Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

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. 

He Refreshes My Soul | He Refreshes My Body

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 reminded that the most important thing about us is not our appearance but the condition of our hearts. Whether you struggle with body image or not, this message provides hope and encouragement about how we should think, talk about, and treat our bodies. In the last sermon of this series, Pastor Julie walks through this important issue.

 

He Refreshes My Soul | “Do You Have Any Saints to Send Us?”

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 those around us like the shepherd does for us: Walking with people through their lives, serving their needs in love, showing hospitality, and helping them seek out the Shepherd’s right path. 

He Refreshes My Soul | Rhythms of Worship to Revitalize Our Souls

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 gathering, and connects them to our series. 

Because worship isn’t just something you do for God. It does something to you as well: revitalizes you by bringing you into acknowledgment of the weight of who God is. We need to regularly be doing this, or our walk with the shepherd will become stale. If we want to keep in step with the shepherd, we have to learn how to do this well.

He Refreshes My Soul | Curing Our Loneliness

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 unpacks how the church meets this need for us and what it looks like for us to do community with one another well so we may have wholeness from following the shepherd as an entire flock.

He Refreshes My Soul | Walking With the Shepherd in our Work

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 the world, to which God is committed and the gospel is part of. In this sermon, Pastor Joel walks through this important topic.

Easter 2022 | Winter to Spring

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.

He Refreshes My Soul | Finding Simplicity in Following Jesus

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. 

He Refreshes My Soul | Why Do Christians Fast?

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 express our response to God in our souls and bodies. Fasting has a range of uses in the Christian life, and as we walk with the Shepherd it’s a way to walk with him with all of who we are—mind, body, and spirit engaged in spiritual purpose. In this sermon Pastor Joel preaches on all this and more.

He Refreshes My Soul | Wise Sheep, Navigating Technology

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 up, done to "make a name for ourselves", and without much thought about the consequences. Yet, technological innovation has massive consequences on us. If we're not thoughtful, it can hinder us from embodied, present spirituality before God and ourselves, which is the lifeblood of wholeness. Pastor Joel breaks this down and more in this sermon.