Show Notes
This Sunday, Pastor Jon opened the new series "FREED" by putting our cultural moment under pressure. We are the freest people in history, and among the most anxious. The freedom we've been promised has not delivered the peace it advertised. What we got instead was exhaustion, comparison, and a quiet sense of fragmentation.
The Bible's definition of freedom is entirely different. The question is not whether you're free to do whatever you want. It's whether you're free to become who you were made to be. Paul, writing to the Galatians, doesn't treat freedom as a footnote to the Gospel, he puts it at the center. From there, Pastor Jon traced what Christ sets us free from: condemnation, religious performance, the pull toward lawlessness, and what we're freed into: a new identity as sons and daughters, the Spirit, a community where we actually belong. Freedom, in this reading, has a direction and a destination.
The invitation of this series is honest work: name what has you bound, reject the lies that sustain it, receive the grace of Jesus, and learn to walk in step with the Spirit alongside people telling the truth.
More from Church of the City New York
This Sunday, Pastor Billy continued our Manifesto of Fruitfulness series by exploring the fruit of praise and asking who or what receives our worship. In Hebrews 13, we are called to offer God a sacrifice of praise, but praise is more than words spoken when life is going well. It is a choice to declare God's worth in the midst of uncertainty, to practice gratitude when complaint comes more naturally and to speak openly about what he has done. Through the stories of Scripture, Pastor Billy reminded us that praise does not deny our circumstances or depend on a particular outcome. It is a response to who God is and what he has already done for us. As our lives are shaped by gratitude and our own encounters with Jesus, praise moves beyond private worship and becomes a public witness to the goodness and faithfulness of God.
This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued our Manifesto of Fruitfulness series by exploring the fruit of evangelism and what it means to share the good news of Jesus with the people around us. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul describes us as ambassadors for Christ, entrusted with the message of reconciliation. But how we share that message can look different from person to person. Whether through our own testimony, an invitation into community, honest conversations about faith or a prompting from the Holy Spirit, we are called to meet people where they are. Pastor Jon reminded us that evangelism begins with the heart of Jesus, who pursues those who are far from God and welcomes people in the midst of their brokenness. As we learn to share the hope we have found in him, we are called to do so with gentleness and respect, trusting that the work of bringing people to Jesus is not ours to accomplish alone.
New York disciples its people through ambition. Etched into the walls of Moynihan Train Hall, the newly renovated front door to the city, is a single word from the New York State seal: Excelsior. It's Latin for "ever upward," and while meant as civic pride showcasing New York's history of excellence, said honestly, in the context of most people's lives in the city, "ever upward" feels more like a mandate than a cheer.
This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued A Manifesto of Fruitfulness, teaching from Galatians 5:13–26 on the fruit of the Spirit.
This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued our series, A Manifesto of Fruitfulness, teaching from Luke 8:4-15, the parable of the sower. Pastor Jon reminded us that Jesus describes one seed, scattered generously across every kind of ground. The variance wasn't the seed, but the soil. He named the four kinds soil could take: seed stolen before it can root, joy that springs up fast and withers under real pressure, a heart slowly choked by the decade-long apartment search, the co-op board interview, a city built to manufacture not-enough, until there's no margin left to notice God, and soil that receives the word, keeps it, and yields a hundred times what was sown, a harvest so disproportionate to the effort that it can only be received as gift. Jon closed with an invitation: not a program to complete, but a simple surrender of the soil itself. Lord, make us good soil.