and to live in response for his glory.
Guest speaker Andrea Kidder explores how the whole church can be involved with what God is doing around the world, no matter where in the world you live.
God created our bodies good and calls us to steward them as acts of worship. But what happens when those acts of stewardship get twisted and become focussed on ourselves or on having "the perfect body" that the world tells us we can have? Scripture tells us that we will always struggle in this life, but one day Jesus will restore and redeem everything including our bodies.
And while we wait, we're reminded that the most important thing about us is not our appearance but the condition of our hearts. Whether you struggle with body image or not, this message provides hope and encouragement about how we should think, talk about, and treat our bodies. In the last sermon of this series, Pastor Julie walks through this important issue.
Psalm 23 is part of a theme in Scripture of the Good Shepherd who comes to gather his scattered flock. When we follow him and are made whole through our life-giving connection to him, we join this mission.
In this sermon, Joel talks about why it’s so necessary we have that connection to the Shepherd in our task of being Christ to the world around us. We do this by framing our interactions with those around us like the shepherd does for us: Walking with people through their lives, serving their needs in love, showing hospitality, and helping them seek out the Shepherd’s right path.
Every Sunday for the last two centuries, Christians have gathered together. There must be something about that weekly gathering that contributes to our walk with the shepherd, and that we could even say is necessary to it. While he doesn’t cover every element of the Sunday gathering in this sermon, Pastor Joel covers the essential elements of primarily worship that happens in every Sunday gathering, and connects them to our series.
Because worship isn’t just something you do for God. It does something to you as well: revitalizes you by bringing you into acknowledgment of the weight of who God is. We need to regularly be doing this, or our walk with the shepherd will become stale. If we want to keep in step with the shepherd, we have to learn how to do this well.
There's a wealth of research that details the effects of loneliness on people, even legitimate health issues. We are meant to have deep, abiding, and robust connection to other people. Like redwood trees whose roots tangle up with each other to cause the whole forest to flourish, we need to be part of a body of people in order to grow to reach up to the heavens.
In this sermon, Pastor Julie unpacks how the church meets this need for us and what it looks like for us to do community with one another well so we may have wholeness from following the shepherd as an entire flock.
We spend the majority of our time at work. It’s one of the main places our attention is focused as we walk with the Shepherd, the focus of this series. But to really do that well, we need to know how God created us to work. When we understand that, we gain clarity and can start to know what to prioritize in our work, and to bring our work under the fold of God’s vision for human fruitfulness in the world, to which God is committed and the gospel is part of. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through this important topic.
Every year, we experience winter turning to spring. When we approach Easter, we sometimes come in some kind of winter of the soul, which Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate spring for. In this Easter sermon, Pastor Joel reflects on Isaiah 61 and how what God has made true through Jesus in his resurrection gives us hope of new life in whatever season of life we may come to this Easter in.
Simplicity, as a spiritual practice, is about focusing our priorities on God so that we can walk with the Good Shepherd and experience wholeness. In this sermon, Julie talks about how simplicity can help us embrace our limits, embrace contentment, and remind us that we already have everything we need in Christ.
Humans are unities of mind, body, and soul. One of the traditional God’s people have connected those together is by fasting.
Scot McKnight defines fasting as, “Fasting is a person’s whole-body, natural response to life’s serious or grievous sacred moments.” When we encounter the kinds of moments we often do in this world that, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans 8, is “in bondage” and “groaning,” we express our response to God in our souls and bodies. Fasting has a range of uses in the Christian life, and as we walk with the Shepherd it’s a way to walk with him with all of who we are—mind, body, and spirit engaged in spiritual purpose. In this sermon Pastor Joel preaches on all this and more.
We live in an age of rapid technological advancement, which impacts our lives from A to Z. What role will it play in our walk with the shepherd, as we've been talking about in this series?
The story of the Tower of Babel is commonly used as a reflection or parable of the role of technology in human society. Often, technological innovation outpaces our ability to ethically and theologically keep up, done to "make a name for ourselves", and without much thought about the consequences. Yet, technological innovation has massive consequences on us. If we're not thoughtful, it can hinder us from embodied, present spirituality before God and ourselves, which is the lifeblood of wholeness. Pastor Joel breaks this down and more in this sermon.
if we aren’t listening to his voice? Meditating on and memorizing Scripture helps us to listen to the voice of God in our daily lives and ultimately shapes us to be more Christ-like.
In a world where we rarely slow down to fully read something (TL;DR), meditating on and memorizing Scripture is often neglected. In this sermon, Julie makes the case for taking our time with God’s word and gives practical ways to spend time committing it to our hearts and minds.
Dan Allender and Tremper Longman say our emotions are the cries of our soul, asking to be heard by God. Prayer is the window from our depths to God. To be whole, we should connect these parts of ourselves to God. But that’s hard! It’s not always easy or natural for us to do it. Why?
In this sermon, Pastor Joel uses the prophet Jeremiah to reflect on what it looks like for us to pray from our depths to God and examine ourselves for why we don’t always do it as well as we might hope, as well as the reflecting on the hope of who God is when we look at Jesus, and the invitation that it gives us.
The Good Shepherd leads the sheep with his voice (John 10:27). But we can't hear the voice of the shepherd unless we engage in the practice of silence and solitude. Silence and solitude is a dialogue between your internal world and the Shepherd.
To do this practice, we need to cut out external and internal noise. Then, we sort through the clutter of our own internal world so that we may bring it to the Shepherd. This sounds simple, but it actually requires great intentionality from us. In this sermon, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
God is a gardener, not just of creation but of people. He does everything a human gardener does for their own plants for us, wanting to see us be vital, healthy, and strong, and a healthy plant bears fruit. The series we’re in is about the wholeness that comes from being connected to the life-giving vine of Jesus, and Scripture tells us wholeness includes bearing fruit. Fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, faithfulness or faith, hope, and more. These are supposed to make up the character and virtue of a Christian.
In this sermon Pastor Joel digs into this idea further. How does it grow? Why does it matter practically? What fruit are we to look for? How do we not just be content with the buds the Holy Spirit gives us but also become gardeners in ourselves to help the fruit grow strong? And why does this matter in a world that often sees unChristlike fruit grow from those who follow him?
In a frenetic, 24/7/365 world, there seems to hardly be any time to slow down, rest, or catch a break. We encounter Jesus of Nazareth who walked unhurried through one of the most anxious times of the ancient world. Instead, Jesus invites us to a subversive and ancient type of rest; one that seems to offer more than just a day-off, wellness plan, or life hack.
Sabbath becomes the defining practice and rehearsal for the New Heavens and New Earth. It invites us to celebrate, delight, rest, stop, and contemplate the Kingdom of God. In a busy world where many of us crave a deep soul-level type rest, it becomes crucial to examine the ways Jesus extends to us a path of restfulness rooted deeply in our identity.
To walk with the Good Shepherd, we have to surrender all of ourselves to Jesus, including our emotions and trauma.
In this sermon, Julie talks about the things that prevent us from processing emotions with God, how Scripture tells us that emotions matter, and how God works through our pain and trauma to bring about new life in us. This is a really important one you don’t want to miss!
When you read Psalm 23, conspicuously absent is any kind of rush. Shepherds take time to find the right spots to have their sheep graze and drink water, and sheep need time after to lay down and for their food to digest.
We will struggle with following the Good Shepherd when we allow ourselves to be swallowed up into the culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction we live in. It will kill our ability to walk with the shepherd. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains how hurry kills our ability to walk with the shepherd and where to start in resisting its impact in our lives.
Psalm 23 is one of the most famous chapters in the whole Bible, but how well does it describe us? Think about the emotional, mental, and physical state of the sheep that are led by the Good Shepherd. In a word, they are whole.
