Show Notes
How do you love a church that built hospitals and also launched crusades? For a thousand years, Christianity built cathedrals, universities, hospitals, and missions — and in the same centuries became entangled with wealth, political power, and violence. Both are true. Neither cancels the other.
In Week 3 of The Story of Jesus' Church: From Acts to Today, Brad Sarian covers the Medieval Church from AD 590–1500: the rise of Islam across the Christian heartlands, the Great Schism of 1054 that split East from West, the Crusades, the popes who ruled like kings, and the reformers who kept calling the church back long before Luther.
In this class: -Why the church divided into East and West — and what Orthodoxy still holds that we don't -How Islam reshaped the map of the Christian world -The Crusades: what actually happened, and how Christians should talk about it -What monasteries, universities, hospitals, and cathedrals gave the world -Why power corrupted the church — and who stood up and said so -Jan Hus, and the men who died for a reformation they never saw
Sincerity is not the same as faithfulness. The church has been wrong, and we don't defend it — we own it. And the gospel kept moving through people whose names nobody wrote down. Jesus keeps His promise: "I will build my church" (Matthew 16:18)
More from Restored Church Los Angeles
Technology is changing almost everything about how we live, but some things about people haven’t changed at all. We still love money, and our relationship with sex is still broken. Hebrews 13 speaks directly to both. After twelve chapters on who Jesus is, this message takes up the first practical commands of Hebrews 13 about love, sexual purity, and contentment, and asks why God cares about these parts of our lives at all.
Following Jesus for a season is one thing. Following him for decades, through suffering and stretches when everything feels difficult, is another. Some of us are barely hanging on, and others are just starting out and haven't hit the wall yet.
Many of us find the idea that Jesus had to die as a sacrifice hard to accept, even barbaric. Why would forgiveness require blood? Hebrews 9–10 answers that question directly. This message looks at why the old sacrifices were never enough, what Jesus' death accomplished that they couldn't, and what it means for how we live now.
Nobody has a hard day and thinks, "What I really need right now is a high priest." To modern ears, needing a go-between with God can sound offensive. But Hebrews says Jesus is the great high priest we needed. He stands in the gap and brings us into a better covenant with complete access, renewed desires, and complete forgiveness.