Port City Community Church Podcast

The table symbolizes both our sense of belonging and our open invitation to be a part of something greater. Here, we encounter the reality of our commonalities and receive the warm embrace of family. The Church should serve as a unique sanctuary for belonging—a community where our shared identity propels us towards collective responsibilities. This shared identity comes with a profound duty to car...

ntegrity isn't something we reach like a destination; instead, it's a state where our inner strength guides our thoughts and actions. It means having the character to face reality faithfully while holding onto hope. Resisting dependence is rooted in pride, while fullness comes from experiencing God's sufficient grace. Wisdom helps us integrate our soul, and humility opens the door to g...

Life flows from our core, and it's vital to understand that the stability we yearn for cannot solely depend on the ever-changing world. True stability, unwavering in the face of life's storms, is found in integrity. By grounding ourselves in God's wisdom, we discover a kind of stability that doesn't waver with circumstances and frees us from the need for constant comparison and com...

The way of life in God’s Kingdom is governed by trust, and you have to be able to trust yourself - that begins with learning to trust Jesus in everything and with everything. The war against sin isn’t your effort to behave but learning to trust—trusting Christ for your identity, sufficiency, and life. The application of wisdom is discernment, where we sense God’s voice and His movement and trust H...

A good life in our world hinges on things falling into place just right, whereas the life Christ opened up for us is rooted in who we are at our core. Nowadays, we often talk about emotional health as the key. It's all about feeling good, but what we're really after is a sense of wholeness that goes way beyond feeling good about ourselves. This wholeness is about experiencing the kind of l...

During the summer months, we've learned that delight is a formative force that shapes the desires of our hearts. It requires intention and an act of our will. Without focus, our desires can run wild, and embracing these lesser things makes our hearts susceptible and vulnerable. Instead, God invites us to renew our desires in a way that makes our hearts and souls come alive. 

This week we conclude our Delight Podcast series by sitting down with Mike Ashcraft, Laurelyn Shaw, and Zack Hamby to talk about what this Summer of Delight has taught us. For more Summer Sabbath resources, you can check out  www.portcity.church/sabbath . If this series has been helpful to you, we'd love to hear your feedback! Send us an email to Creative@portcitychurch.org. Enjoy!

This week, we get to hear Tony Ripa talk with Geoff Banks about "enemies of delight." In today's episode, Tony and Geoff discuss how it's easy to get distracted with "doing" instead of learning to truly delight in Jesus. Are you interested in weekday devotions that can be delivered directly to your email inbox? Check out www.portcity.church/devotions For more Summer Sab...

f we find our delight in good circumstances or safety, it will eventually fall short. In our fallen and broken world, we all experience moments where we wonder, "What is the world coming to?" Our despair can become an enemy of delight. But, amid the struggle, God's glory is put on display. We must remember that our delight is not contingent on circumstances; it is anchored in Jesus,...

Today we are reflecting on what we learned from our Sabbath Sunday practice- the helpful, the difficult, the confusing, and the things we want to take with us into the future as we learn to make Sabbath a more regular practice and rhythm. Today we’ll hear from our Wilmington Campus Pastor, Clay Everett, our Director of Community, Laurelyn Shaw, and our pastor of Children’s ministry, Rich Biagini. ...

Our doing has become a distraction when it comes to true delight in Jesus. We most closely associate our relationship with God with the content that we consume and the things that we do. In a way, our doing has become an enemy of delight. The church has gotten preoccupied with culture and ourselves. We've done God's work without His presence and failed to realize that Jesus values people b...

This week, we get to hear from two awesome women in our church, Lauren Mendoza and Sarah Badillo, who have a discussion on delighting in ordinary life. Their perspectives are relatable, and their insights are helpful. At the top of the episode, we all get to hear from some of our middle school students and leaders about what delights them! For more Summer Sabbath resources, you can check out www.p...