But many of us don't feel wholeness, especially after these last two years. How do we find it? It's actually more simple than we might think: Wholeness is found by simply walking with the shepherd, letting him lead us.
In this sermon, kicking off Res City's winter/spring 2022 series, Pastor Joel talks about why we need wholeness through walking with the Good Shepherd, and plots the course this series, which will delve into it more deeply week by week, will take.
Res City is 3 years old! And we totally anticipated what those years would look like when we planted....(yeah right!)
In this special sermon, we reflect on where we've come from, and who we are as we enter our fourth year by examining the 5 purposes of the church. Pastor Julie look at how we've lived out our vision, celebrate what God has done, and talks about where we're headed next.
Thank you for 3 years!!
In Romans 5:21 Paul uses an interesting phrase: “The reign on grace.” It’s something we’re all under when we accept the gift of God’s grace. What does it mean to be under this reign? It means to give ourselves over to God’s grace, and to let the abundance in us that grace creates spill out of us to others in generosity of time, skill, and attention.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains what Paul says in Romans about what it means for grace to reign in us, as we prepare to celebrate our commissioning Sunday.
God wants you to be rich.
A lot of people might think this, but God doesn’t want you to be rich in what most people mean when they use the word rich. Instead, God wants you to be rich in what Jesus is rich in.
These are the qualities that he shows us in his grace, and which sustain us as we live live fueled by it. And one of the things we learn as we study Paul and The Collection, a large fundraising project he embarked on and speaks about in several of his letters, is that we become rich in what Jesus is rich in through giving financially, among other ways. In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how we can think through our generosity with our money to become richer ourselves in something worth more than money.
We all probably believe generosity is a good thing, but how do we go about patterning lives of generosity? It all comes down to how we understand gifts and generosity, and in the ancient world the word grace gets us to the heart of this question. It’s also one of the most important words in the whole Bible, the electrical current at the heart of the Christian life. It creates new realities, spilling out of us as God gifts us new life in Jesus, into those around us. Pastor Joel gives some thoughts on how this creates a template of grace for us in our own habits of generosity.
As we enter a new year, consider God may be calling you to make a resolution for more generosity in your life, and when we really understand grace, it’s hard not to respond in joyful attitudes of giving.
The systems of the world around us convince us that our best life is one where we’re calculated, successful, and triumphant. We encounter the Advent of Jesus in a way that is far from calculated, successful, or triumphant in the eyes of the world. Instead, Jesus arrives in a horrible conglomeration of circumstances in which He dubs as the upside-down Kingdom of God.
Advent becomes a season where Jesus arrival signals hope and deliverance, but in the most unusual and ordinary ways. It brings us to see that Jesus is the promised deliverer, but that true deliverance and participation in the Gospel hope comes most often and most clearly in the reality of disappointment.
We live with the PTSD of a world full of hypocrisy, and it makes us cynical even about God himself. When we lose hope we start to have actions that aren’t aligned with what we profess. This was a problem the prophet Micah challenged Israel over, and we see King Herod living this misalignment out 700 years later.
However, Christmas is a season of hope, where we celebrate that God isn’t like us: his words match his deeds and character. And so Christmas recalibrate us to hope again. Pastor Joel shows us how we can find hope this Chrismas season when we soak ourselves in the story of a faithful God.
In the Christmas narrative, Matthew frequently mentions the words of the prophets being fulfilled. Who are those prophets and how does Jesus fulfill their words? In this Advent series, we will be looking at how God keeps his word through Jesus. Today, Pastor Julie talks about how Jesus is the promised Immanuel who brings a sign of God’s presence, security and salvation.
We saved one of the big ones for the last sermon in this series! These are two of the most controversial subjects today in Christian theology. How do we deconstruct some of the unbiblical things we’ve learned about them but not get rid of them? In this sermon, Pastor Joel challenges us to get outside our own cultural setting to find a fresh vision for both heaven and hell, by embracing two principles: that it’s good for God to do something about evil, and that God restores his world instead of abandoning it.
God’s judgment is his solidarity with people that know in their bones evil is not okay, and must be made right. God hears & knows & remembers. But he goes beyond that—making the world itself again right by bringing heaven to earth, just like the Lord’s Prayer says.
When we can grasp this, we can understand the biblical vision for heaven and hell. Join us in this sermon as we do dig into these things, as well as a final reflection from Pastor Joel on deconstruction and rebuilding around Jesus.
We currently live in a culture marked by division. Pastor Julie looks at how should Christians should engage with these divisions by looking at the way Jesus engaged with similar divisions in his time. When political tensions were high, Jesus found a way forward that amazed everyone around him. We can follow that same path by listening to Jesus' words in Matthew 22:15-22 when he tells us to "give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s."
Pastor Joel shares in this sermon his journey through learning to “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). This can be a confusing issue, and you may be tempted to shut that part of your Christian life off, like he did. Yet when we understand the reason God gives us his Spirit and the marking of it, the fruit of the Spirit, you understand our need for it in the church. If you’re wrestling with this issue or even if you aren’t, this sermon is for you!
In Matthew 28:16-20, Jesus commissions the disciples to continue God's mission of bringing his reconciliation, peace, love, and justice in the world. In the sermon, Pastor Julie talks about the basis of this commission, the message of the commission, and the method of going about this commission. She also takes a deeper look at our past expectations and experiences of evangelism and suggests more helpful ways to go about evangelism in our current cultural climate - all starting with Jesus.
The church is the place where God’s people gather, and they have done so from the very start. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks the foundation of the church in the story of Jesus talking about the rock the church is built on in Matthew 16. What can we learn as essentials about the church from this short story? How does it inform us on how the church has misstepped and also gotten it right since then? This is one of Pastor Joel’s passion projects, so we hope you’ll join us in hearing him share his vision for the church!
Jesus took Scripture very serious. It gave shape to his ministry, it informed his mindset of how he viewed the world, and he thought it gave him reason to die on a cross, trusting he would be raised again. If we take Jesus seriously, we have to take Scripture seriously as well. The byproduct of this is it gives us a firm foundation from which to ask hard questions about Scripture and not worry about things shattering around us.
But what does it look like to take Scripture serious? The church definitely has taken Scripture serious in the past, but has it done that in the right way? In this sermon, Pastor Joel gives some insight into how to treat Scripture seriously like Jesus.
The church and the world around it largely approach “sin” the same way: create barriers and legislate it away so it doesn’t make us impure. This is precisely the thing Jesus encountered in his own time as well, and he was not about to tolerate it. In this sermon,
Pastor Joel challenges us to think in a fresh way about how we approach sin in the church and outside of it and in a way that builds up on what Jesus teaches us. Jesus calls us to simply “repent & believe” and avoid being deluded into thinking the problem in the world is something for other people to deal with and not us.
Who is God and who has he made humans to be? When we come to the topic of creation, this is the question the Bible is trying to answer. We can come to this topic with lots of other questions, however. How long did it take? Did we evolve or not? And more.
There isn’t anything wrong with questions like these, but it’s important to understand the Bible isn’t trying to be a science or history textbook. Instead, it’s about the revelation of God, which ultimately happens in Jesus. In this sermon, Pastor Julie explains how we can start where God and the Bible start and then work through other questions from there, while holding fast to what we learn in Genesis. When we start where the Bible starts, then it begins to have relevance for how we live.
The word ’Trinity’ and a whole lot of other language Christians used to describe God as including Jesus and the Holy Spirit in it isn’t in the Bible. So why do Christians think Jesus is God? Is this just a later development that didn’t reflect what Jesus thought about himself?
In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what Jesus and his first audience said about what he was doing in the context of Israel’s expectation of what God himself would do, and how the mystery of that is good news for us today as we ask hard questions of God and rebuild faith around the shepherd who comes in power to gather his flock.
