City Church Long Beach Sermons

Building Rituals City Church of Long Beach

How Does a Weary World Rejoice: Sing! – Luke 1:46-55 – December 21, 2025 How do you hold on to hope when the situation you’re in is not going the way you want it to? That could be a focused as having to deal with family drama over the holidays or as global as the state of our nation. These things wear us down. And yet - God continues to invite us into joy even in these situations. Join us this Sun...

Inviting Awe City Church Long Beach

Weary World Rejoice: By Finding Joy in Connection - Luke 1:23-45 with Josh Lopez-Reyes, executive director of the Echo Park Immigration Center.

Finding Joy in Connection City Church Long Beach

6 Kinds of Friends We Need Right Now: The Friend Who is a Partner in Purpose (Acts 18:1-3) - November 23, 2025 Sometimes strong friendships develop from a shared purpose, a mutual "mission," even between somewhat unlikely people. And it's a good thing because our churches are full of unlikely friends who've discovered they need each other on the journey toward Jesus, and they actually like each ot...

6 Kinds of Friends We Need Right Now: The Emotionally Safe Friend: David and Jonathan 1 Samuel 18:1- 4 - November 16, 2025

Suffering is inevitable in this life. There is hardship. There is pain. But somehow through the working of the Spirit of God, these difficult things can be transformed with one little addition: the presence of a friend. Join us again this week as we continue our series, The Six Kinds of Friends You Need These Days.

The Wise Mirror Friendship in the Book of Proverbs City Church Long Beach

6 Kinds of Friends We Need Right Now: The Friend In the Fight – Ecclesiastes 4:12 – October 26, 2025 One of the kinds of friends we need right now is a friend in the fight. We need someone who stands next to us as we push back against the injustices in the world. If we go it alone, we’ll wear out and break down and crack under all the sadness and pressure and frustration. That’s why we need this k...

Family, Forgiveness and Friendship City Church Long Beach

If you find yourself feeling lonely more often than you would like, you are not alone! Social scientists tell us that around 60% of Americans feel that way regularly, and those numbers are only going up. Let's honor the fact that God has wired us for love and meaningful connection, and spend the next few months seeing what God might have to say to us through some famous stories of friendship in Sc...

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the evil and suffering, the meanness (big and small) we see all around us and especially on our social media feeds. Where are the glimmers of hope we need to sustain us? How do we re-focus on these things and why do we need to? Join us as we explore Jesus's invitation to commit ourselves to the way of hope.

Stories of Hope – Luke 16:1-9 – Sept 28, 2025 These are intense days in our country. So many of us have struggled to find equilibrium as news story after news story comes out about our nation moving away from democracy. What must it have been like for Jesus to face the uncertainty of his own political climate, and what teaching did he give us that might help us find hope today?

Stories of Hope: Luke 18:1-8 – Sept 21, 2025 Emily Dickinson famously said that hope is a thing with feathers... Do you ever feel like these days hope needs a little more grit, a little more muscle, a song just as strong and forceful as it is sweet? This Sunday we'll let an unusual example of faith Jesus described for us speak into the places of our souls that are both hopeful and angry. Because h...

Stories of Hope: Matthew 13:31-32 – Sept 14, 2025 In a world full of cruelty and darkness, hope can feel hard to come by. But what if hope wasn’t a bright shiny thing, but rather more like a little old lady who keeps stopping to talk with beggars and then one day you realize she’s Mother Teresa and she’s changing the world? How does real change happen and how does hope play into it and how do we p...

This Sunday we're talking about grief, which may sound strange because usually churches do a big, energetic kick off on this Sunday each year. And in fact, we're having TACOs for lunch! So why grief? We're talking about grief because it's so sneaky and always weasels its way into new seasons of life, especially when there is change. So if we don't look at it directly (and gently), it'll slip into...

What do you do when people put you in a box? We all love to oversimplify others - it's sometimes called being a 'cognitive miser' - because we don't want to take the energy to be curious, to complicate the narratives we tell ourselves and to relate to people as they are as opposed to how we think they are. But Jesus loves to explode boxes, both the ones people put you and the ones you put others i...

Jephthah City Church Long Beach

Mephibosheth and Healing vs Curing City Church Long Beach

Our Lady of the Empty Jars City Church Long Beach

Thaddaeus, the Unknown Disciple City Church Long Beach

Zerubbabel and Small Things City Church Long Beach

There are two women in the Old Testament that have precious little in terms of money, influence, or connections. But what they have they use for the sake of pushing against the forces in their world that oppose the ways of God. Join us to build community connections and to be strengthened in vision and resolve for these hard times.