Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota

The Awe of God | Psalm 104: The God Who Creates and Sustains

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.

The Awe of God | Psalm 139: The God Who Knows Me

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!

Reintroducing Jonah | Offended by God’s Grace

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.

Reintroducing Jonah | Jonah the Patriot

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.

Reintroducing Jonah | Returning to God

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.

Getting Close to God: Leviticus | Remembrance and Generosity

Getting Close to God: Leviticus | Why Sacrifice Matters

The Old Testament sacrificial system can be confusing if you don't understand the meaning behind the rituals. In this sermon, Pastor Julie explains what's going on in the biggest sacrifice ritual: The Day of Atonement found in Leviticus 16. This sacrifice points ahead to the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross to pave the way for all of us to be in right relationship with God again. Even though we don't need the sacrificial system anymore because of Christ, we can still find modern-day practices such as prayer, communion, and baptism that help remind us of Jesus's death for us.

Getting Close to God: Leviticus | The What, Who, How, and Why of Holiness

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.

Hospitality

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

Getting Close to God: Leviticus | Restoring Relationship

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.