Jesus, a man understood as a great prophet, had his ministry end in death, with the claim that he rose again. This story is so familiar to many of us that we can miss some of the most important elements of it according to the gospels.
How do we understand his death in its first century setting rather than in the way we have often grown up hearing about it? How does it connect to him being a prophet? And how does Jesus’ death & resurrection provide us a firm ground to stand on even when we feel like the faith we’ve received needs to be looked at to figure out what is from man and what is from God? In this sermon, Pastor Joel has you covered on all of these questions and more!
"Deconstruction" is something a lot of evangelicals find themselves doing at the moment. The term can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but it basically refers to the practice of reexamining long held beliefs. While it can seem like something new in the church, the practice of asking ourselves if what we've received from tradition is actually from God is a healthy one and something that has produced much fruit in the history of the church.
In this series, we will be deconstructing and then rebuilding around Jesus, starting from scratch. How was he understood from the people who first encountered him? That's where we start in this sermon, as Pastor Joel looks at Jesus as a prophet, a big part of his ministry that is often overlooked. What we find is that the prophet Jesus doesn't just let us deconstruct him, however. Instead, he deconstructs and then reconstructs us.
The apostle Paul speaks of his contentedness in every season, whether in challenging times or peaceful ones. What does he mean? How does he find this? And what is the difference between contentedness and happiness? Pastor Joel shares all this in the final message in our summer Philippians sermon.
As we enter a new season this fall, we are taking a Sunday to focus in on what we want to keep in the front of our minds, guiding our heads, hearts, and hands as a church and as people. In this sermon, Pastors Julie and Joel talk about what it means for us to live the Lord's Prayer, specifically In St. Paul as it is in Heaven. Join us as we plot a course for this season as God has called us!
Habits and rhythms have a massive impact on our mental state, our well-being, our happiness, and most importantly, our worship. For Christians, this last one is vitally important to be aware of.
However, often we're not aware of how our habits affect our worship, and our worship and connection to his Spirit suffer. In this sermon, Pastor Julie lists what Paul says are the patterns of living we ought to have to connect us more to God and worship him with all of our hearts.
In ballet, there are basic movements that you learn immediately and which are the basic movements you will use in all other ballet routines for the rest of your career. These are movements which you practice over and over.
Christianity is like ballet, where to grow is to master, apply, and reapply the movements that come from the gospel itself. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks us through the movements of reconciliation: acknowledgment, repentance, forgiveness, and restoration. Sin breaks God's world. Reconciliation like what we experience through Christ is God's response to the work of sin.
The Philippians are in the midst of facing "enemies of the cross", but Paul doesn't want them to be afraid of them. Instead, Paul is "in tears" over their opposition to the gospel. In this sermon, Res City Worship Director Zach Dohmen explains how we--ambassadors or citizens of heaven--should search ourselves and ask if our unwillingness to live as ambassadors often comes from the same motives that make people enemies of the cross.
Paul urges the Philippians to "live up to what we have already attained" (3:16). He means that while we still await the resurrection that has been attained for us by Christ, we are to take seriously who we have been made in Christ.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what it means to "press on" (3:14) towards the goal of resurrection, navigating the daily tension of life in the weird in between space of the present age.
Paul shifts his tone in this part of his letter to the Philippians as he braces for outsiders on their way to the community who are critical of Paul’s gospel. To help them respond to what these outside teachers will say he tells his story and he establishes the weight of glory found in God’s self-disclosure, Jesus, against all other claimants on that glory.
Pastor Joel helps us sift through the complexity of this passage, as well as consider what it means for us to consider Christ as of surpassing worth. This sermon will challenge you with whether or not God is calling you to die to something that challenges for where your glory lies.
Posture is important for our bodies, both in the short and long term. Posture is also a helpful way to think about our relation to the world around us as Christians living within it. When we recognize that God truly works in the midst of our church, it gives a sense of meaning to all of our actions, and a desire to invite people in to experience it themselves. This leads us to adopt a posture of welcome rather than fear or consumption towards culture. This sermon is great if you're wondering how Christians ought to face the world around us.
The center of Christianity is Christ, and the center for our relations to each other in the church is his sacrifice for us. How do we live out his sacrifice for us? Through radical unity. Res City elder Miles Trump shares how we can center and live out our relations to each other by focusing on and following the model of Jesus.
The Apostle Paul is in a rough situation. He's stuck in prison (and everyone knows it's because of Jesus) and there are some people who have jumped into take over his duty with motives of influence and fame. Yet, despite all that, Paul is encouraged because he knows the pattern of the gospel's spread is the same as how it works: death, pain, hardship, and more lead to life, fruit, and hope. His situation looks similar to our own, as the church and gospel now experience similar bad press flowing from bad motives. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks Paul's mindset and why it matters so greatly for us today.
When you open the letter to the Philippians, you find Paul the apostle in prison thanking the congregation of the church in Philippi for helping him out, and speaking of their "partnership in the gospel." This idea of "partnership" is fundamental for Paul when thinking of Christian relationships within churches, and in this sermon Pastor Joel explores what it means and how it's lived out.
It's baptism Sunday at Res City, and also the week where we kick off our new sermon series in the book of Philippians. Pastor Joel begin by asking if God finishes what he starts, something Paul says God does indeed do. It's a perfect question to consider as we celebrate baptism. What follows is a consideration of that statement by reflecting on God's purposes throughout all of Scripture, considering what we learn about how he approaches what he begins.
As we wrap up our Seeking Wisdom series, Pastor Julie preaches on how wisdom applies to the problem of anxiety--something we all feel sometimes and something many people struggle with on a regular basis. Practical while also theological, you don't want to miss this sermon!
Living a life of generosity goes against the grain, costing us something. We can tell ourselves all kinds of reasons why wisdom tells us to not live generously, but when we really look at what wisdom and the gospel actually have to say about it, we find living generously is essential to both. In this sermon, Angela Hermanson, Res City’s Governance Team chair, explores all of this.
The book of Song of Songs holds out hope for restored relationships, love, and intimacy, but we still live in a world with broken sexuality. Pastor Julie talks about how to move forward with healing from sexual sin or sexual assault.
Song of Songs presents a vineyard of love that grows between the Young Woman and the Young Man, one green and flourishing, in some ways a return to the garden of Eden. However, little foxes threaten to take the fruit of their intimacy before they can get it. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through four different 'foxes' from the Song of Songs that can throw a wrench into the intimacy of a couple.
When is the right time for love? Pastor Julie talks about a piece of wisdom from Song of Songs: don't awaken love until the right time. Sex and intimacy are important parts of the human life, but they are best experienced in their proper contexts. Julie walks through how our spiritual union with Jesus can be a guide for intimacy in our relationships.
Tim Mackie says that, “If the purpose of this biblical literature is to educate us in how to think wisely and well about the many aspects of life in God’s design, it makes all the sense in the world why an entire book would be dedicated to celebrating the goodness of love.” Continuing with a new wisdom mini-series, Pastor Joel explains how Song of Songs communicates wisdom to us in love and relationships, why we need to be restored, and what is at the center of God’s design for human romantic relationships.
Job is at his wit's end, and in a very relatable move he tries to make sense of his predicament. However, in doing so he questions God and removes himself from wisdom. God shows up--and his response is one you don't want to miss. We find wisdom as we study God's response, and learn that while much is outside our grasp, God gives us what we need with the revelation of his response to pain, suffering, evil, and tragedy.
Many people experience suffering on a daily basis, and we want to know where God is in our suffering. The answer is found in wisdom--and Job is here to teach us what wisdom looks like in suffering.
