Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

No Greater Love | Loving God Through Obedience

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.

No Greater Love | Loving God With All Our Hearts

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!

No Greater Love | Abiding in Jesus’s Love

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!

Abiding Prayer | Praying Scripture

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.

Abiding Prayer | Listening to God

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.

Abiding Prayer | Praying Like Jesus

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.

Abiding Prayer | The Daily Office

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.

Advent 2024: Preparing for Royalty | Every Knee Will Bow

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.

Advent 2024: Preparing for Royalty | Generosity and Christmas

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 2024: Preparing for Royalty | Clearing the Darkness

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.