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 old, sinful patterns continue to resurface, especially in how the people in his day treated Jesus and now the news of God's kingdom. Tensions and resistance still exist today. But God works in the midst of them, and he sometimes even uses it as an important way the good news spreads, and in this passage there is encouragement that Jesus stands by us even in the midst of our own challenges to live and preach the good news.

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 illustrates a community who belonged to one another. In this message, Pastor Julie helps us understand this passage and explains how community is foundational to the early church described in Acts—though not just for community itself, but for the purpose of the larger mission Jesus gives us all.

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, specifically because of the way it “hyperlinks” to other passages in the Bible that help explain the groundbreaking nature of this crucial moment in the church's history. The biggest hyperlink in today's message is the way God's power breaks down barriers between humans to create a global and diverse church.

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 today, 2000 years later, live in the continuation of the story that started with Jesus. And it's the story of how the sequel to Jesus turned the world upside down. In this series, we're going to explore Acts and talk about how we fit into this continuing story. In this opening message, Pastor Joel unpacks how the big themes of Acts—taking the good news to the ends of the earth by the power of the Holy Spirit through ordinary people like us—are foreshadowed right away in its opening moments.

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 the problem of the unfaithfulness of our hearts to God and living his righteousness in the world. In this message, Pastor Joel explains how we can find the fulfillment we need to the story by expanding it out into the story of the whole Bible, where one of the descendants of the people in Ezra and Nehemiah, Jesus, picks up where God left off and makes it so we can become people who are transformed by the grace of God.

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 need to control their lives at the expense of trusting God and relying on his wisdom. This is central for us as followers of Jesus, too. As he began his ministry of the kingdom of God, Jesus called people to do something similar: to repent of their need to control their own lives, admit they were ultimately lost, and trust him. This is hard for people to do, especially in a world that encourages us to believe only we truly know how to live our own lives. But when we do, we are invited into the kingdom of God and a life far better than we could ever have found on our own. Many revivals have been founded on confession and repentance, and in this passage we see why.

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 of the larger whole, the body of Christ, as the apostle Paul calls it. In this message, Pastor Joel discusses Nehemiah and the incredible work done by the people he mobilized for a greater work, talks about what we can learn from him, explains why our culture's “narcissism epidemic” is a big obstacle to the larger mission we have, and unpacks Jesus's antidote for the epidemic, self denial.

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 a list of rules to hem closely to or be punished. It's wisdom from God himself, meant to dwell in us and turn us into people who are built on the rock. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what Ezra did and how we can learn from his example.

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 message, Pastor Julie unpacks how we can find renewal and new beginnings in Jesus this Easter.

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 revival or renewal that God was working for the community in Ezra-Nehemiah, and it will happen to us as we seek to take Jesus seriously and build our lives only on the rock of his teaching and gospel. In this message, Pastor Joel shares the opportunities different kinds of opposition can present to us.

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 (Matthew 7:24-27). This series is a chance for us to look at where God is rebuilding his church and ask, “how can we be a part of it?" in a way that lasts. In this opening message, Pastor Joel introduces this series and unpacks three initial ways we see how the Jewish people, irrelevant and small, were led by God to rebuild themselves, and what we can learn from it today.

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, we can have the love we need to love our neighbors in the way Jesus calls us to. In this message, Pastor Joel explains it all from the book of 1 John.

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 same joy as God when that happens? In this message, Pastor Julie helps us to think about how much joy we do or don't have when what God finds of great value is found. She discusses how many Christians feel uncomfortable with evangelism, and talks about how we must avoid fear and resentment.

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 of living this challenging call from Jesus.

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 lots of occasion and capacity to help are the family of faith (Galatians 6:1), the church! In this message, Pastor Joel walks through four points based on Paul's letter to the Ephesians that help us to move in the right direction for living out the command to love our Res City family, or whatever church we call home: (1) Have a We Not Me mindset, (2) Assume the best in each other, (3) Don't let outside differences affect inside realities, and (4) Pursue our Common Mission.

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, and that he truly, deeply, and passionately wants our best, obedience starts to become something we want to do—even a pathway to joy. In this message, Pastor Joel shares what it looks like to trust Jesus and why our tendency to make obedience about achievement will let us down.

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 desires for us, we have to first sort out how we love God. In this message, Res City elder Brett Ripley walks us through how loving God with our heart not a question of will. It's a question of listening with radical priority. Join us!

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 maybe difficult questions: What does it look like to love like Jesus? What does he mean by love? Why does loving by giving ourselves away actually help us become our truest selves? How does loving like Jesus offer us a greater joy than we could ever take for ourselves? And are we living with integrity according to the love of God's grace shown to us? The answers to these questions are what we want to explore in this series. Join us!

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 abiding.

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 is on exactly what we're studying in this series: Abiding prayer. Join us as we come alongside our rabbi and learn his wisdom for prayer that connects us to our Father.