Everything we do as Christians should be done in community, including suffering. In this sermon, Pastor Joel uses Job's friends as positive and negative examples of how to walk with a brother or sister who is suffering--and he explains why this matters for how those outside the church view us as well.
Easter and resurrection are the center of everything we do as Christians--our hope for new life in the future, our hope that that we believe is rooted in truth, and our hope that God is doing new things in us. Pastor Julie talks about the relevance of God's work to make us new after the year of struggle we've all been through.
Job is the third wisdom literature book we’re studying in this series, and it asks difficult questions that make us examine ourselves and how we view God, as well as inviting us to wisdom when the day of suffering comes. Pastor Joel introduces this series in this sermon.
The book of Ecclesiastes is wisdom that gives us a little jolt. The Author of the book compares it to a cattle prod, sharply pointing us in the right direction. What is jolting is the fact that it tells us how fleeting everything "under the sun"--common human experience--is. What we need is to pursue meaning from wisdom that lasts.
Pastor Joel helps us take the hard words of Ecclesiastes in the right direction, discerning how to apply its wisdom in everything life throws at us.
There's a season for everything, but how can we know when those seasons are? In this message from Ecclesiastes, Pastor Julie talks about why it can be so difficult to make decisions, and how God wants us to rely on him for wisdom instead of trying to take it for ourselves.
The book of Ecclesiastes is not for the faint of heart. It offers a depressing and cynical look at the world, and it challenges us to not dismiss its words. One of its critiques of the world is that injustice is everywhere, and rest of the Bible's witness is the same: no one seeks out justice to the fullest extent because of sin.
The important question is what God's response to this is, and in this sermon Pastor Joel tells us how God makes straight the crooked justice of this world through the injustice of the cross.
What's my purpose in life? If you ever wondered that question, you're not alone. Ecclesiastes is a book that asks hard questions about if the things we find meaning in actually provide it. Pastor Julie talks about the beginning of Ecclesiastes and how the wise person finds their meaning and purpose in Jesus.
Wisdom's guiding principle is that God is just and righteous, and his wisdom reflects it. But to understand wisdom deeper, we need to grapple with the complexities of the world. In this sermon Pastor Joel digs into the story of Solomon, the author of Proverbs and the man who is associated with wisdom in the Old Testament more than any other, to give us an in depth understanding of wisdom -- which is God's design woven into creation to promote a flourishing environment for all -- and trust in God.
Proverbs doesn’t just tell us what wisdom looks like so that we may seek it out; it also tells us what folly looks like. The point is that we would recognize people with these traits and avoid their influence and understand these tendencies and try to weed them out of ourselves. Proverbs talks about four such forms of folly: Simple thinking, apathy, avoiding growth, and stirring up quarrels. Pastor Joel breaks down all four points and reminds us how the gospel shows us a wisdom that is for us when we fall into Folly’s trap.
Lady Wisdom, the personification of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs, calls us to heed her voice so we may find God's wisdom and live. She gives many exhortations to those who wish to become wise but we have to make a decision on whether or not we'll listen. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through three characteristics of the wise from the book of Proverbs.
We live in a time where we basically can get instant information on any subject we'd like. But one thing we can't easily know is what to do with it. Wisdom, the biblical concept that is found throughout the Bible, speaks up to tell us to listen to her and she will lead us to life. Join us as we start a new sermon series about what wisdom is.
We talk a lot about our purpose, but when we do we usually divide it from the gospel. Actually, our purpose in Jesus is intimately connected to the gospel, to accept the gift of grace offered in Christ that takes us from death to life and to walk as the artwork God has made us into in the good works God has prepared for us (Eph 2:10). Pastor Joel explains how we learn our purpose and also explains his fear of zombies.
Belonging to Community is one of the fundamental ways we bear the image of God, and it's why God wants us to be members of the church. At Res City we care so much about this that we put it into our vision statement! Pastor Julie explains why this is so important to us.
What does it mean that God wants people to experience Jesus, and how does Res City partner with him in it? Pastor Julie talks about God's mission and what it looks like to be apart of it.
What is Christian leadership, and how does it factor into God’s plan for believers? What does Res City expect of its leaders? And how do we process leadership failure? Pastor Joel examines the nature of Christian leadership in this sermon.
In it, he discusses God's plan for the individual believer, how it needs community in order to fully take place, and how leaders fit into it the God's goal for Christians.
Christian leadership Develops Christians, Organizes churches, Models Christlikeness, and Educates on how to live out the gospel.
And to end the sermon, how do we process ministry failure?
Many in Israel awaited the long expected King, but this wasn’t true for all. Christmas reminds us that Jesus coming means we aren’t King, but giving up the reign of our lives to Him is far better than us trying to play sovereign on our own.
In the Christmas story, Joseph has some big decisions to make. In walking through Joseph's story, Pastor Julie reminds us that the path of following God is not always easy but it's always worth it because God is with us.
Do you skip over the lists of names in the Bible? Pastor Julie explains how these genealogies functioned like resumes and how Matthew 1 1:1-7 tells the story of a savior who would come to save anyone who believed in him, even the most unexpected people.
In this final sermon on the book of Habakkuk, Pastor Joel walks through Habakkuk’s prayer of endurance and faith faced with a tough road ahead. We see what tools the prayer gives us to equip ourselves for similar seasons, especially in this difficult one we find ourselves in now.
God’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint is that he does indeed see injustice, and he does not let it stand. In this sermon Pastor Joel explains what God’s judgment does and doesn’t look like, past, present, and future, and how salvation and grace grow alongside God’s judgment.
The righteous decree of God is to turn those who chase idols over to their idols, which has a tragic consequence: death. In sorrow, but in justice, God sometimes allows people to experience what they desire, which is a life without God. When that happens, death inevitably takes has its effect. Yet in the midst of judgment, God is also always working at salvation. The revelation of the gospel effects both of them. This should be a healing balm to both those who lament the evil and injustice of Habakkuk’s time as well as our own, and those who, like Habakkuk, cry out for deliverance from the evil times they live in.
This week in Habakkuk, we hear the prophet's complaint that God's plan isn't fair. Pastor Julie reflects on how comparison often leads to pride and how Jesus is the great equalizer reconciling us to God and each other and offering forgiveness to all.
2020 has been a tough year. In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how 2020 is not an abnormal year, however, and we need to use the shock of this year to remind us of the presence of sin, ‘the crack in everything’, something we tend to pull back from in favor of positivity and easy responses.
In this final sermon in the Kingdom Politics series, Pastor Joel talks about how to navigate the thorny issue of partisanship and gives five considerations to honor Jesus with your vote this 2020 election season and beyond.
Before we can engage thoughtfully and Christianly in politics, we have to understand what God’s view of government is. In the sermon, Pastor Joel places government into the story of the Bible: Creation, Fall, Accountability and Redemption.
In this sermon in our Kingdom Politics series, Pastor Julie preaches on why Christians should love our neighbors by engaging with politics from Matthew 22.
In the first sermon from our new Kingdom Politics series, Pastor Joel talks about why Christian engagement in politics is so difficult and why we need Kingdom civics instead of partisan ones.
Acts 17 tells us pagans viewed the Christians as “turning the world upside down,” following a different king than Caesar. Today, Christians often aren’t turning the world upside down, but instead look just like any other members of political parties. Christians should baffle the political order by refusing to be categorized neatly into established boxes.
In this important sermon, we discuss what it means to be about the kingdom of God while still engaging politically in this complex time.
In this final sermon in our series in John, we walk through the book's epilogue, where Peter is reconciled to Jesus after he denied him three times as the crucifixion took place.
We learn the power and necessity of repentance as we see Jesus restore Peter, and we see the fruit of that repentance as we reflect on Peter's story.
