Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Jesus is the Good Shepherd. We've heard this a million times if we've spent enough time in churches. But what does that mean? And why do we even need a good shepherd in the first place? Is there a problem of leadership in the world? Why not be your own shepherd?   John 10 opens up a lot of intriguing lines of thought when applied to today's world. Pastor Joel explores them in depth in this sermon.

A major opposition today for belief is what is sometimes called 'the problem of evil', which asks this question: "If God is good and all powerful, why is there evil and suffering in the world?" In this sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks in what way Jesus reframes our view of God and his purpose in evil when we find ourselves asking this question. We must first challenge our assumptions, and ask why Chris...

Jesus said a lot of things that angered the elites of his day, including the crazy idea that all people are slaves to sin. Being Abraham's family members, the ones who had been freed from Egypt, didn't keep the Jews from being free from slavery to sin. What does this slavery look like? And how can the church model true freedom by embracing the multiethnic family of Abraham they now belong to? We t...

In John 7:53-8:11, a group called the Pharisees tries to trap Jesus into condemning a woman who was caught committing adultery. Jesus chooses a third way and instead of condemning or acquitting this woman, he restores her. Pastor Julie reflects on how we can rest in Jesus' restoration and restore one another, even in our current "cancel culture" that doesn't like to give second chances.

At various times in his ministry, Jesus encounters the Pharisees, a strict sect of Jews that looked similar to a modern day grassroots political pressure group. They butted heads with Jesus because the kingdom he was bringing conflicted with their moral vision for Israel. Jesus has harsh rebukes for the Pharisees, and they remain potent for moralism today, whatever form it takes. In this message,...

The kingdom of God coming to earth is not coming into a vacuum; it comes into a space that is occupied territory. So naturally, there is opposition. Jesus encounters this in the book of John, and we will talk about what that opposition looks like for him and how it applies to us as well. In this sermon, Pastor Joel talks through how we should respond when the gospel offends people, which is a big...

Jesus brings both literal bread to those in need, but he offers a deeper and more necessary sustenance: himself. What is the relationship between the two? How does partaking in Christ empower and strengthen us to work to correct injustice and help those in need? Why is it so important that we don't separate the two, as Christians often do? Pastor Joel dives into these very important and timely que...

The big idea of John 5:1-47 is perhaps the most central to the whole book: that when we look at Jesus, we are seeing God. For us, in the midst of history being made, we need to know what God is calling us to do. So to do so, we look to Jesus. When we look at Jesus in this passage, we see two things: 1) A healer and a 2) prophet. Like Jesus, we are called to be healers and prophets in this time of...

In response to the death of George Floyd, we corporately lament the systemic racism, injustice, and sin in our world and in our own hearts. Pastor Joel gives a message from the book of Amos on God's justice, which comes to destroy racism and sin, how radical change begins with repentance, how repentance leads to life not just in the future but now, and how we can find hope in Jesus in the midst of...

What happens when Jesus doesn't heal? Once again, we find Jesus perform a "sign", and this time, Jesus heals a boy who was dying. Before we, with modern eyes, can embark on reading about biblical healing, we need to first empty our pockets at the door and realize how the expectation of happiness and affluence many of us have influences how we view healing, and specifically, how we can forget that...

As John continues to reveal Jesus to us, we are treated in this passage to his interaction with a Samaritan woman--a surprising thing for a rabbi of his stature to do in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. This meeting is a window into the heart of Jesus's message: That ALL are invited to come and be satisfied at the living water that is offered by Jesus, even if you are engaged in unseemly ac...

The story of the book of John pivots back to John the Baptist in this sermon's passage. John, this great influencer for Jesus, has seen his influence decline as Jesus's popularity has risen. His disciples ask him, "What the heck, boss?" and his response is truly incredible. He responds by showing us all the heart and ambition of a Christlike servant. In this sermon. Pastor Joel talks about 3 aspec...

The Apostle Paul, socially distanced from a church he had planted in Thessalonica, encourages the church to live worthy of the call that had been placed on them in their difficult circumstances. We believe that God is calling us to also be worthy of the call he has placed on us in the midst of the crazy times we live in too. In this message, Joel and Julie outline the three things we are calling t...