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 us to bear fruit. The way we bear fruit, he says, is to abide in him, which means to remain in his presence or make our home in him. What does it look like to abide? It's not just a vague word that means “being a Christian.” It's an active verb, something you do, something you make time for, you can in some ways quantify, even. This series is all about some ways to abide in Jesus through prayer. In this first message, Pastor Joel walks through something called a Daily Office, which is a tool that we can use to daily abide in our King.

Christmas has a lot to do with power, and especially with the idea of power and love combining, but that's maybe not how we think of it. In this message, Pastor Joel explains how Christmas shows us an absurd kind of power: the power of love, and we see it expressed in the nativity scene. When this power truly touches us, we aren't the same. Join us for this final Sunday in Advent as we meditate on what that means—and how it might influence how we celebrate Christmas this year.

Christmas is all about an amazingly generous gift from God to us—himself. And so advent has always included an encouragement to being generous ourselves. In this message, Pastor Julie explains what generosity looks like, how it's rooted in God himself and how we take that serious at Res City.

Advent comes to us in what is the darkest time of year; the sun comes up late and sets early. It's fitting that so much of the imagery of the season also has to do with light that dawns in the darkness of Jesus being born: “A people living in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2). We live in a world where things often feel dark. What response might we have to the darkness we feel that can prepare us for the light of Christmas? Perhaps surprisingly, advent calls us to repentance. In this message, Pastor Julie explains how how we can deal with the darkness in the world and prepare our hearts for the coming of the light of Christ.

How much time do people spend preparing for a wedding vs. how much they spend preparing for a marriage? The stats show people spend a lot more time preparing for the wedding than what comes after—the much more important thing. The same question could be applied to us and Christmas? How much time do we spend preparing for the holiday part of Christmas vs. how much time do we spend preparing our hearts for the promise, hope, kingdom, and joy of the coming of Jesus? In this message, Pastor Julie explores what kinds of barriers might exists in our hearts to keep us from preparing for the coming of true royalty in Jesus this advent season.

If you're a Harry Potter fan, you might remember Barry Bot's every flavored beans.  The idea is that some “beans” are good flavors- strawberry, toasted marshmallow, while others are vomit or ear wax flavored. The tricky thing is you can't tell by looking at the beans which one you are going to get- you have to taste and see- to your horror or delight. The idea of a mixed bag of good and bad jelly beans is good analogy for life. Life is a mixed bag of good and bad all jumbled together. Which means we need to be able to spot God's goodness. In this message, Res City Leadership Team member Krista Schroeder shares from Psalm 34 about what it means that God is good, and how the Psalm invites us ‘taste and see' something that is far better than a bag of jelly beans—God himself!

The God of the Bible is described as an author, one who tells the greatest story the world has ever known, and one we're invited to join into with our own individual stories. In Psalm 105 we read about one chapter in this great story, and Pastor Julie shares what it looks like for us to see our own story line up with the one told here.

It's natural for us to praise or celebrate that which feels worthy. It can even feel delightful to do it sometimes. In Psalm 147, we are invited to see God as delightful to worship, and we see why as we read through its twenty verses. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks the Psalm and shares three suggestions for how to build a sense of worth in our hearts for God.

In the Psalms, different parts of God's nature and character are drawn out for us and when we really think about them, fill us with awe and wonder. In Psalm 90, the key idea is God's timelessness, the way in which he is not bound by time in the way we are. It's harder to wrap our heads around this idea than others, but very relevant and wonderful for us when we do. In this message, Res City worship leader Zach Dohmen explains how big God is, how small we are in comparison, and why both of these are good news for us.

It's easy to get cynical in today's world. It's easy to believe that doing the right thing leads you nowhere. But Scripture wants to challenge us away from falling into this bleak way of viewing the world, and offer us one of hope and stability. In Psalm 18, we see that God's character is righteousness, which speaks to his faithfulness to bless us when we walk in his way and wisdom. In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.

It's easy to get cynical in today's world. It's easy to believe that doing the right thing leads you nowhere. But Scripture wants to challenge us away from falling into this bleak way of viewing the world, and offer us one of hope and stability. In Psalm 18, we see that God's character is righteousness, which speaks to his faithfulness to bless us when we walk in his way and wisdom. In this message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down.

In Psalm 18:1-19, God is depicted in a way we haven't yet seen in this series: A fierce deliverer. He is a terrifying force, but his power is used for the purpose of delivering his servant, David. While we might see someone described like God is here as intimidating, it's all about perspective. We are the ones God rushes to deliver. But what does God deliver us from? And do we want to be rescued? In this message, Pastor Joel examines all of these ideas. **Note: There was technical difficulty during the live recording of the sermon, so the audio used here is from a re-recording.

It seems like when we see the news, it's always bad. Psychology tells us that humans are just more interested in bad news than good news, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of good news out there. In Psalm 65 we consider that God is like a king who travels the whole earth, leaving tracks like from a chariot behind him that “drip fatness”—his goodness and blessing pooled up in the track marks and evident for all to see. When we see good news in the world—whatever it looks like—it is a track mark of God's goodness. In this message, Pastor Joel helps us consider three responses to this wonderful God's overflowing goodness—to extend common grace like he does, to live in the abundance of today, and to make it our mission to see God's tracks even when it's hard. Join us as we study this incredible Psalm.