John’s stunning account of the resurrection tells us many things about its significance and why it has enduring importance for Christians and the rest of the world. In this sermon Pastor Joel explains its importance to us in regards to how we view God when things look terrible, in how it’s a credible account for Jesus actually being raised, in how Jesus’s resurrection body is the blueprint for our own someday, and in what it teaches us about how Jesus reveals himself to us.
The crucifixion narrative in the book of John is just that: a narrative. Which means that it conveys the significance of the death of Jesus through details implanted in a story.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel gives three details that offer significance to Jesus’s death:
(1) That Jesus defeats his enemy by shedding his own blood, not theirs (2) That Jesus remains faithful while his disciple Peter (representing us) is faithless (3) That we see both God and man at work in the story, both working towards their own ends
When we put these three clues together, we see what John wants us to know about the death of the Word of God.
Hint: it is good news for ears weary of their own mistakes and beaten down by the world’s bullies.
Jesus’s final prayer before his climactic trip to the cross is for the unity of the church. How does the church realize the vision of unity in Jesus’s prayer? What are similarities and differences between ‘biblical unity’ and modern ideals of ‘equality?’ How do we think about the many differences Christians have among themselves? What mechanism is in the church that makes sure the marginalized are given special care and attention? And how is Jesus our power source and model to make all of this happen?
In this important sermon, Pastor Joel — with an assist from the Apostle Paul — unpacks the incredible vision of unity baked into the church.
John invites us into the room where it happened, the room where Jesus talks about how we must abide or be present with him.
In this sermon, Pastor Julie talks about what it means for us to abide in Jesus using the imagery that Jesus uses: a vine and branches. How do we abide in Jesus and find the life that comes from him so that we may grow fruit? Listen to this sermon to find out!
Jesus, in the room with his disciples, begins to hint and even outright say he will die and leave them. The disciples are naturally unsettled by the prospect of his absence. So Jesus offers them three comforts that we discuss in this sermon.
First, he exhorts them to presence his love to each and the world. Second, he explains he isn't leaving for no purpose, but for their benefit--to, like the American pioneers, trailblaze a place for the disciples to follow him to. Thus, Jesus says he is the only way to God, and in the sermon we discuss whether or not all roads lead to God/heaven. And third, Jesus explains he will send his Holy Spirit to be his voice to lead us along the path he had set for us.
In this message, Troy Wilson, Pastor of Community Outreach at our neighboring church Central Baptist guest preaches. He shares his story of being "the other", how we were once "the other" until Christ saved us with his love, and how we must repent of "differentiating ourselves" from the "others" around us.
Jesus invites his disciples, and us, into the intimate setting of the last supper, his final words before his death and resurrection. He washes his disciples’ feet, symbolizing his cleansing, servant love, and gives his disciples a new command: love each other and others as he loves them.
If we’re honest, though, this presents two problems for us as modern Christians. First, Christians aren’t always the most loving people. Second, we are so confused as to what the word love even means in our society. What does Jesus mean when he says we are to love one another? Both of these questions actually find satisfying fulfillment in this passage. Pastor Joel breaks it all down.
Some people micromanage. Some people are “control freaks.” Some people have darker inclinations for domination and manipulation. In reality, many worship power or control. Because of this, when Jesus is presented as the true King of the world and the one who holds all power, it can be a stumbling block.
It’s a stumbling block because of the scandalous way he uses his power—not meticulously controlling everything for his own self-benefit or comfort, but in emptying himself for us because this is how true power brings life. And he does something more scandalous still: calling us to follow him in seeing power this way. Join Pastor Joel as he preaches this last sermon in the Devil’s Advocate miniseries.
Looking for purpose in this life? Wondering if anything happens when you die?
Pastor Julie talks through John 11 and the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, and shares about the spiritual significance that this story has for us. In Christ, we find new life and purpose in the present and look forward to resurrection and eternal life after death.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We've heard this a million times if we've spent enough time in churches. But what does that mean? And why do we even need a good shepherd in the first place? Is there a problem of leadership in the world? Why not be your own shepherd?
John 10 opens up a lot of intriguing lines of thought when applied to today's world. Pastor Joel explores them in depth in this sermon.
A major opposition today for belief is what is sometimes called 'the problem of evil', which asks this question: "If God is good and all powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world?" In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks in what way Jesus reframes our view of God and his purpose in evil when we find ourselves asking this question.
We must first challenge our assumptions, and ask why Christianity thrived in the past when people faced arguably greater suffering than they do today. We find three things have changed: (1) Our view of God has changed, (2) Our view of pain has changed, and (3) we have divorced the story of the Bible from suffering we face. Jesus brings these three things back together again.
When we look at the Bible and the gospel story, we see the whole narrative is God's answer to the problem of evil. As the gospel recreates us into new creation, God works good from evil. We see that God is indeed all powerful, showcasing a power that is greater than just stopping bad things from happening in the first place by putting broken things back together together into something better than they were before. And we see God is indeed good, because he doesn't just throw things that have been broken by evil into the trash, but lovingly takes them and makes them more beautiful than they were before.
Jesus said a lot of things that angered the elites of his day, including the crazy idea that all people are slaves to sin. Being Abraham's family members, the ones who had been freed from Egypt, didn't keep the Jews from being free from slavery to sin.
What does this slavery look like? And how can the church model true freedom by embracing the multiethnic family of Abraham they now belong to? We talk about all of this in a sermon bursting with biblical truth.
*Note: several parts of this message are missing from the back third of the recording due to technical difficulties. We're sorry for the inconvenience.
In John 7:53-8:11, a group called the Pharisees tries to trap Jesus into condemning a woman who was caught committing adultery. Jesus chooses a third way and instead of condemning or acquitting this woman, he restores her.
Pastor Julie reflects on how we can rest in Jesus' restoration and restore one another, even in our current "cancel culture" that doesn't like to give second chances.
At various times in his ministry, Jesus encounters the Pharisees, a strict sect of Jews that looked similar to a modern day grassroots political pressure group. They butted heads with Jesus because the kingdom he was bringing conflicted with their moral vision for Israel.
Jesus has harsh rebukes for the Pharisees, and they remain potent for moralism today, whatever form it takes. In this message, Pastor Joel examines how Christians can find righteousness that doesn't come from the "look at how righteous I am" mentality many have on social media, but in the faithfulness of the Righteous One, Jesus.
The kingdom of God coming to earth is not coming into a vacuum; it comes into a space that is occupied territory. So naturally, there is opposition. Jesus encounters this in the book of John, and we will talk about what that opposition looks like for him and how it applies to us as well.
In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks through how we should respond when the gospel offends people, which is a big reason people are turned off to the message of Jesus today. Did that deter Jesus? How can we respond faithfully when we as Christians are offended?
Jesus brings both literal bread to those in need, but he offers a deeper and more necessary sustenance: himself. What is the relationship between the two? How does partaking in Christ empower and strengthen us to work to correct injustice and help those in need? Why is it so important that we don't separate the two, as Christians often do?
Pastor Joel dives into these very important and timely questions in this sermon from John.
The big idea of John 5:1-47 is perhaps the most central to the whole book: that when we look at Jesus, we are seeing God. For us, in the midst of history being made, we need to know what God is calling us to do. So to do so, we look to Jesus.
When we look at Jesus in this passage, we see two things: 1) A healer and a 2) prophet. Like Jesus, we are called to be healers and prophets in this time of injustice and pain. Join us as Pastor Joel explains how we can be healers and prophets like Jesus.
In response to the death of George Floyd, we corporately lament the systemic racism, injustice, and sin in our world and in our own hearts.
Pastor Joel gives a message from the book of Amos on God's justice, which comes to destroy racism and sin, how radical change begins with repentance, how repentance leads to life not just in the future but now, and how we can find hope in Jesus in the midst of our anger and sadness.
