Citizen Church Podcast

Have you settled somewhere God never meant for you to stay?

Most of us don’t stall because we’re lazy or rebellious. We stall because we’re safe. The bills are paid, nothing’s on fire, and slowly comfort becomes a plateau. We stop asking God, “What’s next?” because we’re afraid of the answer.

But you were made for more than a nice view from a level you were never meant to live on.

This Sunday, we were honored to welcome Pastor Peter Toggs from Sydney, Australia. Peter and his wife, Laura, pastor Parable Church, and he brought a word from Philippians 3 that calls us off the mountain and into the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

The next level isn’t about you getting bigger. It’s about Jesus being bigger in you. Not your plan with God’s blessing stamped on it, but His plan with your yes all over it.

Three steps to the next level:

Loosen your grip. Let go of past wounds and past wins. Neither one gets to define you.

Fix your gaze. Steward your endings well. What feels like a detour may be God’s setup.

Hold your ground. New territory brings new opposition. Affirmed on Sunday, tested on Monday, and you keep pressing on.

God is more committed to your growth than your comfort. Every season prepares you for the next, and the prize isn’t status or results. The prize is Christ Himself.

You don’t have to stay parked where God has asked you to step up. Take the next step: plant yourself in a church, serve, give, start the thing, make the call.

You want a faith that stands firm when life pushes back. But when the pressure hits at work, at home, or in your own heart, it’s easy to feel like your faith gives way right when you need it most. You’re not meant to face those moments unprepared.

Daniel knew that kind of pressure. His enemies searched for anything they could use against him and found nothing. When a law was signed to silence his faith, he opened his window and prayed, just as he had done before. His faith held because it had been built long before the lions’ den.

In this message from our series on the book of Daniel, Pastor Galen shows you how God forms that same unshakable character in you:

Let Christ live through you. Your strength doesn’t come from trying harder. It comes from the Spirit at work in you (Galatians 2:20).

Build faithful habits. Small, consistent moments with God shape who you become.

Trust God in the den. When the crisis comes, your character will already be in place, and God will meet you there.

You don’t have to wait for the next crisis to find out what your faith is made of. Start building today, and become the kind of person whose life points others to the living God.

Scripture: Daniel 4:29–30, Daniel 6:3–27, Galatians 2:20, Galatians 5:22–23

In this message, Pastor Dustin walks us through four areas where God weighs our lives, with a question for each:

• Accountability: Do I live aware that I will answer to God?

• Humility: Do I recognize that everything I have comes from God?

• Reverence: Do I still treat God as holy, or have I become casual with sacred things?

• Obedience: Do I actually do what God says?

The good news is that the writing on the wall doesn't have to be your story. God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble, and when we humble ourselves before Him, He lifts us up.

So here's the question to take with you this week: Where has God already spoken, and where are you still negotiating?

Most of us didn't walk into church this morning thinking we're the greatest person alive. That's not the kind of pride that gets us.

The kind that gets us is quieter. You wake up, you handle it, you're fine. Things are going well, so God moves from necessity to accessory. You still believe. You just haven't needed Him in a while.

This week Pastor Brandon walks through Daniel 4:

Where pride comes from. Pride is more theological than psychological. It isn't really about how big you think you are. It's about how small you've let God become. You don't need a throne to start believing everything depends on you.

Why God stands against it. The sentence came down while the words were still in the king's mouth. He lost his authority, his mind, and his place among people, and the man who thought he ran everything couldn't manage himself. God had warned him a full year earlier through a dream about a tree. Don't mistake God's patience for His permission. But the warning also said the stump would remain. Even in the discipline, God left a way back.

How it gets healed. "I raised my eyes toward heaven, and my sanity was restored." Humility is not pretending you aren't gifted or talking badly about yourself. It's getting God back into proper view. He measures the oceans in the palm of His hand and calls every star by name. How big is your God?

Here's the part worth staying for: God restored him, and verse 36 says he became even greater than before. God is not against success or effort or achievement. He's against our throne sitting above His. Nebuchadnezzar spent a chapter exalting himself. Jesus did the opposite, and came all the way down to a cross for us.

You are small. You are not insignificant. The God who holds the heavens in His hand is mindful of you.

If you've been running on your own strength lately and you're more tired than you let on, give this one forty minutes.

There's a difference between being impressed by God and being surrendered to God.

You can be impressed from a distance. Surrender costs you something.

