Awaken City Church

The most important question we will ever ask ourselves is "Who is Jesus?" This is the question Jesus asks the disciples in Matthew 16. The only correct answer is what Peter answers, "Christ, the Son of the Living God" - that Jesus is fully God and fully man who died on a cross to save his people from their sins. It is only when we see Jesus rightly that we can take up our cross and follow Him. 

As Jesus sends the crowds away and the disciples across the sea so that He can pray, hours later, as high winds assault the disciples, Jesus comes walking to them on the water. The disciples, afraid Jesus is actually a ghost, refuse to see the signs He gives that it is Him. Peter tells the Lord that the way He can confirm it is Jesus is if He calls Him out on the waters. After sinking, being rescued, Peter along with Jesus return to the boat as the winds cease. It is at this point they finally worship Jesus...

Jesus doesn’t require you to bring everything that’s needed, just everything you have, and then to trust him with the rest. As the boy brought his lunch to Jesus, we follow suit as we bring all that we have to Jesus and watch Him take and use it for the good of others and God's glory. 

God invites us as a people to pray big prayers and ask the Lord to do above and beyond what we could ask or think. God delights in answering prayers that could only happen with His work. As a church family, Awaken City exists to see God do incredible things in and through us as God builds His kingdom. 

Jesus continued teaching the crowds and his disciples in parables. The Kingdom of Heaven Is like Wheat vs weeds, a mustard seed, a valuable pearl. It is seemingly insignificant but is infinitely valuable. As Jesus goes to his hometown, the people refuse to believe that He is who He says He is. Whether our perspective of Jesus is Dismissal or Refusal, Jesus invites us to believe in this too good to be true but is actually true kingdom of Heaven. 

Jesus begins teaching in parables. Parables demonstrate whose hearts are open to the message of Jesus or not. The first parable Jesus teaches unpacks the state of our hearts by using a farming illustration. Your heart might be hard and reject the message of Jesus. The cares of this world may have choked around the message of Jesus and drowned it out. Your soil might be open, but the roots of the message of Jesus may not have rooted down deep. Or, you might be totally open to the message of Jesus. Jesus asks us the question with this...

Proximity to Jesus or mere openness to Jesus does not make one part of the Kingdom. To experience Jesus' power, like the cities Jesus criticizes in Matthew 11, and fail to repent and believe is to remain far from Jesus. To have a relationship with Jesus is to repent and believe in Jesus. Those who trust in Jesus do so by living a life of rest in Jesus - of declaring need for Jesus and going to Him. 

John the Baptist was imprisoned for publicly identifying with Jesus and he sends his disciples to Jesus with a question. "Are you the one who is to come?" In the middle of his suffering, John began to question the foundation upon which his life was built, and the conviction upon which his ministry was based. Disciples of Jesus will also suffer, but we suffer well when we take our questions about faith or our suffering to Jesus, as John the Baptist did. When we find ourselves in a jail cell, or circumstances we didn't ask for, suffering will clarify...

In the end of Matthew 9 and all throughout chapter 10, Jesus sends out His twelve disciples to do the things He had been doing: healing the sick, casting out demons, and proclaiming the Kingdom of Heaven. Throughout the rest of the passage, Jesus directs his disciples to live a certain way as they take the message to the harvest. They are to proclaim the message and entrust it to people who will receive it. They are to trust in God’s provision even as they are persecuted for their obedience. Everything they did for the Lord would be rewarded. Jesus gi...

Jesus told the crowd that stood around Him in v16 + 17 about new wine and fresh cloth - this reality of the newly revealed power of the Kingdom of Heaven. Then, through the rest of the passage, Jesus demonstrated this power by healing five individuals, doing some things for the first time in the Gospel of Matthew and one that had not happened yet in the entire Bible. The ultimate miracle is Jesus' healing of people's sin-sickness on the cross. Jesus wants to demonstrate new-wine and fresh-cloth power in our lives when we bring situations to Him that are too...

The Gospel is for anyone and everyone. No one is too far gone for the message of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus to save. Matthew was the worst of the worst and considered the scum of the earth by his own people. Yet, Jesus found him and called him. Following Jesus cost Matthew a very lucrative job. He collected taxes and could charge extra to make money off of people. He left all that behind to follow Jesus. When we trust in Jesus, that may mean leaving behind things that were precious to us, but in light...

Again, Jesus displays power over creation - He just calmed a storm, and now He is found casting demons into a herd of pigs. Not only is He more powerful that all of creation, He is God over the supernatural. He is able to make us free when we believe in what He did on the cross for us. 

Jackson Goranflo taught Sunday about the Son of God, what He has done, and how we should respond. The Son of God is Jesus, God in flesh who came to die in our place. We must respond in faith to Jesus' person and work and surrender our entire lives to Him. 

