Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

Build and Plant | God the Potter, Us the Clay

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 about him for our own enjoyment. It’s a safari where his word is on the loose, and we are forced to react to it. 

When we approach this passage, we see God as the potter, working with us the clay. We have responsibility, but this passage asks what we will use it for. To drift from God, or to trust his design as the potter? Pastor Joel walks through this question, and then explains why God the potter is good news for us. 

Build and Plant | We Are God’s Signature

“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 his presence. This is simple but incredibly profound and necessary. In this sermon, Pastor Joel explains why this matters and how we can let God write his signature onto our hearts. 

Why Baptism is Life Altering | Baptism 2022

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!

Build and Plant | Pleasing God When All the World’s A Stage

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 save. He knew that wasn’t true of them. 

Pastor Joel talks says when we meditate on this passage, we see what God truly desires: not for us to project ourselves to be the "right kind of people" by letting them know we have the right opinions or complain about the people it’s popular to complain about, nor to try to trick him with it either. All we do is condemn ourselves by failing to live up to our own standard. Instead, he wants us to come to him as we are—in vulnerability and humility and repentance. That is where God meets us and dwells with us. Why would we not have that posture? 

Build and Plant | Too Big To Fail?

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 attach our security and safety to something like the temple, something good and that God has given to us, but when we make whatever that is an end in itself, God isn’t afraid to let it fail, and replace it with Jesus. In this sermon, Pastor Joel discusses what it looks like to search ourselves and see if we’ve got temples in our own lives.

Building Out of Love | Retreat 2022

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's church; and its superiority--how it is what truly causes God's power to be set loose in the world.

Build and Plant | Discerning God’s Word Among Prophets

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 sermon, Pastor Joel unpacks what we learn about prophecy from Jeremiah to help us to have wisdom in discerning those who speak for God—when to take them serious, and when to ignore them. 

Build and Plant| Remembering the Gospel Story

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 water that will always satisfy. Pastor Julie explains how similarly, we can turn to Jesus and experience freedom and true life in him.

Build and Plant

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.”

The prophet Jeremiah is commissioned by God to speak to the nation of Judah in his day and ‘uproot and tear down, build and plant.’ In other words, pluck the weeds in the garden of the church and our hearts out so that God may plant what he desires and have a full, lush garden that bursts forth his glory to the world. In this series, we’ll be exposing our hearts to the words of Jeremiah, ask what we need to uproot in our own lives and church, and build and plant so we may follow Jesus fully. 

The Great Commission: An Invitation for All

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 involved with what God is doing around the world, no matter where in the world you live.