Podcast
Resurrection City Church - St. Paul Minnesota
Hosted by Resurrection City Church · EN
Resurrection City Church exists to minister to St Paul, MN. Our vision is to glorify God by seeing people, our city, and the world made new in Jesus, our Savior and King.
10episodes
Episodes
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Stay Salty | Living by Grace or Achievement
3d ago00:44:22Tap to summarizeChristians talk a lot about God’s grace, but we less often talk about what is sometimes called the scandal of grace. When we really get the concept of grace, we’re going to actually be offended. It steps on the toes of what we think is right or wrong. For people who are used at deserving or achieving all they get, grace can be a real stumbling block, and our ego can even convince us to say no to it. In this message, using 2 Kings 5 and the story of a highly competent, rich and well-connected general named Naaman who desperately was looking for a cure for his leprosy, Pastor Joel explains why grace challenges the deeply held beliefs we have about ourselves, and how in allowing it to offend us God is actually trying to heal us of a spiritual disease we all have. It’s a spiritual leprosy, we could call it, using the story of Naaman as an allegory for our sinful arrogance. This is a message for everyone, but especially those who really struggle with perfectionism and achievement.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Sex and Jesus
1w ago00:41:51Tap to summarizeThis might surprise you, but when Jesus talked about sex he said the conservative hardliners of his day actually didn’t go far enough. For many in his day, as long as you jusrt had sex with your spouse, you were good. Jesus said that true righteousness went a lot deeper than that. Just being good at following rules doesn’t produce the kind of goodness God’s kingdom is meant to bring. Goodness in sex isn’t tied to rules at all, even the golden rule of sex we have today: consent. Jesus would say the kinds of things we all know are wrong when it comes to sex (things like assault and rape) come from the heart, which means we have to go after lust itself. This is a problem for today’s world. Lust is normal and celebrated, and we treat sex like it’s ice cream: it’s all good, there’s no such thing as morally bad ice cream, and everyone just has their own specific tastes. We tell ourselves this view of sex is good and represents progress from the backwards ideas about sex people like Jesus had. But the question we never really ask is this: Is this making us better people? More loving people? Or even happier people? If we’re really honest, the answer is no. And this brings us back to what Jesus says. In this message, Pastor Joel helps explain how the sexual revolution overpromised and underdelivered, and how by targeting lust itself Jesus gives what our craving for lust is really all about at the end of the day: real, true intimacy.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Who Am I?
2w ago00:42:50Tap to summarizePerhaps the defining question of our age is who am I? We are asking what it means to be human now in the age of AI, and we are all asking questions like what gives me value? What is my purpose? Why am I worthy of love, of being known? How can I help bless the world? What will make me feel fulfilled, at peace, truly happy? God thinks answering this question is incredibly important. So important that he put the answer right on page 1 of our Bibles, in the book of Genesis. The answer he gives there to us is that we are image bearers who are made to rule and reign over the world alongside him. What does it mean to reign? Perhaps a more helpful word is responsibility. We are made to exercise responsibility for ‘what we have say over’, our ‘domain.’ What we have say over includes many things, like our bodies, our time, what we think about, what we steward, our relationships, our churches, and more. But there’s a massive problem: Sin. Sin takes our responsibility from us and reigns through us when we try to domineer other people’s domains or neglect our own. Both are chronic issues among people, things that if we’re honest we do more than we’d care to admit. But God has not left us hanging. Jesus’s domain is humans themselves: to take them and make them into the kind of people who can do this, by putting their identity in him. In this timely message, Pastor Joel breaks it all down for us.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Being a Villager
3w ago00:39:16Tap to summarizeThere’s a common idea of how it takes a village to raise or support someone. A village is a great way to think of what the church, the community of the people of Jesus, is. But what does it actually take to be part of a village? It’s harder to know than we might think, and even when we do know it can be even more difficult to actually live it. In a time when people are so lonely and desperately need to be part of the community of Jesus, learning better what Scripture says about how to be a villager is increasingly relevant. In this message, Pastor Julie shares some practical, insightful, and challenging suggestions for how you can be a villager at Res City.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Want to Grow? Get Accountability