In Daniel 3, a whole province finds out which one it has. The music plays, everyone drops to the ground in front of a golden statue, and three young men stay on their feet. They don't make a speech. They don't organize anything. They just don't bow. And when the king gives them one last chance and reminds them exactly what the furnace does to people, they say this:

"The God we serve is able to deliver us, and He will. But even if He does not, we will not serve your gods."

Read that last part again. Even if He does not.

That's the part most of us quietly skip. We'll trust God as long as the scan comes back clean, the job comes through, the marriage turns around, the kid comes home. We say we trust God. A lot of the time what we mean is that we trust the outcome we've already decided on.

This week Pastor Dustin walks through Daniel 3, and it lands on three things:

Trust God, not an outcome. Their faith had three parts: God is able, God will deliver us, and even if He doesn't. Is there an outcome you want so badly that you've made it a condition of trusting God?

Stand when everybody else is bowing. You can't separate private belief from public allegiance. And when everyone around you is face-down, just standing there looks extreme. The statues have different names now. Self. Comfort. Sexuality. Success. A counterfeit version of love. Every one of them is promising something that only God can actually give you.

God meets you in the fire. The king looks into the furnace and counts four men instead of three, unbound, walking around. Notice what God did not do. He didn't keep them out of the fire. He got in it with them. They came out without a burn, without a singed hair, without even the smell of smoke on their clothes.

If you're in the fire right now and you've been praying for a way out, watch this one. You may not get the outcome you asked for on the timeline you wanted. You will not be in there by yourself.

Our God is able. We believe He can. We will ask Him to. But even if He does not, we still will not bow.

Send this to someone who's standing alone right now.

You are probably carrying something right now that you did not create, cannot control, and do not have the answer for — and it is still affecting your life.

A diagnosis. A layoff. A marriage that got quiet. A child making decisions you cannot make for them. A bill that will not wait. You lie awake running the same scenarios, and morning comes without a solution.

Daniel knew that feeling. A king woke up from a dream he could not explain and signed a death sentence for every wise man in Babylon — Daniel included. Daniel did not create the problem. He could not control the outcome. He did not know the answer. And then he said eight words that changed everything: "There is a God in heaven."

In week two of our Daniel series, Pastor Dustin walks through Daniel 2 and shows you what to do when you do not know what to do:

Trust God when the situation seems impossible. Even when the situation is beyond your control, your response is still within your control. Trust is knowing God is still God when you do not know what He is doing.

Trust God because He holds the future. Nebuchadnezzar's statue — gold, silver, bronze, iron, iron and clay — maps empire after empire, and every one of them ends as dust. The stone cut without human hands starts small and fills the whole earth. History is not out of control. History is moving toward the reign of Jesus Christ. You can trust God in your present because He already stands in your future.

Trust God enough to pray. Daniel's first response was not panic or strategy. He gathered his friends and asked God for mercy, prayed specifically, prayed desperately, and worshiped when the answer came. If you truly believe God has the answer, prayer will not be your last resort. It will be your first response.

The statue starts enormous and ends as dust. The stone starts small and ends by filling the earth. Whatever is towering over you today, it is not the last thing standing.

Babylon never asked Daniel to renounce his faith. It changed his address, his language, his diet, and his name — and then it waited.

That is usually how pressure works on you, too. Not one dramatic moment where you decide to walk away from God, but a slow drift where being accepted starts to matter more than being obedient, comfort quietly wins over conviction, and compromise stops bothering you the way it used to.

Every culture has a curriculum. It is always teaching you what to love, what to value, and who to become. The question is not whether you are being formed. The question is who is doing the forming.

In week one of our new series in the book of Daniel, Pastor Dustin opens Daniel 1 and walks through the story of a young man carried into an empire designed to erase his identity — and how he came out of it with his convictions intact. You will walk away with a clear, usable framework for living resolved when the pressure comes:

Know who you are. Babylon changed the name Daniel answered to, but it could not change the God Daniel belonged to. You cannot live with settled convictions while living with an unsettled identity.

Decide before the pressure arrives. "But Daniel resolved not to defile himself" (Daniel 1:8). If you wait until the moment of pressure to decide what you believe, the pressure will make the decision for you.

Plus the four decisions worth making now, before you need them: who defines your identity, what your highest authority is, where your boundaries are, and what you are willing to lose.