What happens when Jesus doesn't heal?
Once again, we find Jesus perform a "sign", and this time, Jesus heals a boy who was dying. Before we, with modern eyes, can embark on reading about biblical healing, we need to first empty our pockets at the door and realize how the expectation of happiness and affluence many of us have influences how we view healing, and specifically, how we can forget that it is is a sign.
Many who are listening to this podcast may experience chronic pain or mental health issues even though they have cried out for healing in the past. We talk about how the sign of faith on those circumstances is greater than the healing would be.
As John continues to reveal Jesus to us, we are treated in this passage to his interaction with a Samaritan woman--a surprising thing for a rabbi of his stature to do in the eyes of many of his contemporaries.
This meeting is a window into the heart of Jesus's message: That ALL are invited to come and be satisfied at the living water that is offered by Jesus, even if you are engaged in unseemly activity, a member of a marginalized race, or a woman in a patriarchal society. Join us as Pastor Julie walks through one of the most memorable passages in the book of John.
The story of the book of John pivots back to John the Baptist in this sermon's passage. John, this great influencer for Jesus, has seen his influence decline as Jesus's popularity has risen. His disciples ask him, "What the heck, boss?" and his response is truly incredible.
He responds by showing us all the heart and ambition of a Christlike servant. In this sermon. Pastor Joel talks about 3 aspects of ambition and servanthood that John teaches us. This is particularly poignant in a society that aggrandizes ambition.
Join us as we dig into this countercultural text, and examine the one who John points to, the great servant king himself, Jesus.
The Apostle Paul, socially distanced from a church he had planted in Thessalonica, encourages the church to live worthy of the call that had been placed on them in their difficult circumstances. We believe that God is calling us to also be worthy of the call he has placed on us in the midst of the crazy times we live in too.
In this message, Joel and Julie outline the three things we are calling the church to endure with, taking small steps in challenges each week.
Those three things are:
(1) Leaning into time with God
(2) Gathering as a Family
(3) Serving Generously
We unpack what those things mean in this message. Hope you enjoy!
John is peeling back who Jesus is, layer by layer, and the layer we peel back to day is the layer that reveals to us God's love, found in the important section that contains John 3:16.
We are introduced to the deep, vulnerable love of God which is itself experienced in vulnerability. Often, we try to receive God's love with in our wisdom or our knowledge, like Nicodemus. But God comes to us in vulnerable love, and we receive him in vulnerability. We are in danger of missing God's coming if we can't receive him vulnerably.
What does it mean to be "born again"? Many of us have negative connotations with that phrase, but in John 3:1-8, we see how Jesus uses it to describe the new life we can have in him that comes with repentance and choosing to follow Him as our king.
God is at work building his kingdom, and just like the wind, we can't control it or even see it sometimes, but we can feel its effect. In this sermon, Pastor Julie reminds us that we need the king (Jesus) in order to see the kingdom and that we gain a new family identity when we are born into the family of God.
This is probably the strangest Easter many of us will ever celebrate. Yet, Jesus is still risen, the tomb is still empty, and we still have hope. This Easter Sunday, Pastor Joel unpacks the situation of the Thessalonians, to whom Paul writes as he is quarantined from them in the letter 1 Thessalonians.
Paul's answer to their uncertainty about the future is to look back at the story of Easter, and then look forward. When we look back at the Easter story, we find that we have hope because we know God has design in death, and he sets a pattern of life from death that we can expect in the age to come, but also now in the present.
Join us as we celebrate the Super Bowl of Christianity on this unique, but still hopeful, Easter.
In John 2, Jesus shakes things up (literally) by going to the Temple in Jerusalem, with all of its prestige and impact on the average Jewish person's life, and declaring it would be destroyed.
But it wouldn't just be destroyed--it had been replaced by Jesus himself.
There are some explosive applications to this, and in ways you might not expect. This includes direct application to what is happening right now in the midst of the COVID19 pandemic. Join us for this sermon and find out how!
This week, Pastor Joel brings up the subject of miracles, or, using the word John does, signs. Signs show God's glory--and the first sign Jesus chooses to use is to keep a wedding dance going strong.
The symbolism of this first sign, turning water into wine, points to the great celebration that comes from God's fulfillment of his covenant, and it is the fulfillment of whatever celebrations Christians have now.
Grab a bottle of wine and listen to this word on miracles and celebration!
In our first Res City Church at Home during the COVID19 outbreak, we get back into our sermon series on the book of John.
We meet Nathanael, a small but important story that John keys us into because it introduces someone who is skeptical of Jesus's Messiahship. Jesus responds tenderly, and we learn that skepticism isn't a threat to the gospel, but in fact it's a part of a healthy faith when understood rightly. This is why John tells us this story - so we can understand how skepticism can help us to experience God in a deeper way, where instead of knowing God we are known by God through Jesus.
Join Pastor Joel as he walks through this really cool story.
If you want to be a part of the Res City at Home community on Sunday mornings as long as we are worshipping together online instead of together, you can head on over to our YouTube page Sundays at 9:30 for worship and a message each week.
In John 1, we meet an important figure in early Christianity: John the Baptist. John the Baptist is the first witness in the book who testifies to God’s glory which has come in Jesus. We find as we study his testimony that he did not completely understand what God was up to, yet he did it anyway. We can respond with similar passion when we feel uncertain too, trusting God is moving.
John comes as a voice in the wilderness, declaring the way of the Lord, and we are called to also be voices, maybe not in the literal wilderness, but in the wilderness that other people experience. This is a calling that we cannot take lightly!
Join us as Pastor Joel walks us through the testimony of the first witness of the book of John.
We are starting a new series at Res City in the book of John. John’s concern is to point us toward something of great weight —the greatest weight—the coming of God in flesh in Jesus. John is someone who has seen this firsthand and desires for you to “come and see” for yourself.
There is a danger to have this glory be right under our noses and miss it, however. We have to be careful not to miss the coming of Jesus, and to not know a lot about Jesus but not know who he is.
Join us as we introduce the book of John and prepare to come and see the glory of Jesus.
The coming of God's kingdom that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer is contested by two things: Our own hearts, full of sin, and the evil one, Satan.
The prayer here alerts us to our own hearts need to be tested, to see what they truly are. This is what we mean when we pray to not be led into temptation or to be tested. We find a strong example of what Jesus means here in the story of Abraham and Sarah. We, like them, desire to attain the blessing of God apart from Him, and try to manufacture the blessing on our own power. When we do, sometimes we will find ourselves tested to see if desire the blessing God gives more than God himself.
When we are tempted, however, we will meet the evil one, who seeks to tear our hearts to worship ourselves and our own ability. When we do, we must pray for deliverance as Jesus teaches.
Thankfully, we do not need to rely on our own ability because we rely in the faithfulness of the One who has remained faithful in the test, Jesus. Pastor Joel explains how Jesus's own faithfulness in the test gives us power and hope for when we face our own.
The Lord’s Prayer makes us perform the uncomfortable task of confessing our sin. In the sermon on what it means for us to ask for forgiveness, Pastor Julie explains why this matters and why we need to confess even if we don’t like it.
Additionally, being forgiven means we can now also be people who turn around and can forgive others. But this is more challenging than it may appear. Julie explains how we can forgive well, like Christ.
The Lord's Prayer includes in its middle portion one line about asking for our needs. When we pray, we devote a little bit more time to our needs than that, however.
When we dig into the prayer, we see Jesus tells us to pray for what we need today, instead of an excess. We learn that Jesus desires for us to be radically dependent on him day by day. Pastor Julie breaks down what it looks like to pray and live this out.
The second and third part of the Lord's prayer finds the person praying asking for something. But if it's God's will they are asking for, whose will is being prayed? And what does it look like to desire God's kingdom?
