Citizens Weekly

From the Vision Series 2022: Follow. Jesus' call to follow him is synonymous with a call to community. The primary title in the New Testament to describe the community Jesus is building is "family." But for many, family is complicated. We don't get to choose our family. The family Jesus is building can also be challenging. Without community, we restrict our spiritual formation...

From the Vision Series 2022: Follow. We’re all in the process of becoming someone. Either we are actively involved in this process, or we are passive.  Jesus invites us to follow in him through the process of abiding. Before Citizens can live a communal life or a charismatic life, we must live the Christ life, which starts with abiding in the vine, being hidden in Christ, and being formed into his...

Matthew 7:12

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount.” Prayer can feel like an impossible practice to integrate into daily life. We all have hangups and deeply conflicting emotions about prayer for various reasons. Even still, Jesus invites his disciples into a life of abiding prayer filled with asking, seeking, and knocking. But what does Jesus mean? And is there a way around the common roadblocks followers of J...

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount.” When we are critical and judge people unfairly, we set ourselves above others, and we sit in God’s seat. By doing this, we set ourselves up for similar judgment in the future. Jesus presents the way we become the kinds of people who help others, his advocates of reconciliation and healing, by first taking inventory of our hidden motives, our desires to contro...

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount”. Anxiety robs us of the identity we have in Jesus and makes us an idolater – placing value on anything other than God (ourselves, our abilities, our education, our title, our influence, our bank account, our degree plan). Anxiety about obtaining possessions, even the basic needs of life, is meaningless because God places value on you. Far more than anything el...

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount”. In Matthew 6:19-24, Jesus questions His disciples in which economy they to participate – the treasures of earth that are momentarily enticing but fade or the treasures of heaven that challenge one’s faith but yield eternal fruit. It’s helpful for disciples in any age to recognize that, because of God’s great mercy and Jesus’ resurrection, the rewards of the F...

In 1 Samuel, King David is described as the man after God’s own heart. Although his life was marked by very high-high’s and even lower-low’s, he never wavered from his desire to know the Lord. Psalm 63 provides a framework for what it means to seek God and how we should pursue him. As a result, we can become a church whose faith can carry us through any storm. 

This week we look at Psalm 23 and how it offers a broad snapshot of what it looks like to trust the Lord while walking through every season of life. The hope of this message is that we would recognize his love and his faithfulness. May this teaching stir up within you a passion to know him more. 

From the Summer Psalms Series. As carnal beings in a carnal-centric world, we may easily obsess over our bodies, minds, and emotions – how we “feel”. Psalm 19 rightly reorients self-obsession to awe and humility before the Lord. For this reason, we need the Bible more than “biblical supplements”, although we often remain content with just supplements. But can we ever truly experience the Bible as...

From the Summer Psalms Series. In a chaotic world where even those outside the church report humanity’s relational crisis, the Psalms anchor us front and center before a God whose covenantal blessings to Abraham have not yet exceeded the promised inheritance of a thousand generations. But how do we meet with this historically faithful God when so much vies for our current attention? The Psalms ins...

From the Summer Psalms Series. As God’s people, we are not meant to fit the Bible into the narrative of our lives like more good advice; rather, we should strive to center our lives within God’s ongoing Biblical narrative of establishing and advancing His Kingdom on the earth. From the outset, the poetry and prayers of Psalms help us enter God’s story.

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount”. We live in the juxtaposition of the true self and the false self, what others have called the eulogy virtues and the resume virtues. In Matthew 6, Jesus shifts his focus from bad things that get in the way of following him to good things that get in the way of following him. In this text, Jesus takes his disciples through four shifts to transition from the fa...

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount”. Eugene Peterson writes, “It is easy to be honest with God with our hallelujahs; it is somewhat more difficult to be honest with our hurts; it is nearly impossible to be honest before God in the dark emotions of our hate”. Jesus confronts a socially accepted style of hatred – entrenched more in jealousy than rage – and declares it unacceptable in the Kingdom o...

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount.” The desire for revenge is a characteristic that is hardwired into our DNA. Some believe the Bible makes a case for revenge in certain circumstances, and some believe retaliation is never acceptable. Jesus claims that there is a 3rd way to bring peace through nonviolent action in a culture of revenge, but is it possible? 

From the Series "Sermon on the Mount”, Matthew 5v33-37. 

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount.” Divorce is painful and destructive. Everyone experiences the fallout after a marriage breaks up. Culture says one thing, legalism says another thing, but what does Jesus say about divorce and remarriage? Without making demands or announcing judgment, Jesus offers a third way, a way that brings healing, joy, and resurrection.

At a deep, fundamental level, we all have a problem. If we misdiagnose the problem, we’ll spend our lives trying to address one thing only to discover later that the problem, or our solution, was the wrong thing all along. Some of us are looking for signs of life in dead places, but He’s not there. He is risen.

From the Series “Sermon on the Mount.” Distorted desires destroy lives. Lust is an inner desire to dominate someone or something else in a distorted way. Jesus announces that, like adultery, lust is a destructive evil and that we must take drastic steps to eradicate its presence from our lives, in all its forms, or we will face hellish and unintended consequences.

From the Series, “Sermon on the Mount”. Anger is a powerfully complex and misunderstood emotion. Depending on cultural norms or family of origin, anger can vary between appropriate and inappropriate. In the middle of those differences, Jesus confronts our outward religious practices of image management and consumerism with the way to live as people of his kingdom.

From the series, “Sermon on the Mount”. Jesus makes the bold claim that He did not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. What does that mean, and did He do what He said?  And how does that change our relationship with the Law? Through the New Covenant, God is not after an outward appearance of righteousness, but a renovation of our heart.

From the Series, “Sermon on the Mount.” Jesus makes a declaration of His followers that is familiar to the point of becoming cliche: He says they are “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world”. He even suggests that they can lose their saltiness and hide their light. But what does any of this mean – practically speaking? Meditating on these statements, in the context of Jesus’ ministry,...