We all want control. We try to control our lives and everything around us, but we can't, and in fact all we end up dong is making ourselves anxious. But we find in Scripture reassurance, or wisdom, that reminds us God is in control, and we can trust in him because of it. In this message, Pastor Julie explains why this is good news for us.

We naturally admire people who aren't helpless when the world doesn't work like it should, and we should have the same admiration with God. In Psalm 82, we read about what God does for those who are helpless in the world, though he does it in a way we might not expect. In this message, we'll be taken into a mysterious and often avoided concept in Scripture: the divine council, a group of spiritual beings who resist God's calls for justice and mercy in the world. What we find is that God is working behind the scenes to help those who are helpless.

Do you ever wonder why Earth is not like other planets? On other planets the conditions are so extreme that no life can ever live, but on Earth life is everywhere and we don't just have to try and survive; we can thrive. We might just chalk it up to random chance, but in the Bible there's another answer: God's active care of creation. In Psalm 104, as the writer surveys all of creation, from the seas to mountain goats, we find three themes that fill us with awe and wonder of God: How fully alive he is, how he restrains and redirects chaos, and how dependent we actually are on him. In this message, Pastor Joel walks through this delightful Psalm and gets us to examine how seriously we actually take God's action in the world and in our lives.

One essential piece of discipleship is awe. We need awe, but awe is not something that comes naturally to us. One way we can cultivate awe within us is by reading the Psalms, which is what we'll be doing in this series: reading selected Psalms that tell us about who God is in order to inspire awe within us. In the first message in this series, Pastor Joel leads us through Psalm 139, which presents God as omnipresent (everywhere at once) and omniscient (knowing all things). But the Psalm doesn't just present God in this way like he's a giant Google machine that can spit out information to you about anything. It presents God as aware of these things because of his intimate knowledge of us. And it's not just his knowledge of us; it's his deep and abiding love for us. God knows us so he can call us to even greater things, more and more. Join us as we spend some time meditating on all of this!

In the final chapter of Jonah, we finally get the conversation between God and Jonah we've been waiting for. This is a chance for both to speak honestly to one another and for us to finally find out exactly what made Jonah run from God in the first place. What Jonah tells God—and us—is a stunning admission that God is not the God he wants to worship. Jonah is offended by God's grace. In this final message of our Jonah series, Pastor Joel talks about how we can find ourselves also offended by God's radical grace—but also why it's so amazing and necessary for us.

The story of Jonah is not really about a man who spends some time in the belly of a fish. Instead, it's the story about a man who runs from God. In this message, we finally get into why Jonah ran from God—and it might not be the reason you expect. Jonah, from what we can discern of him, was an intensely patriotic Jew, one who put his love of country ahead of God. This is the gap that existed between Jonah and God, and it remained even after he decided to follow through on what God asked him to do in the first place. In this message, Pastor Joel unpacks what we can learn from Jonah's own struggles with identity and unhealthy love of country, and the deeper insight we can find from any gaps between God and ourselves we might have.

In the first chapter of Jonah, we read about Jonah's flight from God. Jonah is so relatable because we all run from God, but when we choose to stop, we have to complete the process and return to God. In chapter two, we see Jonah return to God from the belly of a great fish, which the Bible often calls repentance. What does it look like to return to God? In this message, Pastor Joel explains three dimensions of repentance and why it matters so much for kingdom people, not just runaway prophets.

Leviticus can be a difficult book to understand, and people who skim through it might find it to be one of those irrelevant parts of the Bible they hear about. But if we hear what the book is saying to us over and over to help make sense of it, all the hard to understand parts make a lot more sense. The phrase “Be holy for I'm holy” and variations of it recur eleven times in the book, and it's here that we start to make sense of what's going on. In this message, Pastor Joel explains what holiness actually is and why, despite seeming irrelevant to us today, Leviticus and holiness are so important in our own discipleship walks.

In this special message, Res City Leadership Team Member Miles Trump offers some reflections on hospitality.

Leviticus is one of the hardest books for a modern Western person to understand. Full of ancient rituals, rules, and regulations, it's hard to understand, especially when we so firmly believe in the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus: where faith and grace are the foundations of our relationship. But despite the fact that it seems opposed to those foundations, Leviticus has a lot to say to us about how we can get close to God in very practical ways. In this opening message to a five week series, Pastor Julie explains how relationship is essential in Leviticus, and why that matters for us today.

In this special baptism service message, Pastor Joel offers some reflections on baptism from a story in Acts 8:26-39, where we learn about what God does behind each baptism as well as the nature of discipleship. We find in this story that baptism and discipleship are intimately connected.

Sometimes, the most extraordinary thing is right under our noses. In this final message of the series, Pastor Joel talks about the ordinary is good, but we must be careful to not let ourselves believe the good news we believe and the Savior and King we give our allegiance to is ordinary. He walks through the story of the transfiguration of Jesus to talk about how we need these reminders from time to time, but also that they come in glimpses.