What does Jesus actually mean when he says to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him? Working through Matthew 16:24–26, Dominic Jackson takes three instructions that are easy to flatten into one vague call to try harder — and pulls them apart. Denying yourself isn't self-loathing. Taking up your cross was the most scandalous image imaginable to its original audience. And following Jesus means letting go of the version of Jesus you've been trying to control. The invitation at the end of it all isn't about doing more. It's about learning, as Eugene Peterson puts it, how to die — and discovering that what looks like burial is actually being planted.

The same empty tomb. Two groups of people running in opposite directions with completely different stories to tell. Working through Matthew 28, Dominic Jackson opens with a simple observation — that how we look at something often matters more than what we're actually looking at — and carries it all the way to the resurrection. Are we living in the best moment in human history or the worst? Is Easter the greatest hoax ever told or the beginning of everything? The answer, he argues, depends entirely on where you're standing. For skeptics and longtime believers alike, the invitation is the same one the angel gave the women at the tomb: come and see.

Peter is a fisherman, an ordinary man who walked on water and then sank, who declared he would never deny Jesus and then did it three times before sunrise. Working through snapshots of Peter's life across the gospels, Dominic Jackson traces the story of someone who keeps failing and keeps getting restored. From the beach where Jesus first calls him to the charcoal fire where Jesus finds him after the resurrection, it turns out to be less a story about Peter's faith and more about what Jesus does with people who have already counted themselves out.

When Jesus is arrested in the garden, he already knows exactly what is coming—and he surrenders anyway. Working through John 18, Dominic Jackson traces the arrest of Jesus and holds up two contrasting ways of moving through the world. Jesus humbles himself while others seek power. Jesus protects while others attack. Jesus gives his life while the world chooses death. At the center of it all is a choice the crowd is forced to make between two prisoners—a political revolutionary ready to destroy Rome's enemies by the sword, and a nonviolent rabbi who heals the ear of the soldier sent to arrest him. Dominic asks which of the two most of us would honestly choose, and what that reveals about where we actually place our hope.

What does it look like to actually be alone with your thoughts—and why do most of us avoid it? In Luke 5, at the height of his popularity, Jesus doesn't lean into the momentum. He withdraws. Dominic Jackson looks at the practice of silence and solitude in the life of Jesus and asks what it might look like to recover that practice in a world designed to keep us distracted.

What does Christian art have to do with how followers of Jesus should relate to the world? Dominic Jackson opens with the question he wrestled with as a young film student—why is so much Christian art so bad—and uses it as a doorway into a bigger one: how should Christians actually see the world around them? Working through the tension between John 15 and John 3:16, he proposes a framework of four kingdoms—the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the world, the kingdom over the world, and the kingdom of me—as a way of navigating what it means to be in the world but not of it.

What does it look like to follow Jesus when what you really want is what he can give you — security, community, meaning, answers? In John 6, Jesus calls out a crowd still thinking about yesterday's free meal and declares himself the bread of life. The people want a sign. They want bread from the sky. They want what God can do, not God himself.

Dominic Jackson explores what it means to hunger for God himself rather than the benefits that come from him, and introduces the church's Lenten fast as an invitation to disrupt the ordinary and rediscover an appetite for God.

Dominic Jackson explores Jesus’ command to “be perfect” and confronts the quiet pressure many feel to measure their spiritual lives through performance, comparison, and self-evaluation. Drawing from the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the rich young ruler, he reframes perfection not as flawlessness, but as wholeness—a life fully oriented toward God. Rather than calling us to achieve moral perfection, Jesus invites us into a deeper trust that reshapes how we understand sin, growth, and identity.

At the heart of the message is a challenge to release the need for control and to surrender whatever we rely on for security, meaning, or worth. Spiritual formation, Dominic suggests, is not about striving harder or managing behavior, but about learning to live from a place of being already known and loved by God. As we let go of what we cling to and trust God more fully, we begin to experience the kind of completeness Jesus describes—one rooted not in our efforts, but in his presence.

As the Movement series continues, Dominic Jackson turns to the theme of formation—the lifelong process of becoming like Jesus. Rooted in Matthew 28, this sermon looks at the Great Commission as an ongoing invitation to apprenticeship. To follow Jesus is to be continually shaped: receiving and responding to God’s love, embracing his teachings, embodying his rhythms, and walking in community with others.

Dominic challenges a shallow view of faith that stops at a moment and invites us into something deeper and slower. Formation is not about perfection or information—it’s about transformation over time. Like clay in the hands of a potter, or even something as ordinary as a bar of soap carved into something beautiful, our lives are being shaped every day. The question is not if we are being formed—but by what—and whether we are becoming more like Jesus.

In a moment marked by anger, division, and confusion, Dominic Jackson turns to the words of Jesus in Matthew 5 and asks a deeper question: what if the problem isn’t just what’s happening around us—but something beneath it? Through a striking contrast between the “way of the kingdom” and the “way of the empire,” this sermon invites us to reconsider how we respond to injustice, conflict, and cultural tension. Are we being formed more by power, outrage, and control—or by the upside-down vision of Jesus in the Beatitudes?

Dominic explains how the kingdom of God doesn’t advance through force, domination, or even winning—it moves through humility, mercy, peacemaking, and self-giving love. In a world that often looks like empire, this is an invitation to become people who embody a radically different way.