Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Many Christians go through a period of their life where they walk in what feels like a spiritual wilderness: A season where we feel lost to God and our faith and many other things. Our spirit is crushed, and we feel unable to hear God’s voice. Depression might be part of it, but it’s more than that. God feels hidden to us. Some call this season a dark night of the soul. Has God abandoned us? Is he...

Friendship is one of the most vital parts of a healthy life as well as faith, but it's increasingly harder to do well in ordinary life. In this message, Pastor Julie shares some wisdom from Proverbs on what we should seek in a friend--and how to be a good one ourselves!

Have you ever had a day where something happens and it just throws off your day? One of those emails, a conversation with a co-worker, something your kid says to you, whatever it is. Productivity, peace, patience, just gone. And worst of all for us who follow Jesus, our ability to bear fruit is out the window too. Usually when this happens, it’s because some fear has been triggered: I’m worthless,...

Humans love stories, and the main places we tell stories in our modern culture is through movies, TV shows, and increasingly, video games. In our ordinary lives movies, video games, and TV shows are some of the places we go to find something special, to find, as actress Nicole Kidman says in a well known AMC Movie Theater ad, “magic…to laugh, to cry, to care, because we need that. To find that ind...

For many of us, caring for others like children or family or friends with needs is ordinary. How do we do so with gentleness, like Jesus? In this Mother's Day message, Pastor Julie shares how from the book of Hebrews.

In this series, we’re talking about the ordinary. Something that is ordinary for Americans is elections, and we have another contentious one coming up in a few months. We’re hunkering down for the fear, the anxiety, the conflict seeking, the black and white, back alley, bare knuckles, street fighting with the other side nature of it all. It’s exhausting. Is it how we should approach it as Christia...

Most upper and middle class Americans are uncomfortable with suffering, and we often think of our faith in terms of the triumph and success we can get from it. But when we read Scripture, we find stories of suffering are a lot more common than we think, and we need to be exposed to them so that we can learn how to speak and think about our seasons of suffering. Suffering is ordinary. What are we g...

Having a body is a lot of work! It requires a lot of ordinary maintenance, and we can get annoyed by it or view our body simply as a machine. But according to Scripture, our bodies are spiritually very significant to God. In this message, Pastor Joel explains why that is the case, from why it has significance, the stories it tells as we maintain it, and the sacredness of how God dwells in us and w...

On this special Res City Commissioning Sunday, Angela Hermanson preaches on what is most ordinary about the work we do: it never seems to end. As she focuses on the story of Nehemiah and the efforts of the Jewish people to rebuild the city walls of Jerusalem, she notes different encouragements to remember when our own work feels repetitive and ordinary.

We tend to view maturity as being the opposite of a child—someone who is independent, can make their own decisions and get what they want without help. Someone with willpower and assertiveness is someone we look up to. But at the same time, Christians pray a prayer that says of God, “Your name be hallowed, your kingdom come, your will be done.” The mature Christian, if we take that prayer seriousl...

Easter weekend is sacred because it’s the interruption of what’s ordinary: death. There is perhaps nothing that is as ordinary as death because it’s something all people do, no matter who they are. Except for one man, Jesus. By definition, the resurrection is extraordinary, and disciples of Jesus are people who come into an encounter with the extraordinary, risen Jesus. Yet, as we’ve been talking...

Imagine this: You get poor feedback at work, or you get a poorer grade on a test than you thought. You are more winded after a workout than you thought. You find out something you said a week ago actually rubbed a friend the wrong way. Bumping up against the truth like this is ordinary, but how often do we make confessing and surrendering to the truth ordinary? Those are not the same thing. In rea...

One of the tensions Christians live with is how to sustain their spiritual life of discipleship with the often chock full, fast paced life of their ordinary, which fills up their schedule and can squeeze out the time necessary to have a robust life with God. While God finds the ordinary good, our ordinary can lead us away from him too. We need to learn how to be intentional with our ordinary, beca...

Author and Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren writes that, “We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out. Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God?” In this new series, we will talk about why these things matter to God and look at how we can live ou...

Jesus offers to all his disciples a simple portrait of what it means to follow him, and at Res City we believe the words Know, Grow, Go, Together helps us to keep this portrait in front of us. In this message, Pastor Joel takes those four ideas that we’ve been covering in this series and walks through them all in Luke 5, a simple story of discipleship to wrap up this series on the core concepts th...

As we talk about what it means to KNOW, GROW, and GO, we want to do all of those things TOGETHER. We’ve all been adopted into the family of God, and as a local church community, we are an extended family. Even though we may all have different backgrounds, interests, and life stages, we come together to follow Jesus and support one another along the way. In this message, Julie explores practical wa...

At Res City, we believe a healthy disciple of Jesus is someone who is Knowing, Growing, Going. When we are Knowing and Growing, we desire to Go, which means serve the needs of the world around us and invite others to be disciples. In this message, Res City member and former campus evangelist Nathan Van Zee shares why Invitation is so important but also why we must be very thoughtful about how we d...

Ever hear the advice to dress for the job you want, not the job you have? Christians look forward to a time when Jesus will return and restore and make whole all things. In the present, disciples of Jesus are people who dress for the world we want Jesus to bring, not the world we currently live in. This is the heart of service. Service in our city and of those in need is important at Res City beca...

As we continue our series on discipleship and specifically look at what it means to Grow, Pastor Julie talks about how we must deny ourselves in order to grow spiritually. Spiritual growth holds that the presence of God and his Spirit are the things that change us, AND we can take practical steps to move toward growth in our own lives. In this message, Pastor Julie walks through both of those idea...

Christians are not always that well regarded in society, and we often find people to be uninterested in our good news. The truth is, people outside the church don’t care that much about the good news of Jesus if they don’t encounter goodness when they meet Christians. Eternal life is not something that starts in the future, it’s supposed to be something that starts now, and it’s supposed to be som...

In this series about how we understand discipleship at Res City, we build off of last week’s message on what it means to Know God. While it starts with knowing him through new birth, having an emotional awareness of God’s love for us, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to grow in knowing God with our minds. In fact, Jesus expects it by telling us to love God with our heart, soul, strength, and min...

At Res City, we use the language Know, Grow, Go, Together to describe what it means to follow Jesus and be made new by God’s Spirit. In this series, we want to take an extended look at them all, giving us a shared understanding of what they mean and something to come back to, spending two weeks on each word. We want this series to be foundational in how we think about the Christian life in a order...

This Sundays’s advent candle is the candle of joy, and pastor Julie talks about where we find true and lasting joy during the holidays and all year long. 

One of the most famous Christmas passages of Scripture is in Isaiah 9, which speaks of a coming child-king who will be a Prince of Peace. Why is peace such good news for all generations? What does the Bible even mean by the peace that we receive from Jesus? It might not look exactly how you think. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through this essential Christmas tradition.