Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Scripture compares baptism to the global flood in the story of Noah’s Ark. One of the ways it’s similar is that choosing to follow Jesus changes us, our world and our community. We die to our old selves, interact with the world differently, and join the church family to help us navigate those changes. Baptism represents the work that God has done in our hearts and is something we should celebrate!

In Jeremiah 14, we read a prayer offered to God to deliver the people of Judah from a drought, and boy, is it a good prayer. But God tells Jeremiah he won’t listen to it.  Why would God not listen to their prayer? Because he knows that the people don’t mean it, and he isn’t interested in them presenting themselves to be righteous, signaling to him that they were the right kind of people he should...

In Jeremiah’s time, God’s people had fixated their hope on the temple in Jerusalem, assuming that since it was where God lived he would never let anything bad happen to it or the city it was in. Because of this, they didn’t see listening to God’s warnings through Jeremiah as very necessary. So, one day God tells Jeremiah to go and tell everyone God would let the temple be destroyed. We often attac...

In this talk from the 2022 Res City Summer Retreat, Pastor Joel walks through 1 Corinthians 13 to talk all about love: its necessity to mark us out as Christ's followers and the tragedy of when we don't; its character, which we must discern when love is often just a marketing strategy; its permanence, which causes it to be more important that gifts of charisma we might try to focus on to build God...

One of the issues for God to build and plant in Jeremiah’s time is that Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet. In fact, there were many of them, and they didn’t all speak for God and often gave a message that was contradictory to Jeremiah. What were the people to do?  We also have people who claim to speak for God in our time, yet we don’t always have wisdom to know who does and who doesn’t. In this se...

In chapter two of the book that bears his name, Jeremiah gives the people a message from God that is still relevant to us today. He urges people to stop abandoning God and running after empty idols that lead to the people feeling empty themselves, living in a different story than the one the gospel at their time called them to live in. Instead, God calls them to turn to him, the stream of living w...

The Old Testament prophets can seem like vestige of a long lost era, but they have enduring relevance to the church today still. That’s because they continue to challenge us and speak into the moment we live in, where the church’s warts have been on full display and many are leaving the church because, as Russell Moore says, “the church doesn’t seem to believe what the church says it believes.” Th...

Matthew 28:18-20, known as the Great Commission, is a well-known passage of the Bible for inspiring missionaries to cross-cultural service. But how should other members of the church respond? The Great Commission is an invitation for all Christians to know the heart of God for his people and to live in response for his glory. Guest speaker Andrea Kidder explores how the whole church can be involve...

God created our bodies good and calls us to steward them as acts of worship. But what happens when those acts of stewardship get twisted and become focussed on ourselves or on having "the perfect body" that the world tells us we can have? Scripture tells us that we will always struggle in this life, but one day Jesus will restore and redeem everything including our bodies. And while we wait, we're...

Psalm 23 is part of a theme in Scripture of the Good Shepherd who comes to gather his scattered flock. When we follow him and are made whole through our life-giving connection to him, we join this mission.  In this sermon, Joel talks about why it’s so necessary we have that connection to the Shepherd in our task of being Christ to the world around us. We do this by framing our interactions with th...

Every Sunday for the last two centuries, Christians have gathered together. There must be something about that weekly gathering that contributes to our walk with the shepherd, and that we could even say is necessary to it. While he doesn’t cover every element of the Sunday gathering in this sermon, Pastor Joel covers the essential elements of primarily worship that happens in every Sunday gatherin...

There's a wealth of research that details the effects of loneliness on people, even legitimate health issues. We are meant to have deep, abiding, and robust connection to other people. Like redwood trees whose roots tangle up with each other to cause the whole forest to flourish, we need to be part of a body of people in order to grow to reach up to the heavens. In this sermon, Pastor Julie unpack...

We spend the majority of our time at work. It’s one of the main places our attention is focused as we walk with the Shepherd, the focus of this series. But to really do that well, we need to know how God created us to work. When we understand that, we gain clarity and can start to know what to prioritize in our work, and to bring our work under the fold of God’s vision for human fruitfulness in th...

