New City NYC Sermons

Three days walking toward a mountain. Wood on his son’s back, fire and a knife in his own hand. And a boy’s question: “Where is the lamb?” Abraham’s answer: “God will provide.”

In this message, Piero walks through Genesis 22, where God asks Abraham to give back the very promise he waited decades to receive. Earlier, Abraham tried to seize that promise himself, driven by impatience and anxiety. Now the test shows what is really in his heart: is Isaac a gift, or an idol? Abraham obeys, trusts God’s character in the middle of the mystery, and takes the risk of laying it all down, not yet knowing about the ram. Surrender is real only when we are willing to lose what we hold.

Piero also shares his own stories of surrender, in relationships and vocation, and what happened when he stopped forcing the outcome. The heart of it: We are not after the promise but the Promiser, not God’s hands but His face. We let go because He is enough, and we can open our hands because God did what Abraham never had to: He provided the Lamb and raised His own Son.

What is your Isaac, the good thing you are anxious to attain or afraid to lose, and what would it look like to place it in God’s hands?

Every morning, the Israelites woke up to bread on the ground. They could gather it, but they couldn’t hoard it, save it, or invest it. Keep extra overnight and it spoiled. Forty years in the wilderness, with nothing in their control and every meal a gift. Moses later tells them why: God was teaching them that we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.

In this first message of our Hearing the Voice of God series, Jingyang asks a simple question: why should we want to hear God’s voice at all? He walks through Deuteronomy 8 and the strange lesson of manna, then shares reasons from Scripture and his own story: hearing God is how we stay faithful to Him, how our lives and community find meaning, and how we find an anchor when we second-guess the decisions we’ve made. It is also how we grow closer to God and come to know what is on His heart.

But the heart of the message is a question about desire. Hearing God’s voice assumes we want to know what He is saying and are willing to obey it. Sometimes we don’t want to hear, and sometimes knowing what God wants and not doing it is worse than not knowing at all.

Do you want to hear what God is saying to you, and are you willing to follow where He leads?

Gethsemane means "oil press," the place where olives were crushed so something precious could pour out. And here, the night before the cross, Jesus says, "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death." This is God in human flesh, and He isn't hiding what He feels.

In this final message of our Made to Feel series, Piero walks through how Jesus handles the most intense emotion of His life. He feels it. He tells the friends He trusts. Then He falls to the ground and tells the Father exactly what He wants: "Remove this cup from me." But He doesn't stop there: "Yet not what I will, but what you will." In the first garden, Adam chose his own will. In this garden, Jesus chose the Father's.

Feel it, say it, surrender it. That's the pattern Jesus gives us, and it's only possible because He drank the cup so that we don't have to. Even when the Father's answer isn't what we asked for, it may be exactly what our hearts needed.

What are you carrying alone right now, and what would it look like to say it honestly to God and surrender it?

But David strengthened himself in the Lord his God. That's the turning point in one of the most devastating scenes in David's life: his city burned, his family taken captive, his own men talking about stoning him. Everything around him and inside him was falling apart. And in the middle of it, he found strength, not by fixing his circumstances first, but by turning to God.

This fourth message in our Made to Feel series steps back to ask a bigger question: what actually shapes how we feel? Jingyang traces three forces working on us all the time, our feelings themselves, our bodies, and our environment, and shows how each one carries real weight in our spiritual lives. Paul writes of being so utterly burdened he despaired of life itself, and Jesus in Gethsemane says His soul is sorrowful even to death. Our bodies carry what we go through too, sometimes in ways we don't even recognize until exhaustion or pain shows up where words don't. And our environment, the spaces we build, the habits we keep, quietly forms us more than we realize.

But when feelings run dry, when the body is worn out, when the environment offers no relief, Scripture points us back to the disciplines: prayer, worship, fellowship, fasting, the practices that carry us even when we don't feel like doing them. Sometimes the heart catches up to the body, not the other way around. And in the end, like David, we press on because God provides the strength to endure, even when nothing else does.

What has God put in your heart about your own feelings, your body, or your environment, and what would it look like to bring that honestly before Him?

What Are My Emotions Telling Me?

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul pants for you, O God. Psalm 42 opens not with complaint, but with thirst, a desperate longing for God written by someone far from His presence and aching to return.

This third message in our Made to Feel series takes us into Psalms 42 and 43, really one poem split in two, and into what's known as a psalm of lament. Koob traces the pattern honestly: tears that replace food, grief crashing wave after wave, the raw question "why have you forgotten me?" There's no sugar-coating here, because the psalmist knows he's speaking to a God who can handle the full weight of what he feels.

