Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

We live by the spirit of God, Paul says, and since we do, we should take every step of our life in harmony with the spirit of God. But what does that mean? When we don’t know where to start, we might just do nothing, but if that happens, we miss the fact that being a mature follower of Jesus means cultivating sensitivity to God’s spirit.  To kick off this new series, Pastor Joel helps us understan...

When we left Zechariah, he'd had the mute button hit on him and was stuck in silence until his son, John, would be born. When we step into Zechariah's shoes, it's understandable that he wasn't sure about what the angel said. But he still needed to truly hear from God to comprehend what was happening.  What we see when the story picks back up with him is that God had been doing something in the sil...

When we meet Mary, she’s engaged and excited to live out her plans, of a new husband and children and community.  But then an Angel show up and disrupts those plans with the announcement that she is part of God’s story to give birth to a son she never expected. This would totally derail her plans.  This happens to us sometimes too. We can learn a lot from Mary’s response. We get 3 things when we e...

This Advent, we are looking at how people in Scripture respond to hearing the good news of Jesus's coming. First, we look at Zechariah and how he responds to the news with cynicism. Through tracing God's faithfulness through the story of the Bible and seeing how God always keeps his word, we see that hope is a better response than cynicism. Pastor Julie ends the message with some thoughts on how w...

Gamophobia is “the fear of commitment.” It’s common for us to fear truly committing to things, for lack of certainty, for the belief that keeping our options open leads to more happiness, and because we want to try and have it all, thinking sacrificing other options isn’t necessary.  But Jesus says it doesn’t work like that if you want to follow him. To truly follow the Way of Jesus, we need to sa...

We had so many questions after our sermon on Matt. 6:25-34 and the concept of worry that we decided to continue the conversation on the podcast! Julie, Lisa, Drew, and Catie talk about what it looks like to follow Jesus when you're battling anxiety, how to deal with regret and decision paralysis, and how the church is called to care for others. There is so much wisdom in this episode; you don't wa...

“Well, sure, maybe I made a mistake, but what about them?” We say and feel this more than we’d care to admit. Jesus tells us this impulse does not fit his kingdom. When we pivot blame off of ourselves onto someone else, we’re helping no one. Jesus calls us to something higher than that in our lives if we’re going to follow him. In this sermon, Joel unpacks this passage and explains how it connects...

In Matthew 6:25-34, Jesus calls his followers not to worry. Easier than it sounds! But Jesus walks us through why we don't need to worry – because he is our creator, provider, and sustainer. He also invites us to consider what worry might be saying about the state of our heart and which master we are following, and he ends with a challenge and encouragement to seek him first above all else. Pastor...

Would you rather acquire treasure for right now or treasure that lasts forever? That’s the question Jesus puts to us in the passage Pastor Joel unpacks in this sermon. It goes to the heart of what many consider the most essential part of their safety: their bank accounts. The world runs on money, and we live the story where money is the author: having no money, then as we grow, gaining more and mo...

We had so many great questions come in after our sermon on Matthew 5:38-48, where Jesus calls us to turn the other cheek, that we had to go deeper than a few questions after the sermon. So, we recorded a conversation between Joel and Julie and Res City members Andrea Kidder and Luke Sandstrom, sharing thoughts on some of the harder questions around living these words of Jesus out truly and practic...

The Lord’s Prayer is one of the most famous sections in the Sermon on the Mount. But something we can often miss is that in the context of Jesus’ sermon the prayer is, as commentator RT France points out, a “literary digression.” In other words, the point of the passage is not merely, “this is how you ought to pray.”  The context is about the principle that the radical obedience Jesus calls us to...

It’s normal to love those who love us, and require an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth for our enemies. Jesus says this will not work if we want to follow him, however. All that is is flirting with the same fire that caused our enemy to do evil to us in the first place. Instead, we are to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, give them the shirt off our back. These are famous words, but d...

Those who follow Jesus are given an impossible standard to meet: “Be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). When we read the Sermon on the Mount, we find how radical it is to follow him. Jesus’s expectation is not that we would meet this standard—this is why he offers grace and forgiveness to us free of charge—but he does want us to constantly have growth and humility as our...

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. What does that mean for us today? Pastor Julie talks about how Jesus reveals the full meaning of the law, ultimately fulfills the law on our behalf, and how the wisdom of the law is still something we should follow today. 

In the ancient world, without electricity, darkness was common and food would go bad easily. Two things, salt and natural light were both very important because they helped survive in a world without electricity. Light helped people see, and salt helped preserve food.    Jesus says our role in the world is supposed to be like light and salt. We Christians who understand the gospel and seriously li...

We live in a world that was changed forever by Jesus announcing that the kingdom of God had come. We can gloss over it, or we can take it serious. Many people, including a lot of Christians, don’t take it very serious. In this new sermon series, we’re talking about how we can take it seriously! The Sermon on the Mount was Jesus’ message for how to live in the kingdom. To start off this revolutiona...

Even though the people of God in Jeremiah's time are hard hearted and stubborn, God promises to start a new relationship with them. This new partnership will hinge on God's forgiveness and will inspire his people to follow him in new ways. No matter how far we get from him and no matter how much we mess up, God's not done with us yet. Instead he offers grace and forgiveness and calls us back to a...

In 1 Peter, the recipients of the letter are referred to as “exiles,” a word that describes Christians in all times and places. Our home is where God’s presence and glory are all around us, and we don’t live in that place yet, so we need to remember our identity and take seriously our state as exiles.  But wisdom is required to know what it looks like for us to live in this world now. Jeremiah’s l...

A new community of Israel has been created through exile in the book of Jeremiah. This lost and lonely people, ripped away from what is familiar, has an uncertain future. What will God do for them? When we are the midst of similar seasons, often God brings renewal. He brings new life out of our exile. But like the birth of a child, there are birth pains and growing pains as we grow into the new re...

A major moment in Jeremiah’s ministry gives us something deep to ponder: that God works his future through those we often don’t expect according to our culture’s systems of worth or value or our own biases. We must remain humble and remember God is not trapped by how we label or categorize people. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains how we can remember God’s ways are irregular in our minds, and t...

Major crises don’t spring up out of thin air; there’s always a story behind them. The crisis of Judah in Jeremiah’s time is no different, and when we go back to the beginning of the story we find Judah had forgotten God’s holiness and because of that had forgotten who they were.  In this sermon, Pastor Joel explores the connection between God’s holiness and our identity, why it matters that we tak...

Jeremiah 18—comparing God to a potter and Israel to clay—is a famous passage used in debates about free will and God’s sovereignty. But to think of it only as that misses the point, and Pastor Joel explains how that approach to reading Scripture (squeezing it into debates and ideas about God) causes us to miss what Scripture actually is. It’s not a zoo where we observe God and learn information ab...

“The heart wants what it wants.” This is a famous line, but Jeremiah said essentially the same thing centuries before someone else said it. Unfortunately, the heart often wants what is not in tune with God’s law. It is deceitful and a puzzle, Jeremiah says, with sin written on it that overrides our ability to do God’s will. What can we do? God’s answer is to write his will onto our hearts through...