GARDEN CHURCH Podcast

Paul walked into Ephesus, the wealthiest and most idol-filled city in the Roman Empire, and found twelve disciples who had never heard of the Holy Spirit. Three months in the synagogue later, he moved the church to a rented lecture hall and taught the word of God daily for two years, during the hours everyone else spent napping through the heat. In Acts 19, revival wasn't organized around a prayer...

In Acts 19, Paul spends three months preaching in the synagogue in Ephesus. Some listeners recognize the truth of what he's saying and still refuse to believe, because believing would cost them their position. So Paul moves out, rents a lecture hall, and spends the next two years teaching the disciples day after day until the whole region has heard the message. In this message, Pastor Bill looks a...

Everybody is talking about revival right now. But history shows the same pattern every time God moves, whether in Wales in 1904, on Azusa Street in 1906, or in Ephesus in Acts 19: the presence of God, the fear of the Lord, sin confessed, and idols dropped. You can't manufacture revival. You meet the conditions and God sends the fire. In this first week of a six-part look at Acts 19, we step into f...

What do you learn after you know everything? In Acts 18, Luke introduces Apollos, a learned man from Alexandria who taught about Jesus accurately and with real fervor, though he knew only the baptism of John. When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him home and explained the way of God more adequately. Two tentmakers with no formal training between them, and he listened. We looked at what t...

Acts 18 tells us what happened during Paul's eighteen months in Corinth. First Corinthians tells us what was happening inside him while it did. In this message we look at both. Corinth was built on strength, beauty, eloquence, and success. Hide your weakness, show off your best, win at all costs. Paul arrives as the most credentialed missionary of his day and instead of booking the biggest venue,...

Paul lands in Athens alone, walking a city drowning in idols, and what rises in him is a settled burning, the same grief God has over a place that has everything except him. In Acts 17 that burden turns into conversation. He doesn't open with Genesis. He finds an altar the Athenians built out of an old fear, quotes their own poets back to them, and tells the Epicureans and the Stoics where each of...

Paul preaches the same message in two cities forty five miles apart. Thessalonica riots. Berea starts a Bible study. Same message, same messenger. The only thing that changes is how the word gets received. We look at why people can miss the truth when it's sitting right in front of them, and why the obstacle is usually not the evidence but the story we've already built our lives around. In Thessal...

In Acts 16, a fortune telling girl follows Paul through Philippi shouting things that are technically true, and he silences her with the name of Jesus. We look at the kind of spirituality she represented, the Delphi brand that kings and business owners paid good money for, and how accurate words can still be arranged into a lie. Most of us listened to a dozen voices before we ever walked into chur...

In Acts 16, Paul is doing exactly what Jesus called him to do, and the Holy Spirit keeps closing doors. He heads for Asia and gets blocked, tries Bithynia and gets blocked again, until finally a dream sends him to Macedonia. The question underneath the whole passage: can we trust the God of the no as much as the God of the yes? Closed doors are one of the main ways God guides his church, and Acts...

Paul and Barnabas had one of the closest partnerships in the early church, and then they had a fight sharp enough that they went in separate directions. In Acts 15, their disagreement over John Mark ends the pairing, but the gospel keeps multiplying. This week we look at why God seems to prefer partnerships to solo callings, how our need to be right can become its own idol, and why dishonor is so...

This week in Church on Fire , we're in Acts 15 with Pastor Brian McCormack. The gospel is Jesus plus nothing equals everything. The second you take out the "nothing" and add anything to it, you ruin the whole thing. That's what was at stake in the Jerusalem Council. Some believers were trying to load new converts with extra requirements to prove they really belonged. Peter, James, and the wider ch...

Paul closes his first missionary journey by walking back through the same cities where he was beaten, driven out, and left for dead. His message to the new believers there is a hard one: we must go through many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God. In Acts 14:21-28, we sit with what it means to keep following Jesus after the initial excitement fades. We look at three places hardship tends to show...

In Acts 13, Paul preaches his first recorded sermon. He's tired, sick from the journey, and dealing with conflict in ministry, and he stands up in a synagogue full of people who already know the story. They've read the law and the prophets Sabbath after Sabbath. Then he gets to the end and reveals the one thing that changes how all of it reads: Jesus. We walk through Paul's sermon as he traces the...

In Acts 13, the church at Antioch is the most diverse leadership team in the early church, and it's about to send out its first missionaries. From this we pull three marks of a missional church: it worships before it works, it gives itself away, and it confronts the counterfeit. We look at how the Holy Spirit set apart Barnabas and Saul for himself, not for a mission field or a destiny, and what t...

Acts 12 gives us two apostles arrested by the same king. James meets a sword in a single verse. Peter, guarded by sixteen soldiers and bound in chains, is set free by an angel while the church prays through the night. One gets a sword, one gets an angel, and we live in that tension, because God doesn't always answer the way we hoped. In this message, Pastor Darren walks through the story of Peter'...

Jesus promised he would build his church, and Acts 11 shows us what that actually looks like in practice. The church at Antioch didn't have a famous founding pastor or an official send-off from Jerusalem. It was started by scattered people who'd watched their friend Stephen get stoned to death and then just kept going. And out of that, the first truly multicultural church was born. In this message...

Acts 10 is one of the great turning points in scripture. A Roman centurion named Cornelius prays and gives generously. A Jewish apostle named Peter wrestles with a vision he doesn't yet understand. And the wall that separated Jew and Gentile begins to come down, not through an argument, but through hospitality. In this message, Pastor Darren walks through the story of Cornelius and Peter and asks...