Podcast
Church of the City New York
Hosted by Jon Tyson · EN
Welcome to the Church of the City Podcast.
Church of the City New York is a church community passionate about making disciples who "practice the way of Jesus together for the renewal of the city." We believe in the authority and power of the scriptures to shape our communal life and practice, as we seek to teach God's word with clarity and conviction.
Most of the teaching in our community is done by Pastor Jon Tyson and our teaching team. We have both morning and evening services and meet in the heart of Manhattan.
For more information visit: churchofthecitynyc.com
26episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
FREED | Fear - Luke Lefevre
1w ago00:46:26Tap to summarizeThis week, guest teacher Luke LeFevre continued our FREED series with a sermon on fear, exploring how fear can quietly lead us into self-preservation rather than faithful stewardship. Drawing from Matthew 25, Luke unpacked Jesus' parable of the talents, challenged the comparison that keeps many of us from embracing our God-given assignment, and called us to live with an eternal perspective. The invitation was simple but costly: freedom from fear is not waiting until fear disappears, but choosing to trust and obey Jesus anyway.
Transcribe →Freed | Unforgiveness - Tim Brown
2w ago00:44:17Tap to summarizeThis week, Pastor Tim Brown continued our FREED series with a sermon on unforgiveness—what he called one of the most ignored sources of bondage in the Church today. Drawing from Matthew 18, Pastor Tim explored why forgiveness is so difficult, how bitterness quietly takes root in our lives, and why Jesus speaks about forgiveness with such urgency. Through the parable of the unforgiving servant, he showed that forgiveness is not minimizing an offense, but absorbing the debt, humanizing the offender, and releasing them. The invitation of Jesus is clear: unforgiveness imprisons us, but forgiveness opens the door to freedom.
Transcribe →Freed | Rejection - Sam Gibson
3w ago00:40:18Tap to summarizeThis week, Pastor Sam Gibson continued our FREED series with a sermon on rejection—opening by admitting he couldn't promise freedom from it. Rejection is inevitable. The real question is whether it will deform you or transform you. Pastor Sam unpacked the snare of recognition as rejection's dangerous shadow side, walked through the Greco-Roman context of adoption in Romans 8, and landed on this: in Christ, we are not rescued strays but chosen heirs—named, inheritance transferred, legally irrevocable. That is the spirit of adoption available to us, and it is what sets us free.
Transcribe →Freed | Shame - Jon Tyson
4w ago01:02:01Tap to summarizeThis week, Pastor Jon preached from John 7:53–8:11, using the story of the woman caught in adultery and dragged into the temple courts before a crowd with stones as his text for the freedom Jesus offers us from shame. He pushed back on the typical cultural responses to shame—the "you're worthy" or "do better" responses. Neither reaches the place where shame actually lives. He walked through the honor-shame architecture of first-century Jewish culture to show what Jesus was subverting every time He ate with tax collectors, touched lepers, and stopped for the people everyone else walked past. Jesus coming to deal with our shame was a central theme to His ministry. From the animal skins God fashioned for Adam and Eve to the white robes of the saints in Revelation, Scripture traces an important story—God clothing the naked and the shamed in righteousness and glory. That is what Jesus came to do. That freedom is available today.
Transcribe →FREED | Anxiety - Raegan Griffith
May 1800:44:39Tap to summarizeThis Sunday Pastor Reagan Griffith continues our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from anxiety. Drawing from Matthew 6:25-34 and Philippians 4:6-7, Reagan identifies the roots of anxiety within lies and the cycle this creates. As New Yorkers we may feel exempt from this freedom, but God calls us to be free and empowers us to "not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God." By embracing this truth that anxiety has no place in our lives, as followers of Jesus, "the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Transcribe →Freed | Idolatry - Ralph Castillo
May 1100:41:25Tap to summarizeThis week, Pastor Ralph Castillo continued the FREED series with a teaching on freedom from idolatry. Drawing from Jeremiah 2, Pastor Ralph traces God's grief over a people who abandoned Him for lesser things. The passage is startling in its intimacy. God isn't issuing a legal verdict, He's asking a relational question. "What happened between us?" He speaks in the language of a wounded covenant, the devotion of youth, the love of a bride. Idolatry, in God's framing, isn't just disobedience, it's betrayal. The quickest route into it is simply forgetting who God is and what He's done. The text calls us to respond to idolatry the way God does, appalled, heartbroken, undone. Jeremiah 2:13 gives us the clearest picture of why. God is a fountain of living water, and our idols are cracked cisterns that can barely hold what they promise. The sermon concludes by saying that in God's wrath, He remembers mercy. Like the father in Luke 15, He doesn't wait for us to close the whole distance, He runs.