Passive delights are just the things we instinctively enjoy without effort. We live in a way where as soon as something doesn’t “delight” us anymore, we start to look for other things. But everything we instinctively enjoy isn’t always the most helpful for the kind of life we want. Our affections are formed in ways that often undermine the things we value most. We either pay the price of attention...

Sabbath is a life-giving practice that God designed for us. He wove the rhythm of the Sabbath deeply into the fabric of the creation and embedded it intimately into the human soul. It's a time set apart to experience rest as we deliberately stop working and trust in God's provision. God modeled the Sabbath and then called us to remember and observe it. The goal of the Sabbath isn't res...

Today we get to hear from Laurelyn Shaw, our Director of Community, and Sam Noland, who is our Treasure Island Volunteer Coordinator talk about Delight and Sabbath. We also get to hear from a few of our high school students and leaders about what delights them! We have created a Habit of Delight Experience that consists of eight practices that will help us better understand the concept of delight...

The life we live today results from the practices we have formed along the way. Unhealthy habits bend our faith away from God and toward ourselves. Our direction stays the same when our intentions change, but our habits don’t. What we do habitually determines how we experience God relationally. The way to devotion is consistency, proactivity, and authenticity. True faith is cultivated by private d...

Treating the summer like a Sabbath is not just an invitation to rest; it’s also God’s invitation to delight in Him! As we journey through summer together, we want to encourage our church to create a habit of delight by developing intentional rhythms that direct our heart’s affection and attention toward God. We have created a Habit of Delight Experience that consists of eight practices that will h...

How we see delight determines whether or not we indeed find it. If delight is merely a commodity, we will settle for whatever brings it quickest and sustains it the easiest. When everything is about us, we are living in the superficial. We can’t offer God our true selves or experience true delight when steeped in superficiality. Sadly, we settle for the superficial because we can control it, but f...

As we look to explore Sabbath through this lens this summer, we recognize that our delight cannot be dependent on favorable circumstances. Last week we got to sit down with Cheryl Jacobs, who is a part of our church family. In our conversation, we got to hear Cheryl’s story- and her experience with loss, walking with others through grief, her experiences of growing up in Wilmington as an African A...

Our eyes aren't lighting the world around us but rather the life within us. Deeper desires and redeemed affections require more than just a passing gaze or being enticed; we must learn how to remain, seek, and see. What catches our attention will capture our hearts, and what we treasure will ultimately drive our pursuits, so we need to pay attention to what we pay attention to.

Welcome to our new weekly Delight podcast series, where we explore what it looks like to treat this summer as a Sabbath! This summer, we invite you to slow down, rest, and trust in the promise of Psalm 37:4 that when we delight ourselves in the Lord, the deepest desires of our hearts will be met in Him. To kick us off, we get to have some fun with a "Questions With Caleb" segment followe...

From the beginning, God gave us a desire for delight and the means to experience it, so it’s no wonder that delight comes naturally to us. It's not a question of if we delight, but what we delight in. Every longing at its core is a longing for life. Christ is life. All around us, there are things that spark joy, spur delight, and move us deeply. We can and should enjoy these blessings, but we...

Poverty isn’t first an economic problem but rather a matter of dignity. Dignity is simply the innate worth of another person. We don’t give dignity; we honor it; to honor someone’s dignity, we need to see and notice them. Listening honors dignity. Saying someone’s name demonstrates dignity. Trusting another brings dignity. Dignity is the lens through which we see redemption. We learn to bring dign...

Sometimes to understand someone else's perspective, we have to leave our "normal," leave our "routine," and enter into a different space. On today's Midweek Meditation, Corey leads us through a contemplative reflection through Pepper's story and week six of our series, Radical.

As we continue to explore the heart of servanthood, Mike Ashcraft sat down with Laura Bullock, about serving in the city. In their conversation they discussed what it looks like to show compassion and care for others, especially those who are in need or marginalized in our society.