Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Acts: Turning the World Upside Down | A Study on Conversion

You often hear of someone having a “Damascus Road” moment, where something new is revealed to them and their whole life changes. The phrase comes from this passage in Acts (chapter 9), where a man named Saul, better known as Paul the Apostle—who at first seems like the main villain in the story—suddenly has his whole life change when Jesus interrupts his plans to stop the growth of the church dead in its tracks. It’s a famous story. And it tells us a lot about what is taking place when someone chooses to begin following Jesus. In this message, Pastor Joel highlights four important elements to conversion, which are relevant not just for new followers of Jesus, but also for the seasoned saint to come back to again and again as they continue the journey begun in their own conversion.

Acts: Turning the World Upside Down | God’s Unstoppable Mission

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.

Acts: Turning the World Upside Down | Finding Belonging

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.

Acts: Turning the World Upside Down | Hyperlinks and the Holy Spirit

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.

Acts: Turning the World Upside Down | Living the Sequel

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.

Restored: The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah | Lessons From An Unfulfilled Revival

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.

Restored: The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah | Step 6: A Healthy Dose of Confession and Repentance

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.

Restored: The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah | Step 5: Work Together For the Mission

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.

Restored: The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah | Step 4: Struggling With Scripture

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.

Restored: The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah | Step 3: Become People of the Word

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.