Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Res City is 3 years old! And we totally anticipated what those years would look like when we planted....(yeah right!) In this special sermon, we reflect on where we've come from, and who we are as we enter our fourth year by examining the 5 purposes of the church. Pastor Julie look at how we've lived out our vision, celebrate what God has done, and talks about where we're headed next. Thank you fo...

In Romans 5:21 Paul uses an interesting phrase: “The reign on grace.” It’s something we’re all under when we accept the gift of God’s grace. What does it mean to be under this reign? It means to give ourselves over to God’s grace, and to let the abundance in us that grace creates spill out of us to others in generosity of time, skill, and attention. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains what Paul s...

God wants you to be rich.  A lot of people might think this, but God doesn’t want you to be rich in what most people mean when they use the word rich. Instead, God wants you to be rich in what Jesus is rich in.  These are the qualities that he shows us in his grace, and which sustain us as we live live fueled by it. And one of the things we learn as we study Paul and The Collection, a large fundra...

We all probably believe generosity is a good thing, but how do we go about patterning lives of generosity? It all comes down to how we understand gifts and generosity, and in the ancient world the word grace gets us to the heart of this question. It’s also one of the most important words in the whole Bible, the electrical current at the heart of the Christian life. It creates new realities, spilli...

The systems of the world around us convince us that our best life is one where we’re calculated, successful, and triumphant. We encounter the Advent of Jesus in a way that is far from calculated, successful, or triumphant in the eyes of the world. Instead, Jesus arrives in a horrible conglomeration of circumstances in which He dubs as the upside-down Kingdom of God.  Advent becomes a season where...

We live with the PTSD of a world full of hypocrisy, and it makes us cynical even about God himself. When we lose hope we start to have actions that aren’t aligned with what we profess. This was a problem the prophet Micah challenged Israel over, and we see King Herod living this misalignment out 700 years later. However, Christmas is a season of hope, where we celebrate that God isn’t like us: his...

In the Christmas narrative, Matthew frequently mentions the words of the prophets being fulfilled. Who are those prophets and how does Jesus fulfill their words? In this Advent series, we will be looking at how God keeps his word through Jesus. Today, Pastor Julie talks about how Jesus is the promised Immanuel who brings a sign of God’s presence, security and salvation.

We saved one of the big ones for the last sermon in this series! These are two of the most controversial subjects today in Christian theology. How do we deconstruct some of the unbiblical things we’ve learned about them but not get rid of them? In this sermon, Pastor Joel challenges us to get outside our own cultural setting to find a fresh vision for both heaven and hell, by embracing two princip...

We currently live in a culture marked by division. Pastor Julie looks at how should Christians should engage with these divisions by looking at the way Jesus engaged with similar divisions in his time. When political tensions were high, Jesus found a way forward that amazed everyone around him. We can follow that same path by listening to Jesus' words in Matthew 22:15-22 when he tells us to "give...

Pastor Joel shares in this sermon his journey through learning to “keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25). This can be a confusing issue, and you may be tempted to shut that part of your Christian life off, like he did. Yet when we understand the reason God gives us his Spirit and the marking of it, the fruit of the Spirit, you understand our need for it in the church. If you’re wrestling...

In Matthew 28:16-20, Jesus commissions the disciples to continue God's mission of bringing his reconciliation, peace, love, and justice in the world. In the sermon, Pastor Julie talks about the basis of this commission, the message of the commission, and the method of going about this commission. She also takes a deeper look at our past expectations and experiences of evangelism and suggests more...

The church is the place where God’s people gather, and they have done so from the very start. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks the foundation of the church in the story of Jesus talking about the rock the church is built on in Matthew 16. What can we learn as essentials about the church from this short story? How does it inform us on how the church has misstepped and also gotten it right since...

Jesus took Scripture very serious. It gave shape to his ministry, it informed his mindset of how he viewed the world, and he thought it gave him reason to die on a cross, trusting he would be raised again. If we take Jesus seriously, we have to take Scripture seriously as well. The byproduct of this is it gives us a firm foundation from which to ask hard questions about Scripture and not worry abo...

The church and the world around it largely approach “sin” the same way: create barriers and legislate it away so it doesn’t make us impure. This is precisely the thing Jesus encountered in his own time as well, and he was not about to tolerate it. In this sermon,  Pastor Joel challenges us to think in a fresh way about how we approach sin in the church and outside of it and in a way that builds up...

Who is God and who has he made humans to be? When we come to the topic of creation, this is the question the Bible is trying to answer. We can come to this topic with lots of other questions, however.  How long did it take? Did we evolve or not?  And more. There isn’t anything wrong with questions like these, but it’s important to understand the Bible isn’t trying to be a science or history textbo...

The word ’Trinity’ and a whole lot of other language Christians used to describe God as including Jesus and the Holy Spirit in it isn’t in the Bible. So why do Christians think Jesus is God? Is this just a later development that didn’t reflect what Jesus thought about himself?  In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what Jesus and his first audience said about what he was doing in the context of Isra...

Jesus, a man understood as a great prophet, had his ministry end in death, with the claim that he rose again. This story is so familiar to many of us that we can miss some of the most important elements of it according to the gospels. How do we understand his death in its first century setting rather than in the way we have often grown up hearing about it? How does it connect to him being a prophe...

"Deconstruction" is something a lot of evangelicals find themselves doing at the moment. The term can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but it basically refers to the practice of reexamining long held beliefs. While it can seem like something new in the church, the practice of asking ourselves if what we've received from tradition is actually from God is a healthy one and something that has...

The apostle Paul speaks of his contentedness in every season, whether in challenging times or peaceful ones. What does he mean? How does he find this? And what is the difference between contentedness and happiness? Pastor Joel shares all this in the final message in our summer Philippians sermon.

As we enter a new season this fall, we are taking a Sunday to focus in on what we want to keep in the front of our minds, guiding our heads, hearts, and hands as a church and as people. In this sermon, Pastors Julie and Joel talk about what it means for us to live the Lord's Prayer, specifically In St. Paul as it is in Heaven. Join us as we plot a course for this season as God has called us!

Habits and rhythms have a massive impact on our mental state, our well-being, our happiness, and most importantly, our worship. For Christians, this last one is vitally important to be aware of. However, often we're not aware of how our habits affect our worship, and our worship and connection to his Spirit suffer. In this sermon, Pastor Julie lists what Paul says are the patterns of living we oug...

In ballet, there are basic movements that you learn immediately and which are the basic movements you will use in all other ballet routines for the rest of your career. These are movements which you practice over and over. Christianity is like ballet, where to grow is to master, apply, and reapply the movements that come from the gospel itself. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks us through the move...

The Philippians are in the midst of facing "enemies of the cross", but Paul doesn't want them to be afraid of them. Instead, Paul is "in tears" over their opposition to the gospel. In this sermon, Res City Worship Director Zach Dohmen explains how we--ambassadors or citizens of heaven--should search ourselves and ask if our unwillingness to live as ambassadors often comes from the same motives tha...

Paul urges the Philippians to "live up to what we have already attained" (3:16). He means that while we still await the resurrection that has been attained for us by Christ, we are to take seriously who we have been made in Christ. In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what it means to "press on" (3:14) towards the goal of resurrection, navigating the daily tension of life in the weird in between sp...