Every year, we experience winter turning to spring. When we approach Easter, we sometimes come in some kind of winter of the soul, which Jesus’ resurrection is the ultimate spring for. In this Easter sermon, Pastor Joel reflects on Isaiah 61 and how what God has made true through Jesus in his resurrection gives us hope of new life in whatever season of life we may come to this Easter in.

Simplicity, as a spiritual practice, is about focusing our priorities on God so that we can walk with the Good Shepherd and experience wholeness. In this sermon, Julie talks about how simplicity can help us embrace our limits, embrace contentment, and remind us that we already have everything we need in Christ. 

Humans are unities of mind, body, and soul. One of the traditional God’s people have connected those together is by fasting.  Scot McKnight defines fasting as, “Fasting is a person’s whole-body, natural response to life’s serious or grievous sacred moments.” When we encounter the kinds of moments we often do in this world that, as the Apostle Paul puts it in Romans 8, is “in bondage” and “groaning...

We live in an age of rapid technological advancement, which impacts our lives from A to Z. What role will it play in our walk with the shepherd, as we've been talking about in this series?  The story of the Tower of Babel is commonly used as a reflection or parable of the role of technology in human society. Often, technological innovation outpaces our ability to ethically and theologically keep u...

if we aren’t listening to his voice? Meditating on and memorizing Scripture helps us to listen to the voice of God in our daily lives and ultimately shapes us to be more Christ-like.  In a world where we rarely slow down to fully read something (TL;DR), meditating on and memorizing Scripture is often neglected. In this sermon, Julie makes the case for taking our time with God’s word and gives prac...

Dan Allender and Tremper Longman say our emotions are the cries of our soul, asking to be heard by God. Prayer is the window from our depths to God. To be whole, we should connect these parts of ourselves to God. But that’s hard! It’s not always easy or natural for us to do it. Why? In this sermon, Pastor Joel uses the prophet Jeremiah to reflect on what it looks like for us to pray from our depth...

The Good Shepherd leads the sheep with his voice (John 10:27). But we can't hear the voice of the shepherd unless we engage in the practice of silence and solitude. Silence and solitude is a dialogue between your internal world and the Shepherd. To do this practice, we need to cut out external and internal noise. Then, we sort through the clutter of our own internal world so that we may bring it t...

God is a gardener, not just of creation but of people. He does everything a human gardener does for their own plants for us, wanting to see us be vital, healthy, and strong, and a healthy plant bears fruit. The series we’re in is about the wholeness that comes from being connected to the life-giving vine of Jesus, and Scripture tells us wholeness includes bearing fruit. Fruit like love, joy, peace...

 In a frenetic, 24/7/365 world, there seems to hardly be any time to slow down, rest, or catch a break. We encounter Jesus of Nazareth who walked unhurried through one of the most anxious times of the ancient world. Instead, Jesus invites us to a subversive and ancient type of rest; one that seems to offer more than just a day-off, wellness plan, or life hack. Sabbath becomes the defining practice...

To walk with the Good Shepherd, we have to surrender all of ourselves to Jesus, including our emotions and trauma.  In this sermon, Julie talks about the things that prevent us from processing emotions with God, how Scripture tells us that emotions matter, and how God works through our pain and trauma to bring about new life in us. This is a really important one you don’t want to miss!

When you read Psalm 23, conspicuously absent is any kind of rush. Shepherds take time to find the right spots to have their sheep graze and drink water, and sheep need time after to lay down and for their food to digest. We will struggle with following the Good Shepherd when we allow ourselves to be swallowed up into the culture of speed, superficiality, and distraction we live in. It will kill ou...

Psalm 23 is one of the most famous chapters in the whole Bible, but how well does it describe us? Think about the emotional, mental, and physical state of the sheep that are led by the Good Shepherd. In a word, they are whole.   But many of us don't feel wholeness, especially after these last two years. How do we find it? It's actually more simple than we might think: Wholeness is found by simply...