Paul closes his first missionary journey by walking back through the same cities where he was beaten, driven out, and left for dead. His message to the new believers there is a hard one: we must go through many hardships to enter the Kingdom of God.

In Acts 14:21-28, we sit with what it means to keep following Jesus after the initial excitement fades. We look at three places hardship tends to show up: pressure from the outside, tension inside the church, and the harder battle within our own hearts. We watch Paul entrust brand new, still-forming believers to the Lord. And we're pushed to think about what following Jesus looks like once it moves past Sunday and into how we spend our money, treat people, and handle disappointment on Monday.

In Acts 13, Paul preaches his first recorded sermon. He's tired, sick from the journey, and dealing with conflict in ministry, and he stands up in a synagogue full of people who already know the story. They've read the law and the prophets Sabbath after Sabbath. Then he gets to the end and reveals the one thing that changes how all of it reads: Jesus.

We walk through Paul's sermon as he traces the whole Old Testament back to Jesus, the one every promise was pointing to the entire time. We talk about what it means to recognize him instead of choosing to unsee, what it means to call him Lord and not just clip him on when it's convenient, and why the peace and freedom we're after isn't found in performance or practices but in the person of Jesus.

And it ends where the whole story has been heading all along. Not a God standing over you saying do more, but a Father who climbed the mountain himself and did not withhold his only Son. You were never asked to climb it. He already climbed it for you.

Pastor Darren Rouanzoin, from our series Church on Fire: A Journey Through Acts.

In Acts 13, the church at Antioch is the most diverse leadership team in the early church, and it's about to send out its first missionaries. From this we pull three marks of a missional church: it worships before it works, it gives itself away, and it confronts the counterfeit.

We look at how the Holy Spirit set apart Barnabas and Saul for himself, not for a mission field or a destiny, and what that does to our obsession with finding our calling and authoring our own story. We talk about being sent right where you already are, your cubicle, your carpool, your group text, not waiting on a passport moment. And we sit with Paul confronting Bar Jesus, and what it means to name the counterfeits that sound familiar enough to pass for the real thing.

Garden Church | Church on Fire: A Journey Through Acts

Acts 12 gives us two apostles arrested by the same king. James meets a sword in a single verse. Peter, guarded by sixteen soldiers and bound in chains, is set free by an angel while the church prays through the night. One gets a sword, one gets an angel, and we live in that tension, because God doesn't always answer the way we hoped.

In this message, Pastor Darren walks through the story of Peter's rescue and gets honest about the kind of praying most of us have never been discipled into. We pray small, polite, vague prayers, sometimes out of unbelief and sometimes because we're tired of getting our hopes up again. But Jesus never rebuked a bold prayer. He rebuked small belief. Drawing from how Jesus taught us to pray in Luke, the neighbor banging on the door at midnight, the widow who won't quit, the settled son and daughter who come to the Father with confidence, we're invited to pray bold and pray specific. Vague prayers get vague answers, so we get specific and keep knocking on the door of heaven.

Part of our series Church on Fire, a journey through the book of Acts.

Join us on Sundays in Huntington Beach at 9, 11, or 1, or in Costa Mesa at 10 or 12. Visit garden.church for more info.

Jesus promised he would build his church, and Acts 11 shows us what that actually looks like in practice. The church at Antioch didn't have a famous founding pastor or an official send-off from Jerusalem. It was started by scattered people who'd watched their friend Stephen get stoned to death and then just kept going. And out of that, the first truly multicultural church was born.

In this message, Pastor Ramin looks at what the Antioch church reveals about how Jesus builds something, and it's not primarily about programs, stability, or meeting people's needs. It's about forming missional disciples who live for something beyond themselves.

We're in our series Church on Fire, a study through the book of Acts.

Join us on Sundays in Huntington Beach at 9, 11, or 1, or in Costa Mesa at 10 or 12. Visit garden.church for more info.

Acts 10 is one of the great turning points in scripture. A Roman centurion named Cornelius prays and gives generously. A Jewish apostle named Peter wrestles with a vision he doesn't yet understand. And the wall that separated Jew and Gentile begins to come down, not through an argument, but through hospitality.

In this message, Pastor Darren walks through the story of Cornelius and Peter and asks what it means for us today: that heaven keeps track of hidden prayers, that the Spirit is always a sending voice, and that the new thing God wants to do is often most resisted by the people who participated in the last thing he did. Geography teaches theology. Joppa, the same port Jonah fled from, becomes the place Peter says yes.

The invitation is simple and uncomfortable. Let hospitality go first. Welcome the people you've categorized out. Move on the whisper before you have full clarity.

Part of our series Church on Fire, a journey through the book of Acts.

Peter heals Aeneas in Lydda and raises Tabitha in Joppa, and the whole region turns to Jesus. But the point of Acts 9 isn't the miracle. It's the kind of people the Spirit is forming.

Pastor Bill Dogterom walks through Acts 9:32-43 and asks what it looks like to live like Peter, who has been around Jesus long enough to know he's not the healer, and like Tabitha, a widow whose ordinary faithfulness to the poor leaves a hole in the community when she's gone. The same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in us. The question is whether we'll be discerning enough to notice what God is already doing, and humble enough to step in without making it about ourselves.

Part of our series Church on Fire, a journey through the book of Acts.

Acts 9:32-43

In Acts 9, Saul is on his way to Damascus to imprison followers of Jesus when a light from heaven stops him in his tracks. He hears his name called, goes blind for three days, and the entire direction of his life changes.

Chase Cofer walks through the story of Saul's encounter on the road to Damascus and the role of Ananias, an ordinary disciple Jesus sends to lay hands on him. It's a message about how mercy interrupts, how transformation often comes through faithful, unnamed people, and what it looks like to say "here I am" when Jesus asks something costly of us.

This sermon is part of our series Church on Fire, a journey through the book of Acts.