But the psalmist doesn't stop at the complaint. Three times he turns and interrogates his own soul: "Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God." That's the turn this whole sermon hinges on, our emotions are honest reporters of what we're carrying, but they don't get the final word on who God is. Feeling forgotten doesn't mean you are forgotten. And if you find yourself cycling back into the same pit more than once, that isn't failure. That's what faith actually looks like.

When your soul is downcast, what would it look like to speak truth to it instead of just believing it?

"Where are you?" That's the question God asks Adam and Eve after the fall, not because He doesn't know, but because He's inviting them to look inward. It's the same question He's still asking us.

This second message in our Made to Feel series moves from God's emotions to ours, and specifically to the heart behind them. In Genesis 3, Andrea traces a pattern that feels uncomfortably familiar: saw, desired, took, ate, gave. Before Eve ever disobeys, something has already shifted inside her, a quiet decision that God's way might not actually be the best way. That's the real story of the fall: not just an action, but a trust that broke first.

From there, Andrea walks through what Scripture calls a distorted heart versus a pure one, and lands on the promise buried in Genesis 3:15 before judgment is even spoken: a Redeemer is coming. David's cry in Psalm 51, create in me a clean heart, becomes the model. Not fixing ourselves, not suppressing what we feel, but bringing our hearts honestly before God and letting Him do what only He can do.

Where are you hiding, and what would it look like to stop covering and just answer the question?

We were made in the image of a God who feels. Not a distant deity untouched by the world, but a Father who grieves, a Son who weeps and rages and rejoices, a Spirit who can be grieved by our sin. If God feels, and we are made in His image, our emotions were never a design flaw. They are part of the gift.

This opens our new series, Made to Feel, right where Scripture opens: God created man and woman in His own image, emotionality included. Genesis shows Him grieving over humanity's sin. Hosea shows compassion growing warm and tender. Zephaniah pictures Him rejoicing over His people with singing. And in Jesus, we see the fullest range: tears at a friend's grave, righteous anger in the temple, joy He wants full in us. He never suppressed what He felt. He was never ruled by it either. His identity as the Son shaped every response.

That's the arc of this series: emotions as a good gift, distorted by sin, redeemed in Christ, formed by the Spirit to reflect Jesus. Today we start at the source, the God who feels, who made us to feel like Him.

If God feels the full range of human emotion without being enslaved to it, what would it look like for you to stop treating your feelings as an enemy to suppress or a master to obey?

You cannot hold on to two things at the same time. The hands that grasp eternal life must release everything else.

This final message in our series through 1 Timothy closes the letter the way it opened: with a charge to fight. Paul's word for "fight" is agon, the root of "agony," a brutal, painful struggle, like an athlete driving toward the finish or a soldier locked in combat. But this fight isn't for a temporal crown. It's for what is eternal.

Paul shows us what that fight looks like: receiving eternal life by releasing everything competing for first place in our hearts, embodying the gospel the way Jesus did before Pontius Pilate, confessing truth without holding back, giving generously instead of chasing the false security of wealth, and guarding the gospel entrusted to us with everything we have. And underneath it all, one truth: we don't fight for victory, we fight from victory already won.

What are you holding onto that's keeping you from taking hold of eternal life?

Continuing our series in 1 Timothy, Dilip Aaron preaches from 1 Timothy 6:3–10 on the connection between godliness and contentment. Paul warns the church about false teaching—especially teaching that uses faith as a means to pursue wealth, division, or personal gain—and points believers toward a radically different definition of true wealth: godliness with contentment.

Dilip explores how we can recognize false teaching, why knowing God’s Word matters, and how the pursuit of money and worldly success can quietly shape our desires. Instead, he invites us to find our identity, security, and satisfaction in Christ, declaring that Jesus is enough.

Through practical practices such as generosity, fasting and self-denial, gratitude, and guarding what we allow to shape our desires, Dilip challenges us to examine where we are placing our worth and hope. He closes by sharing the story of his friendship with an international student whose understanding of success was transformed by hearing that true success is found in loving Jesus—not in money or achievement.

In this sixth message of The Good Fight: Trained for Godliness, Andrea Gorriti teaches from 1 Timothy 5:3–16 on what it means to honor and love others, especially those who are vulnerable and in need.

Paul’s instructions about caring for widows reveal that Christian love is more than an emotion or a sense of duty—it is a tangible expression of God’s character. As Andrea explores the biblical meaning of honor, she invites us to consider how we value people, how families and the church are called to care for one another, and how we can respond to the needs around us with both wisdom and compassion.

Ultimately, caring for others is not simply a matter of doing more. It is a matter of discipleship: becoming people who reflect the heart of God. As followers of Jesus, we are called to imitate God’s character, extending His love and mercy even when it is inconvenient, costly, or offers nothing in return.

Andrea also shares personal stories from her family’s experience serving at an orphanage in Peru and from a season of vocational transition, reflecting on what it means to love others without trying to fix every problem.