Citizens Weekly

Our Citizens leadership team joins together for a panel discussion about the practice of fasting.

God offers one thing to those that choose a life and path saturated with humility: grace. Jesus went against the grain of His culture by choosing this path and so can we. 

As believers, we know that happiness is a reaction to something great, but Joy is the product of someone great. To know the Gospel creates the greatest possible joy in the human heart. Advent contains within itself the crucial balance of the now and not-yet that our faith requires: the disappointment, brokenness, suffering and pain that characterize life in this present world is held in dynamic tension with the promise of future glory that is yet to come. In that Advent tension, the church lives its life. Because we live in this age, we feel sorrow; but because we also live with a foot in the age to come, we feel joy. 

Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s plan for true peace, Shalom. Now, as sons and daughters, wholeness and true peace is ours for the taking. Let’s live our lives undivided and whole as we agree with God’s perfect plan of Shalom!

Biblical Hope finds rest in God’s promises. Therefore, we must know the promises of God found richly in His Word. We also can look to certain Biblical figures, such as the Virgin Mary, as models who cultivated Hope in habit and in prayer, doing so in ways that caught God’s attention and earned His treasured descriptor of “highly favored”.

The Name of the Lord literally cannot be lifted higher. His is already the Name above all names. Yet Jesus tells us to “hallow”, or honor, the Father’s name. The Psalmist also consistently blesses the name of the Lord. What happens when we do the same? What changes in us and in our environment when we bless the Lord? It’s worth finding out and practicing often.

What made Jesus’ prayer life set apart? Jews at that time would have already prayed three times per day yet the disciples still ask, “Will you teach us how to pray?” Together we explore the heart posture that grows our intimacy in prayer. 

What does it look like to really commune and fellowship with each other at a deeper level? Not a church potluck. More than light coffee visits or church lobby hellos. How do we become a community that is truly vulnerable, intimate and known in the family of God? 

New studies suggest Gen Z is now the loneliest generation, and experts say we're in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. But the good news is that, through the cross, we have been born into a family. Through His death, burial and resurrection, Christ not only made a way for us to be made right with God, but He made a way for the members of His household to be rightly related to one another. In this message, Brian discusses this reality laid out in Ephesians chapter 2, while challenging the church to live openly and honestly before God and one another... roof off, walls down, and masks away.