CityLife Church

This week's sermon continues our Open Table series by taking a closer look at Jesus’s first meal in Luke. After He publicly calls a Tax Collector to follow Him and that Tax Collector actually says “Yes”, we question whether Jesus called the “wrong one”. When Jesus then attends a whole feast with other "wrong ones”, is it all that surprising that the “religious” are repulsed by this? Pastor Pedro i...

This week, Pastor Pedro introduces CityLife's overarching themes for 2022: Invitation, Disciple Making and Deeper Life, and our first sermon series of the year entitled, Open Table. In this series, we will look at Luke’s unique account of Jesus’s meals, who He ate with, what was discussed, and how people treated Him. Perhaps most importantly, we look at who left the table satisfied.

This week’s sermon compares the stories of two men - Adam and Jesus, called the Second Adam - and the two trees they left as legacies. We explore how Scripture compares and contrasts how Adam changed the course of human history and then how Jesus reverses it. Pastor Pedro teaches that though Adam’s experience with a certain tree may have given us the knowledge of good and evil, Jesus’s Cross recon...

We begin 2022 by taking an honest look at ourselves and find we are no different than the people in the story of Babel. Though we proudly believe otherwise, humanity's condition is remarkably unchanged since the Genesis 11 story. Don’t we still strive for the same self-made importance and security and try build up our own names? Let’s rediscover how the way of Jesus enables us to understand one an...

As we bring 2021 to a close, we look forward to 2022. We resolve to enter the coming year, energized with wonder of what God may bring. We reflect on when God appointed and anointed a new leader over His people to be strong and courageous and promised to be with him every step of the way. That very same promise is for each of us as we step into God’s calling over our lives.

* This week, we look at how Jesus’s birth marked the arrival of perfect joy in the world. As Scripture tells us, the birth of Creation's King was no easy feat for anyone involved, yet God surrounds the birth of His Son with “sounding joy”. Pastor Pedro reminds us that to experience joy is to taste God’s future promises in the present and we can chose joy in all of life's circumstances.

This week, we look at how Jesus’s birth marked the arrival of perfect love in the world. The world uses the word “love” in so many different ways, yet we, as Christians of all people, must truly grasp how Jesus perfectly embodies love. John 1:14-18 teaches us that, through Jesus, we receive God’s grace and truth and are compelled to pursue loving intimacy with the Father.

* At the start of Advent, we look at how Jesus’s birth marked the arrival of perfect hope in the world. Pastor Pedro reminds us that Christmas is a wildly audacious claim. The notion that God came down and put on humanity is counterintuitive, to say the least, but on top of that Christmas is the claim that through “a baby born in Bethlehem” hope perfectly entered the world. What does perfect hope...

This week, we pause to celebrate God's faithfulness to our church. This Sunday was CityLife's first indoor Sunday service in 89 weeks! In our first service in our new location, we look back on how generous God has been to us since March 2020. We celebrate Him and share our testimony of how faithful God has been in this past season of exile, much like the people of God, led by Ezra and Nehemiah, di...

This week, we finish our brief but intimate look at Moses’s life. We've been on a four week quest to understand how God transformed Moses from a murderous fugitive from Pharaoh to the consistent companion of the Creator. Let’s see how the end of Moses's story models profound relationship with God and powerful leadership of God’s people.

This week, we look at the decades-long relationship that Moses and God shared while the Hebrews wandered in the wilderness. Pastor Pedro walks us through how God transformed a man with no home into a man who had relationship with God with no filter. How did God equip Moses for his extraordinary calling simply by meeting regularly with him face to face?

For the next chapter of Moses’s story, we turn to Exodus 3 and 4 where God uses a burning bush to invite Moses into a profound conversational relationship with Him, a transformation from whom he’s always thought he was into whom God’s always known him to be, and an extraordinary calling. Pastor Ryan shares how God uses ridiculous spectacles - like wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing tube men -...

This week begins a short preaching series on Moses by trying to understand the man. Understanding who Moses was at the start of his journey allows us to see how God moved and formed him. Knowing the man allows us to understand his calling, his journey and his God-given assignment Join us as we rediscover how a lifetime journey with God transformed Moses into the man who led a young nation. 

