GARDEN CHURCH Podcast

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...

Peter heals Aeneas in Lydda and raises Tabitha in Joppa, and the whole region turns to Jesus. But the point of Acts 9 isn't the miracle. It's the kind of people the Spirit is forming. Pastor Bill Dogterom walks through Acts 9:32-43 and asks what it looks like to live like Peter, who has been around Jesus long enough to know he's not the healer, and like Tabitha, a widow whose ordinary faithfulness...

In Acts 9, Saul is on his way to Damascus to imprison followers of Jesus when a light from heaven stops him in his tracks. He hears his name called, goes blind for three days, and the entire direction of his life changes. Chase Cofer walks through the story of Saul's encounter on the road to Damascus and the role of Ananias, an ordinary disciple Jesus sends to lay hands on him. It's a message abou...

In Acts 8, Philip leaves a thriving revival in Samaria to walk a desert road, where he finds one Ethiopian official reading Isaiah in a chariot. That single conversation becomes the seed of the Ethiopian church, one of the oldest Christian traditions on earth. We walk through this story to ask a simple question: what does success in the kingdom of God actually look like? Not crowds, not platforms,...

In Acts 8, the gospel moves into Samaria and a whole city begins to come alive. But Luke pulls back the curtain on something we can't miss: wherever God is moving, a counterfeit power is always at work. Simon the Sorcerer had an entire city under his spell, and two thousand years later, the same power is still shaping us. We just call it something different now. This message confronts the quiet da...

This message explores the tension many of us feel after Easter. If Jesus really rose from the dead, why does life still feel the same? Why are we still dealing with anxiety, uncertainty, and unanswered questions? Looking at the life of Thomas, we’re reminded that resurrection doesn’t force change on us. It invites us into it. Faith isn’t inherited from someone else’s experience. It’s personal. It’...

This Palm Sunday message invites us to wrestle with a version of Jesus that doesn’t always match what we want. The crowd expected power, control, and deliverance on their terms. Instead, Jesus comes gentle, refusing to be shaped by their expectations and showing that the way of the Kingdom is not climbing up, but laying things down. This is a story about what happens when Jesus disappoints us, and...

In Acts 8, the early church faces one of its darkest moments. Persecution breaks out, Stephen is killed, and believers are scattered. But what looks like loss becomes the very thing God uses to move His mission forward.  This message explores how God works through suffering, why He doesn’t waste the hardest seasons of our lives, and how surrender becomes the pathway to being used by Him. Through t...

In Acts 7, Stephen stands before the Sanhedrin under intense pressure and opposition. Instead of defending himself, he tells the bigger story of what God has been doing all along. From Abraham to Joseph to Moses, Stephen reveals a vast panorama of God’s grace and shows how every part of the story points to Jesus.   In this message, we see that following Jesus does not remove pressure. Sometimes it...

In Acts 6 we meet Stephen, an ordinary follower of Jesus chosen to help care for widows in the early church. Yet Scripture describes him as a man full of faith, full of grace, full of power, and full of the Holy Spirit. Even in the face of opposition and false accusations, Stephen responds with wisdom, courage, and a peace that reveals the presence of God in his life.  This message explores what i...

In Acts 6, Stephen is described as a man full of the Holy Spirit, wisdom, faith, grace, and power. Not a platform preacher. A table server. A volunteer. Yet when pressure came, what spilled out of him looked like Jesus. This week we ask a simple question: When your life is shaken, what comes out? Crisis does not create what is inside of us. It reveals it. And the Christian life is not about trying...

In Acts 6, the early church is growing fast. Revival is breaking out and right in the middle of it, there’s conflict. Widows are being overlooked. Needs are exposed. And the solution is not better branding or stronger personalities. It’s surrendered, Spirit-filled people. This message is a call to lay down your life again. There is no small role in the kingdom. Serving tables is ministry. Prayer i...

In Acts 5, revival turns into resistance. The apostles are arrested, beaten, and warned to stay silent. And yet they leave rejoicing. Why? Because they did not see suffering as failure. They saw it as fellowship with Jesus.  This message challenges a comfort-first version of Christianity and invites us into something deeper. Obedience may cost you. Faithfulness may lead through pain. But when your...

What does it look like when God’s presence is not just talked about, but carried? In this message from our Church on Fire series through the book of Acts, we look at Acts 5 and the early church as a community marked by the real, active presence of God. As the Spirit fills ordinary people, lives are healed, faith becomes public, and the church becomes a visible sign of Jesus’ reign in the world. Th...

What happens when the Holy Spirit fills a community but our inner lives do not match our outer appearance? In Acts 5, we are confronted with a sobering moment in the early church where hypocrisy is exposed and God’s holiness is taken seriously. This message explores the danger of curated faith, unprocessed wounds, and pretending to be someone we are not, even while participating in the things of G...