A tribute video to God's glory over Grace City's 16-year history.

At its core, the reason the Church exists is to display God’s glory. All that we do as a church has the primary goal to glorify God. This two-part series explores what it means for the gathered church, and for the scattered church, to fulfill its purpose to put God’s glory on display.

"Grace. City. Church." is a two-part series that unpacks the beautiful purpose of God's Church, as we process Grace City's merge with Harbor West. Understanding this purpose guides what we do as a church that gathers on Sundays, and as a church that scatters to our various callings and vocations during the week.

The Great Commission can sound intimidating because we don’t see ourselves as disciple-makers who baptize and teach. Isn’t that for the professionals anyway? This message unpacks the big story of the Bible and what compelled the first disciples to share the good news of God’s Kingdom, and how we too share in this mission to tell the good news and to compel others to follow Jesus.

Was all that Jesus declared and demonstrated about the Kingdom of God true, or was it a pipe dream? Will evil, and pain, and suffering really be purged from our existence, especially when evil and corruption seem to get the last word? This sermon looks at how we walk the tension between the fear that evil wins, and the joy that all the risen Christ said and did is true.

How does the Kingdom of God change your life? If we’re honest, our lives don’t seem to change much. Of course, there are significant life-events such as the birth of a child, marriage, moving, a new job, retirement, etc. But apart from these one-time events, life tends to drift into daily and mundane routines. So what is this change brought on by the Kingdom of God? This sermon unpacks one significant change that affects our entire lives.

How do you deal with guilt? How do you overcome regrets from your past? This sermon looks at ways we tend to deal with out guilt, and how Jesus is the one who deals with our guilt.

In his darkest moment, suffering an emotional and physical breakdown, Jesus turns to the Father because no one else is paying attention. In fact, Jesus’ closest allies abandon him. Yet, the upside-down Kingdom of God advances through weakness, and even through deserters.

At the Passover meal with His disciples, Jesus gives new meaning to the bread and to the cup: the bread is Jesus’ broken body and the cup is his blood of the new covenant. It’s here that Jesus institutes the Lord’s Table as a perpetual ceremony for all believers to experience God’s grace today.

Headed toward his Crucifixion, Jesus is surrounded by betrayal by the Jewish leaders, the Jewish crowd, and even his own disciples. In the midst of this we find a nameless woman who expresses extreme devotion to Jesus. What can we learn from this woman? What does this mean for our devotion to Jesus?

Judgment Day is the climactic point of human history when God executes his righteous justice over the whole earth. It’s the day when justice is served, and payback and amends are made for every wrong. For those in Christ, this won’t be a day of horror, it will be a day of rejoicing as we gain our reward of eternal life. Today’s sermon unpacks the role our good works have at Judgment Day, and we wrestle with the tension of a loving God “sending” people to eternal fire and punishment.

Jesus continues to teach what life looks like as we await his return. How do we stay alert and ready for his return when his return seems delayed and it seems like it’s taking forever?

The “last days” began with the first coming of Jesus. From the time of Jesus’s ascension to the closing of the New Testament canon, the apostles believed Jesus’s return would be “soon”. Now it’s been about two thousand years since, and the world has not passed away. As a result, many of us struggle to feel the urgency to live as the apostles instructed. How do we live in the last days that have lasted so long and may last for generations longer?

Jesus makes it clear that we don’t know the day or the hour of his Second Coming. However, we do know his return will be sudden, it will be obvious, and many will be caught unaware. Rather than speculate about the timing of his return, we are told to be alert and to be ready for that day.

Jesus’ prophetic prediction of the Temple’s destruction, the fall of Jerusalem, and the end of the world isn’t meant to cause fear or confusion. Rather, Jesus’ followers are told to stand firm, to be ready, and to find comfort that God is in control of all things.

Sometimes to learn what to do we need to learn what not to do. Today’s text is like that – it gives us a negative image, which should help us understand the positive image. This chapter tells us what life in the kingdom doesn’t look like, thereby, we learn what life in the kingdom does look like.

The resurrection that’s coming is more than a far off time and place. The resurrection bears down on our lives and determines how we live our lives today as new creations.

Jesus continues to teach about the importance of a fruitful life with a crazy story about inheritance-stealing, murder, and redemption.