In this sermon, Pastor Joel describes the mingling of wills we find when humans pray for God's kingdom to come, what the kingdom is, and learn to see where God's kingdom is not in order to pray this petition.
We talk about the two types of God's will, how following God's will is like playing music, and tangled cords.
The Lord's Prayer is not just something that we pray in church some Sunday mornings. It's a gift from Jesus to give us a model on how we can pray. For this reason, we ought to be praying this prayer on a regular basis.
But before we can pray it, we have to understand what it says. This sermon series will go through the Lord's Prayer, line by line, and break down what is happening so that we we pray, we understand what is happening to us as we pray it.
The first part of the prayer contains a tension: God as Father, and God as hallowed one. The tension may seem stark, but in reality, if you can grasp the tension well, you can move on and pray the rest of the prayer with abandon. Pastor Joel walks us through the tension.
We wrap up the Why Church series by asking how we do church well. The church is a part of Gods work in reconciling the world back to himself and there are things the church can do to help make that happen. Pastor Joel walks through five things that all churches are called to, but are also things we want to to be known for. Those things are Justice and service, Community and imitation of each other, Beauty and art, Proclamation, and Celebration. Join us as we break each of these down.
The author of the book of Hebrews tells us the church is a gathering of the redeemed who enter Gods presence because Jesus has made a way. Specifically there are three "Let us" exhortations that constitute this author's vision to how we are to live as a community. The three Let us exhortations or lettuces are 1 Let us draw near to God, 2 Let us hold onto our hope, and 3 Let us challenge and encourage one another and not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing. In this sermon Pastor Julie tells us why we should be in the habit of doing these 3 Lettuces together as a church each week and how we do it well
To grow is to stay at the beginning. What does this mean? That we must consistently draw our Christian life from the essentials of our faith. And one of the primary essentials to our faith is the church. But why is this? And what are the reasons we attend each week? This series aims to get us thinking about the answer to this question. In this sermon Pastor Joel kicks us off by walking us through the church is an embassy of reconciliation, the reconciliation between God and the world that is being enacted through Jesus. We are ambassadors of this message and the church is the place where the foreign soil of reconciliation manifests in our world. Reconciliation works itself out in the church in 3 ways: 1 Reconciliation back to God through creating counter habits of worship that point us back to the beginning of our faith, 2 Reconciliation to one another through true interconnectivity as opposed to false interconnectivity through by digital means, and 3 Reconciliation of all our thought under the Lordship of Christ a foreign idea to us that we learn through gathering as a church in many ways. We unpack these three ideas of reconciliation in this weeks message. Join us as we grow by returning to the beginning
Every culture tells stories which point to the values struggles and ethics it holds. Naturally this happens with Christmas and the stories we tell ourselves both have overlap with and divergence from the true Christmas story told by Christians each year. In most other Christmas stories we are told we must have Christmas spirit or we will suffer some consequence. To start we look at A Christmas Carol and Elf. Often we come to view Christmas Spirit as a moral code we are supposed to follow that no one can enforce but ourselves consisting of kindness generosity and charity. Marys song roots us in an amazing story where God remembers his promises because she roots us in Israels story. This is a story about a people who are unkind, disingenuous, and uncharitable. Despite that, God remembers his promise to them and comes in the most vulnerable way imaginable. We must be able to respond in our own vulnerability to truly receive and understand the gift of Christmas. When we do we can then truly embody Christmas Spirit in the fullest sense.
Mary's Song, The Magnificat is known as a revolutionary song. But what makes it so revolutionary? What made it get banned in some countries in history because it could cause trouble for those in power? Why does it cast down the mighty and lift high the lowly? In this sermon Pastor Julie walks through the powerful message of the song and what it says to both those who are mighty and those who are lowly.
A young teenage girl is suddenly awakened by a messenger from God who tells her she will be of central importance in Gods plan to redeem the world. Her response: A fearless and revolutionary song. For Advent season we are going to look at Mary's Song long revered in Christian history for the way it magnifies the God who it refers to. Specifically, Pastor Julie digs into how it helps us to find true joy at Christmas instead of fake holiday spirit when we magnify God like Mary.
Daniel wraps up with a long vision of what will happen in the unfolding centuries and what God will do to vindicate his people. The big idea of the passage is that God rules history and it is all faithful to accomplish his purposes. Pastor Joel preaches on two bad ways and two good ways taken from the passage to respond to Gods rule of history. His rule works towards his purpose of entering into his own story as a child and as Daniels story culminates, we introduce the Advent season as we approach Christmas.
Before Daniel can receive the final vision of the book, he learns that the angel delivering the vision has been detained by another spiritual being. This is a perplexing passage that deserves a full look at the realm of God and the sons of God. We learn about a parallel spiritual conflict to the one Daniel is revealing to us. As we study the topic of spiritual warfare we find out that the response from us is to go about our normal Christian rhythms. But we must not forget that those normal patterns are infused with greater meaning because they find resonance in the world we will explore in todays passage.
In Daniel 9 we find a disappointed and frustrated Daniel one who had an expectation of God that is currently unmet. Daniel reflects on his people's relationship with God and there are so many takeaways for us in this jewel of a passage. As Pastor Joel digs into it, we find great encouragement for our own relationship with God as we examine it in depth, learning how we can rest firm in it because God is part of it: He is all we need.
Daniel 8 details major conflict in the world that will unfold and affect Gods people. Despite parts of the vision that terrify Daniel into making him want to take a nap, we've all been there, Daniel. The big picture is that God is in control and we can rest firm in that. This is great news but it shouldn't be enough for us to just know that and then do nothing with it. Its important that we pause and think about how we live practically knowing God is in control of all that unfolds. Pastor Julie breaks down what that looks like in this sermon while also giving you a quick and entertaining description of the history described in the passage.
In Daniel 7, a strange figure is central to Gods purposes in judging the beasts. That figure is revealed as Jesus where he confesses to being him on a trial before the Jewish religious authorities. In both cases God reveals or unmasks the situation as it is from heaven. In order for us to get the glory of the passage we have to reveal or unmask our own situations over and over in our own hearts. If we don't, we will find ourselves getting bored with the gospel. Pastor Joel talks about how to keep the gospel from being stale in our hearts even when we've heard it so many times.
In Daniel 7, Daniel has a vision of four beasts who cause havoc on the earth. In it, we find a picture that resonates with our own crazy times. Daniel 7 is a lot of things and the imagery in the passage is tough to understand but when we get a grasp of it we see that it is a goldmine for leading us to understand what God is doing in the world about evil and chaos. Pastor Joel illustrates how to understand the type of literature that Daniel 7 is written in as well as what it means for us in our own conflict ravaged world.
Daniel is thrown into a pit of hungry lions looking for something to devour. We may not ever get thrown into a lions den but we have all felt like we were in a pit surrounded by lions who are licking their lips. In this sermon on Daniel 6, Pastor Joel explains that it's important that we view the lions den well like Daniel does. Only when we reframe the experience and quit assuming we know what is happening in the den can we have hope in God to deliver us. *Note This sermon was rerecorded due to technical difficulties
In Daniel 5 King Belshazzar is confronted with the word of God and it terrifies him It is a picture of us when we read Scripture We can find ourselves confused by it like when the history of the text doesnt align perfectly with other history as happens in this passage offended by it or frustrated that it doesnt give us what we want We need to be ready to let Scripture achieve its purpose and we need to know the master key to unlock it Jesus Otherwise it will rightly confound us and keep us from understanding its message Pastor Joel walks through how we can related well to Scripture in this sermon
One of the main differences between the people of God and the world around them is the humility with which they are called to live with. Our worship of God is what sets us apart and one of the primary ways to live that worship out is in redefining success giving credit where it is due and repenting and looking to God. Pastor Julie walks through the back half of Daniel 4 to break down how Nebuchadnezzars pride and his repentance of it is a model for us.