John is peeling back who Jesus is, layer by layer, and the layer we peel back to day is the layer that reveals to us God's love, found in the important section that contains John 3:16. We are introduced to the deep, vulnerable love of God which is itself experienced in vulnerability. Often, we try to receive God's love with in our wisdom or our knowledge, like Nicodemus. But God comes to us in vul...

What does it mean to be "born again"? Many of us have negative connotations with that phrase, but in John 3:1-8, we see how Jesus uses it to describe the new life we can have in him that comes with repentance and choosing to follow Him as our king. God is at work building his kingdom, and just like the wind, we can't control it or even see it sometimes, but we can feel its effect. In this sermon,...

This is probably the strangest Easter many of us will ever celebrate. Yet, Jesus is still risen, the tomb is still empty, and we still have hope. This Easter Sunday, Pastor Joel unpacks the situation of the Thessalonians, to whom Paul writes as he is quarantined from them in the letter 1 Thessalonians. Paul's answer to their uncertainty about the future is to look back at the story of Easter, and...

In John 2, Jesus shakes things up (literally) by going to the Temple in Jerusalem, with all of its prestige and impact on the average Jewish person's life, and declaring it would be destroyed. But it wouldn't just be destroyed--it had been replaced by Jesus himself.  There are some explosive applications to this, and in ways you might not expect. This includes direct application to what is happeni...

This week, Pastor Joel brings up the subject of miracles, or, using the word John does, signs. Signs show God's glory--and the first sign Jesus chooses to use is to keep a wedding dance going strong. The symbolism of this first sign, turning water into wine, points to the great celebration that comes from God's fulfillment of his covenant, and it is the fulfillment of whatever celebrations Christi...

In our first Res City Church at Home during the COVID19 outbreak, we get back into our sermon series on the book of John.  We meet Nathanael, a small but important story that John keys us into because it introduces someone who is skeptical of Jesus's Messiahship. Jesus responds tenderly, and we learn that skepticism isn't a threat to the gospel, but in fact it's a part of a healthy faith when unde...

In John 1, we meet an important figure in early Christianity: John the Baptist. John the Baptist is the first witness in the book who testifies to God’s glory which has come in Jesus. We find as we study his testimony that he did not completely understand what God was up to, yet he did it anyway. We can respond with similar passion when we feel uncertain too, trusting God is moving. John comes as...

We are starting a new series at Res City in the book of John. John’s concern is to point us toward something of great weight —the greatest weight—the coming of God in flesh in Jesus. John is someone who has seen this firsthand and desires for you to “come and see” for yourself. There is a danger to have this glory be right under our noses and miss it, however. We have to be careful not to miss the...

The coming of God's kingdom that we pray for in the Lord's Prayer is contested by two things: Our own hearts, full of sin, and the evil one, Satan.  The prayer here alerts us to our own hearts need to be tested, to see what they truly are. This is what we mean when we pray to not be led into temptation or to be tested. We find a strong example of what Jesus means here in the story of Abraham and S...

The Lord’s Prayer makes us perform the uncomfortable task of confessing our sin. In the sermon on what it means for us to ask for forgiveness, Pastor Julie explains why this matters and why we need to confess even if we don’t like it. Additionally, being forgiven means we can now also be people who turn around and can forgive others. But this is more challenging than it may appear. Julie explains...

The Lord's Prayer includes in its middle portion one line about asking for our needs. When we pray, we devote a little bit more time to our needs than that, however. When we dig into the prayer, we see Jesus tells us to pray for what we need today, instead of an excess. We learn that Jesus desires for us to be radically dependent on him day by day. Pastor Julie breaks down what it looks like to pr...

The second and third part of the Lord's prayer finds the person praying asking for something. But if it's God's will they are asking for, whose will is being prayed? And what does it look like to desire God's kingdom? In this sermon, Pastor Joel describes the mingling of wills we find when humans pray for God's kingdom to come, what the kingdom is, and learn to see where God's kingdom is not in or...