May 2400:45:38Tap to summarizeWe value independence, a lot. And independence might give us a lot of things we want, but will independence really help us grow as people, especially the people of God? In this message, Pastor Julie explains why we only grow when we rely on God, and accountability to each other is essential to how God helps us to become the people he is crafting us into.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | A Ministry of Reconciliation
May 1700:44:08Tap to summarizeAlbert Einstein once said you don’t understand something well enough until you can explain it simply. Something similar could be said about the gospel: you may not understand the good news of Jesus well enough if you don’t see the necessity of unity and reconciliation. The good news is all about reconciliation: Jesus bringing us back from our rebellion and sin to God through the cross. The disciple, pastor, and writer in the early church Paul knew this, and he puts it this way: we have been given a ministry of reconciliation. What might it look like to take this seriously? In this message, Pastor Joel tells the story of Philemon and Onesimus, a slave and master whom Paul worked to reconcile across even the terrible chasm of slavery. For Paul, we find, reconciliation means hard work, and has to flow first out of Christlike character, which Paul describes in detail in another letter and which Pastor Joel practically walks through to close the message.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Real Vulnerability
May 1000:39:52Tap to summarizeVulnerability, being real, and authentic—these things are desired by many. We want to be vulnerable and live in the midst of vulnerable community. But we don’t really know how, and it’s much harder than we think. Christians believe the problem with vulnerability is our sin, which leads to shame, which breaks relationships. In this message, Pastor Julie explains how Jesus is the answer to our shame, which allows us to repair relationships and be vulnerable in them. She also discusses the tragic consequences to living without vulnerability.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Healing Our Political Sickness
Apr 2600:39:28Tap to summarizeJesus wants us to be salty—weird, unique, different in a good way for the good of our world, by offering it the special blessings of Jesus and the gospel. But there’s a lot of reasons we could say that Christians aren’t that weird, and one of the main ways has to do with politics. Many people have walked away from faith in Jesus at least in part because they hoped Christians would be different—and they weren’t! How might we begin to look different? In this message, Pastor Joel explains how it all starts with whether or not we see Jesus and his teaching as actually having something to offer not just out political beliefs, but equally as importantly, the kinds of people we are in our politics. Specifically, Jesus talks about how we are not to be controlled by fear or give into anger, which breeds contempt. Fear and anger are both incredibly important compinents of American politics, and Pastor Joel offers some suggestions for weeding them out of how we participate in the politics of our time.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | The Weird and Scary World of Spiritual Conflict
Apr 1900:45:04Tap to summarizeHave you ever noticed how many books and movies are about someone who lives what seems to be a dull life, but then discovers a world behind ours, filled with mystery, wonder, but that is also frightening and dangerous? It seems like we have a sense that the world might actually be like that, but we have been told for so long that is not the way the world actually is. Things that people used to call “demonic” are just the products of unfortunate circumstances and some chemical imbalances in the brain. But the Bible wants to let us in on a secret: our sense that there is some conflict beyond ours is right. It’s what Christians call spiritual conflict. In this message, Pastor Joel takes us through a study of this world from multiple passages of Scripture. He gives us an introduction to Satan, the spiritual warlord and general of hordes of others diabolical spiritual forces. He explains how Satan has taken control of our world and we’re all stuck in it, and—most importantly—he talks about where Jesus is operating in the midst of it all and how the good news of his death and resurrection is our deliverance from it all.
Transcribe →Stay Salty | Faith that Delights God
Apr 1200:43:18Tap to summarizeFaith is one of the most commonly discussed concepts in the whole Bible. Almost every single book of the New Testament refers to it. It’s how we begin and continue a Christian life of discipleship. It’s so central that the author of Hebrews writes, “It is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him.” (Hebrews 11:6). What does faith that pleases or delights God look like? In this message, Pastor Joel tackles that question and talks about how we can focus on Jesus to fortify four legs of a stool of faith and be people who can manage through wavering and being of two minds when trust is required.
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