CityLife Oversight Team Member, Carla Calderon shares with us one of the most interesting stories in the Bible: when Jacob wrestles with God. She reminds us that at the end of that encounter, Jacob’s relationship with the Lord was strengthened and he was finally able to refer to God as his own God, not just the God of his forefathers. God had always been present in Jacob’s life, but it was only in...

This week, instead of our regularly scheduled programming, we take time to recap and practice the Spiritual Disciplines we studied together in our Missional Communities (MC). The disciplines have served the Church since its founding, teaching God's people to pursue deeper presence with the Him. Pastor Pedro gives us a brief word and issues an assignment: Pursue presence with God. Care to join us a...

As we bring “Our Beatitudes” sermon series to a close, we discuss the last part of the Beatitudes: rejoicing! The end result of being a beatific follower of Christ is a call to rejoice, even in the face of persecution. Pastor Pedro breaks down how suffering in the hands of a good, healing, and redemptive God produces true blessing.

This week's sermon places those who are reviled, persecuted, and spoken evil against on Jesus’s account are at the center of His blessing. Pastor Pedro breaks down what it means to be on Jesus’s account, why His blessing accompanies this hardship, and why Jesus preaches directly to us His followers. When Jesus calls us to be “beatific followers”, He calls us into the practices AND the promises.

This week, we look at what it means to be persecuted. If Our Beatitudes describe a person satisfied in Christ, why “in God’s Name” then are we called to have a healthy relationship with persecution? What does it mean to be persecuted for righteousness’ sake rather than for being a jerk? What does it mean to be a beatific sufferer? Short answer: we’re called to know Christ in both His joy and burde...

This week, the Peacemakers shine forth. Jesus calls all of His followers to be makers of peace in a world that cannot adequately define what peace is. The Father desires His children to take up the family business of establishing peace. Pastor Pedro discusses why peace is so central to God's work and how peacemaking, according to the Bible, costs.

This week, we take a look at the Pure In Heart. This beatitude may be the most pertinent beatitude to a New York City area church with regard to our hearts and schedules. How can busy, ambitious, and successful people live lives that deeply evidence Christ? How can this promise shape life and allow us to say no to being overworked, overwhelmed and too tired at the end of the day?

This week, we learn that those who both FEEL and PERFORM mercy are blessed! This raises some important questions such as, “What is mercy?”, “How is it unique from other loving characteristics?”, ”How do we become a merciful people?”, “How is mercy a perfect combination of need and relief?”, and “If acts of mercy never materialize in our lives, are we truly merciful?” Jesus teaches about mercy and...

This week, we learn how and why the hungry and thirsty are blessed. Jesus preaches that we are blessed when we relentlessly search for truth, or as Scripture often puts it - righteousness. Blessed are those who seek after Jesus and allow nothing else to fill them because nothing else truly can. Pastor Pedro breaks down hunger as it pertains to our character and how hunger for righteousness over co...

This week, Jesus’s and #OurBeatitudes shine the spotlight on those who never really get spotlighted, the Meek. Pastor Pedro asserts that meekness may be the strongest of the Christian character qualities, yet it is most often incorrectly correlated to weakness. How is it that meekness becomes strength in Jesus? How is it that Jesus changed the world with meekness? Why does Jesus call His mature fo...

This week, we focus in on Matthew 5:4 in order to understand what our next step is in #LivingOurBlessedLives according to this portrait of one of Christ’s followers. Pastor Ryan walks us through the kind of mourning that promises to bring us the true comfort of God and the idea that enduring the pain of confession and repentance is much like learning to ride a bike without training wheels. In the...

This week, we look at the very first beatitude included in Jesus’s extraordinary Sermon on the Mount. Jesus calls those “blessed” who are the POOR IN SPIRIT. We ask ourselves what it means to be “poor in spirit, if we are poor in spirit, and why being poor in spirit makes one blessed. Pastor Pedro shows us how this realization is very different from self-hate and self-pity and why he thinks Jesus...