Courage determines what you will not do. Wisdom determines how you respond. You can live in Babylon without becoming Babylonian.

Press play, then send this to someone who is feeling the pull.

SCRIPTURE IN THIS MESSAGE Daniel 1:2 Daniel 1:3-7 Daniel 1:8 Daniel 1:18-21 Isaiah 43:1

There's a seat at the table for you. The question is which chair you're sitting in.

Jesus said, "I am the bread of life." The church was never meant to be the bread — the church is the table where the Bread is served. And everyone who walks through the door is sitting somewhere at that table.

In this message, Pastor Dustin walks through the four chairs at the table and helps you find yours. Not to label you, but to help you take the next step from where you are.

The four chairs

The Non-Believer — hungry, tired, and welcome exactly as you are

The Baby Christian — new to faith, still being fed

The Spiritual Adolescent — growing, but still asking what the church can do for me

The Mature Believer — "I don't just go to church. I am the church."

Maturity changes the question from "What can I get?" to "What can I give?" It sounds like this: I still eat at the table, but now I help set the table.

How do we set the table? By serving, by giving, and by inviting.

Scriptures: John 6:35 · Psalm 107:9 · Matthew 11:28 · 1 Corinthians 3:1-3 · Psalm 92:12-14 · 1 Corinthians 13:11 · Matthew 23:11-12 · Luke 14:23 · Acts 2:42, 44-47

Prayer

Father,

Thank You for making room for us at Your table.

Wherever we are sitting today, help us take the next step toward You.

Feed the hungry among us, grow the young in faith, and give us the humility to stop asking what we can get and start asking what we can give.

Make us the kind of people who serve, who give, and who go out and invite others in, until Your house is full.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

Nostalgia feels good — until it convinces you that your best days are behind you.

In this final message of “The Good Ol’ Days,” Pastor Layla closes out the series with a challenge: your single season isn’t a waiting room. It’s not a “someday” you’re stuck in until the real story starts. It’s the story.

Whether you’re single, dating, or somewhere in between, it’s easy to put life on hold — to treat this chapter like a layover instead of a destination. But Scripture paints a different picture: singleness as a gift, an opportunity, and a life meant to be lived fully, right now.

In this message, you’ll discover:

- Why your single season is meant to be lived, not just endured

- Four practical ways to thrive right where you are — pursuing maturity, protecting purity, prioritizing community, and giving yourself to ministry

- How to stop waiting for “someday” and start living today

We're not just raising kids. We're forming adults.

Every parent wants to get this right — but most days it feels like you're just trying to survive bedtime, homework, and the next meltdown. Somewhere between the chaos, it's easy to lose sight of the bigger picture: you're not just managing behavior today, you're shaping the adult your child will become.

In Week 3 of "Good Ol' Days," Pastor Dustin tackles parenting head-on — not with guilt, but with a game plan. Because our kids don't ultimately belong to us. Psalm 127:3 reminds us they're a heritage from the Lord, entrusted to our care for a season. That changes everything about how we lead them.

Pastor Dustin walks through four practical, Scripture-rooted ways to parent with the future in mind:

1 Guide Their Faith — Your lifestyle will become their normal. Deuteronomy 6:5-7 calls us to impress God's truth on our kids in the everyday moments, not just on Sundays.

2 Speak Into Their Identity — Proverbs 18:21 reminds us that your words today become their inner voice tomorrow. Our job isn't to create their identity — it's to help them discover the one God already gave them.

3 Develop Their Wisdom — The goal isn't to protect them from every bad decision. It's to teach them how to make wise ones — in their attitudes, their actions, and who they choose to walk with.

4 Trust God With Their Future — Parenting is the lifelong process of moving from control to influence to trust. God loves your kids more than you do. You are their steward, not their savior.

Whether you're in the diaper stage or watching your kids drive off to college, this message will reframe how you think about the years you have left with them at home.

Watch now, and if this speaks to you, share it with another parent who needs to hear it. Subscribe so you don't miss the rest of the "Good Ol' Days" series.

Pastor Dustin closes with this prayer for our children:

"Heavenly Father, thank You for the children You have entrusted to us. Give us wisdom, patience, and strength to lead them well. Help us to reflect Your heart in the way we love, lead, correct, and encourage them. Forgive us where we fall short, and remind us that we are stewards, not saviors. Teach us to trust You with what we cannot control, and let our homes be filled with Your presence and centered on You. In Jesus' name, Amen."