Transcribe →Freed | Lies - Tim Brown
May 400:47:05Tap to summarizeThis Sunday, Pastor Tim continued our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from lies, drawing from John 8:31–47. He opened with a confession that many of us could relate to: New York has trained us to believe that freedom is always one system away, and if we are not careful, that same restless optimization spills into our spiritual lives too. Pastor Tim argued that the problem is not that we haven't tried hard enough. It's that beneath every sin pattern is a lie we have been carrying so long it feels inseparable from who we are, and no amount of effort will ever reach it. Jesus does not come to help us manage that lie. He comes to replace it with something stronger: Himself, the truth that became a person, who walks up to the lie that has been running your life and extinguishes it. The condition He places on that freedom is not more effort but abiding, remaining in His word long enough for the truth to do its deep work underneath.
Transcribe →Freed | Sin - Sam Gibson
Apr 2700:44:59Tap to summarizeThis Sunday, Pastor Sam continued our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from sin, drawing from 1 John 1:5–10, 2:1–2. He opened by naming what sin actually does to us: it separates, stains, sensitizes, steals, and spreads. The heart of the message, though, was not diagnosis. It was invitation. Through the lens of both guilt-innocence and honor-shame frameworks, Pastor Sam showed that Jesus doesn't just declare us innocent; He restores the relationship. Through the practice of honest, specific, and confident confession, we can walk out of the shadows and into the freedom that is already our inheritance in Christ.
Transcribe →FREED | Past - Jon Tyson
Apr 2000:57:04Tap to summarizeThis Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series with one of the most personal questions it will raise: can you actually be free from your past? He opened with a number—nine out of ten—his and Christy's combined score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment. The score wasn't shared for sympathy, it was shared to make the question real. As James Baldwin wrote, "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them." Sin works the same way. It exerts power by keeping you in what has already happened, but the antidote isn't denial. Pastor Jon called the answer, "eschatological realism" — a clear, inhabitable sense of the future God has for you. When you're living from that future, what the present holds over you loses its grip. Paul is the guide. In Philippians 3, a man with a past that could have defined him entirely writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Biblical forgetting isn't numbing, rather it's the intentional release of failure, guilt, and the pride that can calcify even around our wounds. In Christ, we've been given an identity more defining than anything we've been through. Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.
Transcribe →FREED | The Call to Freedom - Jon Tyson
Apr 1300:39:41Tap to summarizeThis Sunday, Pastor Jon opened the new series "FREED" by putting our cultural moment under pressure. We are the freest people in history, and among the most anxious. The freedom we've been promised has not delivered the peace it advertised. What we got instead was exhaustion, comparison, and a quiet sense of fragmentation. The Bible's definition of freedom is entirely different. The question is not whether you're free to do whatever you want. It's whether you're free to become who you were made to be. Paul, writing to the Galatians, doesn't treat freedom as a footnote to the Gospel, he puts it at the center. From there, Pastor Jon traced what Christ sets us free from: condemnation, religious performance, the pull toward lawlessness, and what we're freed into: a new identity as sons and daughters, the Spirit, a community where we actually belong. Freedom, in this reading, has a direction and a destination. The invitation of this series is honest work: name what has you bound, reject the lies that sustain it, receive the grace of Jesus, and learn to walk in step with the Spirit alongside people telling the truth.
Transcribe →