New Life Downtown

How are we supposed to live as citizens of God's Kingdom when we have a lifetime of experience living according to another standard? Pastor Joey Jimenez reminds us that God's plan has always been to establish His kingdom through the testimony of the church and its members. We each have a role to play in revealing the Way of King and the Kingdom.

In week 2 of our "Thy Kingdom Come" series, Pastor Evan Reedall opens the Word to look at the Kingdom inward. The Gospel of Luke tells us that the Kingdom is within, and it's giving God the rule and reign of our hearts that brings about this reality.

This week Pastor Joey Jimenez begins a new sermon series called "Thy Kingdom Come." Jesus came to show us the Father and to reveal a way of life that is is radically different than anything the world has ever known. Pastor Joey shows us that in order to fully understand the nature of the Kingdom we first must seek to understand the nature of the King.

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." Pete Greig, founder of the 24/7 Prayer Movement, joins us all the way from the UK to talk about how to host the favor of God in times that feel turbulent. Pete offers a wonderful reminder to dream and pioneer in ways that reflect the creative potential of Christ in us.

In the final week of the "This Functional Family" series, Jeremiah Parks brings a message about emotional healing through forgiveness. His testimony speaks powerfully of Gods way of forgiveness and the healing that comes by it.

After a few weeks of exploring what some may call the negative emotions, Pastor Glenn Packiam helps us examine how we experience joy in our relationships. Along with practical guidance from the Scriptures on how to cultivate joy in our relationships, we discover that the secret of joy is knowing the difference between what it comes through and where it comes from.

Sadness is a result of loss, and life is full of losses - from the small and ongoing losses to the large, one-time losses. Yet we often compartmentalize our sadness, keeping it from ourselves, and from others. Pastor Glenn Packiam helps us see how to be a good friend to others during times of loss, and to allow sadness to become a pathway to intimacy in our relationships. Above all, we see Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, entering into our sadness, allowing each of our losses to be way to know Him.

In this third week of our series on emotions and relationships in the family of God, Dr. Adam Pelser illuminates the nature of anger as a concerned perception of an offense. As revealed in the biblical narrative of Jonah, anger can be a right response to injustice, but all too often it is a self-righteous reaction to inconvenience and a relationship killer. Our culture encourages us to angrily demand our rights, but the Bible instructs Christians to reflect God's heart by being slow to anger and quick to forgive. When we learn to put away anger and be tenderhearted toward each other, we can foster the "new life" of peaceful, loving relationships available to the family of God.

As we explore how emotions affect our relationships in the family of God, Pastor Glenn Packiam helps us examine the science of emotion to uncover how themes, scripts, and triggers work. Fear is cued by a perceived threat to something or someone we love. While it can have a healthy function, it can also be devastating to our relationships, as we see from the Bible's story of Jacob. In the end, only lovingkindness can break the power of unhealthy fear in our lives, and re-write the negative scripts we have held onto for so long.

In this series on relationships, we will use emotions as the primary lens to examine how our how our brokenness distorts us and destroys our relationships, and how the Spirit restores us into the image of God and makes us fully human so that we can truly be the Family of God.