Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

In Acts, as the good news spreads and produces people who live differently, it causes tension in Jerusalem. One of the key leaders of this new church, a man named Stephen, gives a speech that really kicks the hornets nest, and it gets him killed. In this message, Pastor Julie examines this speech and the story that surrounds it. The speech goes through the history of the people of Israel and how o...

Stats today show a renewed interest in America in belief in God, and one of the main factors for it is the profound need for belonging that so many people have and miss, in the case of those who have walked away from faith. The beauty of the good news of Jesus and the revolution he began is that he creates deep and real belonging among those who follow him. Acts 2 is a famous passage that illustra...

Every story needs some event that kicks off the plot. In Toy Story it’s Andy getting a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. In Harry Potter it’s an owl showing up at Harry’s house to tell him he’s invited to Hogwarts. In Acts, it’s the Holy Spirit being poured out on Jesus’s friends and followers at what we now call Pentecost. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks why Pentecost matters so much, spe...

Movies and TV are saturated with sequels, reboots, and spinoffs. We love to see how stories progress into new times and settings, how characters grow, and how they respond to the world as it changes along with us. One of the cool things about the Bible is that it has sequels too. Acts is the sequel to the gospels—the four books about the life and ministry of Jesus—written to show us how we, even t...

Often, the book of especially Nehemiah is framed as a kind of manual for how to build God’s kingdom, and certainly, there is a lot of wisdom in it for that. But the end of the story told in Ezra and Nehemiah is one of disappointment, of unraveling of all of the work that had been done up to that point. It can’t be treated as a manual for revival. Instead, it’s a story longing for fulfillment to th...

One of the final things the community of returned exiles we’ve been studying in Ezra and Nehemiah do is take time to confess and repent their and their ancestors sin to God. They admit the ways they had been arrogant, stiff-necked, refused to listen, and failed to remember God’s faithfulness to them in the past. They had wanted to do things their own way, and they’d seen the consequences of that n...

Before Jesus ascended into heaven, he tasked his friends with a mission: To go and make disciples, to teach them to obey all he has taught. We are called to make disciples in breadth (new disciples) and depth (deepening existing disciples’ apprenticeship to Jesus). We are most effective when we do this together, using our unique skills, strengths, experiences, passions, and personalities as part o...

In the previous message of this series, we talked about how one of the keys to rebuilding the community of Israel in Ezra and Nehemiah was to place Scripture at the center of their lives. With that comes a struggle, when Scripture might be too hard to understand or even seem to clash with itself. What do we do when we’re in similar situations? In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.

At the point Ezra and Nehemiah take place, Israel had a checkered history of knowing and taking seriously God’s word. In this moment of restoration, they decided they would not be like their ancestors, and Ezra—the premier Bible nerd of his day—led the people in not just reading Scripture but living it out. A key part of that was helping them understand the Bible is not just divine information or...

Easter represents a brand new beginning, one that started the entire movement of Christianity that we are part of today. And because of that new beginning, we have the opportunity for new beginnings at all times, because of Jesus. Christians experience renovations of our lives, our hearts, our souls, as we follow Jesus. Maybe you are looking for a new beginning this Easter right now. In this messa...

The book of Ezra-Nehemiah reveals a simple truth to us: Whenever we set out to do a work God has called us to, we should not be surprised at opposition or challenge associated with it. The opposition can be trials and tribulations, it can be spiritual opposition, and it is even often ourselves—our own tendency to get in way and mess things up. This is exactly what happens in the midst of the reviv...

The first thing we see the returned exiles in Ezra-Nehemiah do is restore their patterns of worship, in time and place. In this message, Pastor Joel explains why, and how establishing patterns of worship will help us to love Jesus better, for as St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.”

Whether you go by statistics or just general vibes, many would say the church in America is not in a great spot. But God is always on the move. Ezra and Nehemiah are two books in the Old Testament that show us how God rebuilds. Jesus tells us that if we want to be people who endure, we should build our discipleship and churches on his teaching and gospel, a foundation he compares to a solid rock (...

A popular notion in the world we live in today is that we need to love ourselves to love others. There’s some wisdom in this—we do need to be loved to love others. There has to be something in us to spill out to our neighbors. But far better than any love we can love ourselves with through boosting our ego is accepting a far greater force of love: God’s love for us. When we accept his love for us,...

Jesus would tell stories to illustrate his points called parables. He tells several about people finding things of great value they had lost, and the joy that they had in finding those things. The stories were told to let us know how much God values finding the things he finds of greatest value that are lost: people. In love, he wants us to help find people who are lost, too. But do we find the sa...

Jesus says that it’s not actually that special to love your friends, the people who you like and who have the same interests with you. Anybody can do that, he says. The challenging part of his call to love your neighbor is to love those who are hard to love—even people you might call your enemy. In this message, Res City Leadership Team member Miles Trump walks us through where to start in terms o...

Jesus tells us we respond to his love by obeying him, and obeying him is summed up in two simple but profound commands: Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. In our series, we previously spent time studying what it means to love God, and for the next few weeks we will study how to love your neighbor. A neighbor is anyone God gives us occasion and capacity to help, and one group who we have...

Jesus tells us to love God with (paraphrasing) our head, heard, and hands. How can we love God with our hands? In this message, Pastor Julie gets really practical, talking about how our habits can become love for God. She shares how we can be intentional to point our habits toward God and become more like him through them!

Jesus tells us that the greatest command is to love God and that one of the ways we can do this is through obeying him. We might not often think about obedience as a form of love, and the word “obey” might even rub us the wrong way. But if we are willing to enter into Jesus’s vision for it, we can see how obedience is all about trusting him. If we trust that he’s the smartest man who ever lived, a...

The greatest command, Jesus says, is simply to love God with all your heart, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor. It’s really simple, right? Not as simple as we might think. We want to tackle how we can live out this great command in this series, starting with loving God, and specifically, loving God with our heart. How do we do that? In order for us to love our neighbor the way Jesus de...

In our last series we spent time thinking about abiding, specifically in prayer. But as Jesus’ teaching moves forward in John 15, we see abiding includes more than prayer. It involves imitation and obedience, and Jesus specifically says it is to look like loving in the way he does. When we read the whole passage—or maybe better said, let it read us—we begin to ask ourselves some important and mayb...

In this series we’ve been talking about abiding prayer, or prayer that helps us make our home in Jesus. In order to produce abiding, prayer must be filled with two-way communication, and to be honest, most of our prayers are one-way: us talking to God. Last week, Pastor Julie taught on listening prayer, and this week, pastor Joel teaches us about meditating on Scripture to help our prayer lead to...

When we think about prayer, we probably think of talking to God. Prayer certainly includes us asking God for things, but to imagine that’s all it is misses the point. Prayer is a conversation, which means we must sometimes be silent and listen to God, too. In this message, Pastor Julie shares how we can do so, unpacking the concept of listening or contemplative prayer.

Christians talk about Jesus in all kinds of ways—as God, a king, the messiah, a prophet, our sacrifice—but we less often relate to him as a rabbi, which is how many people primarily experienced him. He was a teacher, who taught people how to live wisely and fruitfully in God’s world. When we take him seriously as our rabbi, we see how much he has to teach us. And one of his most famous teachings i...

It’s the beginning of a new year, and people often get reflective about themselves after the ball drops at midnight. In this short series to kick off 2025, we want to talk about what it might mean to have rhythms that lead us to lives that are fruitful. One of the most crucial passages for discipleship in the Bible is in John 15, where Jesus explains that when we are his disciples, he desires for...