The book of Daniel along with many other books in Scripture offers a critique of power gone wrong calling those in authority to acknowledge that they cannot fulfill the role of God. In this passage, King Nebuchadnezzar finds himself called to repent and turn to God. It is hard for us to understand the role of someone like Nebuchadnezzar or Caesar or other emperors in the ancient world both because of how we view authority and because we live in a modern democracy. Sometimes its good then to turn the magnifying glass on ourselves and reckon whether or not we are trying to be Little Caesars trying to pull off what that authority figure would do ourselves. In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks about how we can hope in the kingdom of Jesus rather than any other kingdom we might try to build up on our own.
Daniel has shown us how we can follow Jesus and still find excellence, but this doesn't mean we wont sometimes face opposition. On top of that, we are faced with the sometimes confusing question of how we should act in a pluralistic society. In this sermon on Daniel 3, we find out how we are called to follow Jesus when we are pressured to bow to some idol. Find out more about Resurrection City Church. Go to our website rescitychurch.org or follow us on Instagram and Twitter and like us on Facebook.
When the apostle Paul walks into Athens in Acts 17, he observes and is distressed by many idols all relating to different aspects of peoples lives. His response is a disruptive gospel that takes the system of life of the people of Athens and turns it on its head. In this Fall Kick Off sermon, Pastor Joel tells why this disruptive gospel is one we need to retune ourselves and why its good to be made uncomfortable by the news of Jesus.
In Daniel 2, Daniel grows up learning the dominant trades of the culture which in Babylon means he is trained in astrology and divination. He excels in it but we find he only excels because of his reliance on God. In doing so he shows us how to be salt in our world, to worship Jesus, and to make the culture flourish as a result. This is what Christian excellence looks like. Pastor Joel describes what this Christian excellence entails.
As we finish the first chapter of the book of Daniel, Pastor Joel walks through what Daniel teaches us about how the people of God are to relate to their culture. Instead of rejecting culture or receiving culture, we are to redeem it through respecting distinction. We talk about how to do it in our workplaces in particular, just as Daniel does at the highest echelons of Babylon.
In the introduction to the new sermon series on Daniel, Pastor Joel breaks down how the plight of Israel in exile in the book of Daniel makes it a quintessential book for us to explore in our own exile as Christians today. And the answer is that it is a matter of staying distinct through worship of Jesus alone in all areas of our lives that leads us to bless the culture we are in.
In this standalone sermon, Pastor Julie walks through how a story about a group of people who would stop at nothing to get their paralyzed friend in front of Jesus correlates to the vision of Res City Church.
In the final sermon in the Ruth series, Pastor Julie brings the story of Ruth, Boaz, and Naomi to a conclusion. We find that God's hesed towards Ruth and Naomi is fulfilled in amazing ways both in the present and in the larger story the Bible is telling. We find out what Gods hesed for them means for us as readers of this story now.
On this Baptism Sunday, Pastor Joel walks through Romans 6:1-7 and how baptism is a symbol that points us to the gospel of Jesus our unity with him our death to old things and life to new.
In the first half of chapter 4 of Ruth, we find out how Boaz uses the legal system to redeem Ruth and Naomi. As we study it we see how Boaz's willingness to use his privilege to help others is a pointer to something much greater than Boaz could've ever imagined.
In chapter 3, Naomi hatches a plan to help Ruth find security for her life, but Ruth has a plan of her own. Ruths actions prompt us to consider what it means to be a part of the family of God in our own daily lives.
In the second half of Ruth 2, we find that God has not abandoned his loving loyalty to Ruth and Naomi. When we dig deeper we discover how God shows this hesed love to us.
Pastor Julie examines Ruth 2:1-13 and explores the generosity of Boaz and how that relates to Christ and our current lives.
Psalm 75 is about God the just judge and brings up all kinds of things we can find discomforting. Pastor Joel walks through what it means for us to read this Psalm and all others Christocentrically, meaning we find Christ at the heart of it. When we do that, we find what it is that makes him the just judge and why its so incredible to follow him.
Psalm 1: This is a Psalm about being happy. Pastor Joel dives into why being rooted in God's law and its perfect culmination, Jesus, causes us to bear fruit which leads to our happiness.
Looking at Psalm 42 as an example, Pastor Julie talks about how to recognize challenge and process our emotions with God.
Ephesians 1:1-10 | If the Apostle Paul could have had you read anything this would be it. Ephesians roots us into the story of our history from our formation by Gods grace to the good works the church is called to now as God's artwork. Pastor Joel kicks off the series with this intro to the book on Res City Church's very first ever Sunday service.
*Note This sermon was rerecorded due to technical difficulties
Ephesians 6:18-24 | In the final sermon in the book of Ephesians we find Paul ends the letter where he started Gods catalytic and sustaining grace for us Pastor Joel talks about how prayer uniquely fits into the big picture of all God has done for us in Christ
It can be confusing to know what to do with the devil and demons and spiritual warfare, and how we respond to Scripture passages that bring it up. Pastor Joel breaks down Ephesians 6:10-17 and talks about how putting on the armor of God and engaging in a conflict we didn't ask to join.
Do Christians just have a bunch of rules to follow or are we just supposed to live free and authentic? Paul has a different vision for a Christian ethic and Pastor Joel explores it in this framing sermon for how to understand the rest of the book of Ephesians.
*Note: This sermon was rerecorded due to technical difficulties
In this passage with a difficult subject, slavery, Pastor Joel breaks down Pauls revolutionary message about slavery and the gospel dealing with the complexities of first century life noting our frustrations with Paul not saying what we all want him to say. We find that Paul has a profound message about the gospel when we move beyond the surface.
In order for the new society God has created through his grace to work, his people need to live in distinctive ways that reflect the story they find themselves in. In this sermon, Pastor Joel examines why it matters how children, even as adults, honor their parents and what it means to parent like God the Father.
Pastors Julie and Joel walk through Paul's instruction for marriage, how it is a deeply countercultural, and how it is a signpost for Christ's relationship with the church.
Pastor Julie walks through Ephesians 5:1-20 and talks about the new ways we are called to live as Gods people.
In Romans 1, Paul tells us that Jesus was appointed the Son of God in power. Pastor Joel breaks down what that means and why it matters to us on more than just Easter.
In the second session of the 2019 Res City Spring Retreat, Pastor Joel contrasts Jesus the King of the Sabbath with our other kings who push us to relentless work.
Pastor Julie walks through our call to work how work is affected by sin and how it is redeemed in Christ.
Pastor Joel walks through the different gifts described in the passage and why they are so important for the church.
Pastor Julie talks about our gifts and our callings and how we can use them to further Gods kingdom.
In this turning point in the letter of Ephesians, Pastor Joel talks about what it looks like to live a life worthy of the story of Ephesians.
Pastor Joel explains the incredible vision for what the church should be that Paul describes in the passage.
Ephesians 2 explains how God has united people together in Christ regardless of race gender or any other identity marker humans have assigned value. Pastor Joel walks us through the passage.
Pastor Joel tells us the plan of God to make us brand new people in the midst of a dying world and what it means to be his handiwork.
Pastor Julie talks about what it looks like to know God and know the power that we have in Christ.
In the second sermon in the Ephesians Series, Pastor Joel discusses grace and election and what their purpose is in Ephesians 1:11-14.
Pastor Joel talks about how Psalm 104 challenges us to expand our imagination in regard to who God is.
Pastor Joel examines Psalm 11 and how Christians can relate to anxiety in their daily lives by taking refuge in Christ.