Gabe, Awaken City Church's Youth director brings a message from James challenging us with the truth that if we love God, we will obey what He says. Our obedience is a marker that we love Him and have been transformed by the message of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. 

Those who follow Jesus walk in the light as Jesus is in the light. They are continually reshaped by Jesus' character and work in their lives. Those who say they follow Jesus but live lives in a totally opposite direction fool themselves and actually walk in the darkness. To walk in the light is to follow Jesus and do what He says. We come to the light when we trust in what Jesus did for us as the satisfaction of the punishment for our sin. 

Join us as one of our national partners shares their story of partnering with Awaken City and how that encourages and challenges us as individuals and as a church. 

Those who would be disciples of Jesus must understand the cost to follow Jesus. Trusting Jesus for salvation is not simply a thought, feeling, or action, it is directing our entire lives toward the reality that Jesus is Lord over our lives. Because of that, we will have to pay the cost of comfort, family commitments, and safety. Those who want an easy, predictable, comfortable life should not follow Jesus, because following Jesus leads to storms. Also, Jesus will be with those who follow Him. He will not lead us somewhere He will leave us. 

Pastor Derek continued sharing the vision of where God is taking us into the future. Specifically, he taught on how the Bible teaches us to view our money. Money doesn’t truly give us satisfaction or security that it promises us. Jesus is after our hearts, not our money and stuff. We find our treasure by looking at where we spend our time and money. That’s what we treasure and that’s what we truly trust. Giving happens through the local church not to the local church.  

Following Jesus was never meant to stop with us. In this message, we explore the call to make disciples and the real cost that comes with it—our comfort, time, and lives. Yet when viewed through eternity, we discover that the cost of not making disciples is far greater. As we take initiative, invest in others, and love people deeply, God works through ordinary obedience to accomplish “above & beyond” anything we could ask or imagine.

Jesus closes out the Sermon on the Mount with the challenge that in everything, especially with money to surrender to Jesus' commands and obey them. Jesus alone satisfies, and when we build our lives on Him we realize that truth. The foundation on which we build our lives matters. When our lives are built on the foundation of His Word, it is solid, unshakable, no matter what comes against it. 

As Jesus wraps up the Sermon on the Mount, He proposes that there are only two options to respond to His teachings. People must choose the Narrow gate or the Wide gate. The Narrow Gate is difficult and few will choose it, while the wide gate is easy and many people will travel that way. To travel the narrow gate is to trust that we need Jesus' righteousness and our righteousness is not enough. We trust Him and do what He says. On that road, there are obstacles. The False prophets desire to set us on the easy road...

All through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus established the standard for those in His Kingdom as higher than the culture around them. He revealed that the hearts of disciples must be right, not merely their external actions. With this section, Jesus confronts judgments people make toward one another. He does not prohibit disciples from judging others, only He directs them to look at their own hearts first. When they do confront people about wrongs done, they should assess if that person is ready to hear the truth. Jesus teaches the principle that Christians should judge only when they...

Jesus addresses the question, 'who or what is worthy of our trust?' The Resurrection answers that Jesus is the only lasting treasure worthy of our trust. Everything else will fade away and come to ruin. Possessions, money, people will all fail us, but because Christ rose from the dead, He proved that He will not fail us when we base our lives on Him. 

In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus unpacks an important principle: disciple's in the King's Kingdom seek God's praise, not people's praise. He uses three examples to teach this principle: giving, praying, fasting. When disciples do these things, they do them because of their connection to God, not to perform on a stage. Jesus teaches that all righteousness is to be done this way, even those things he had addressed before. Disciples in Jesus' Kingdom thrive on the reward that comes from faithfulness to God. 

Jesus continues His teachings about how disciples who live in His kingdom should live. He preaches on retaliation and loving one's enemies. Disciples in Jesus' Kingdom will go above and beyond what is required, being gracious when people insult them, and generous when fulfilling what is expected of them. Jesus also raises the bar with regard to how disciples treat their enemies. Because God forgave and loved His enemies, those far from God, those whom God has forgiven should forgive and love those who have repeatedly hurt them. 

Disciples do not obey to live in the Kingdom, Living in the Kingdom changes the disciple's way of life. Disciples are those people who understand their need for Jesus' righteousness (moral perfection) and accept it through faith. Then, disciples change the way they live as those who follow Jesus. In the areas of Anger, Adultery, Divorce, and Oaths, we learn what the lives of those who live in Jesus' Kingdom should look like. 

Jesus continues His Sermon on the Mount teaching on how believers act in their world. The commands Jesus gives are not simply a list of to-dos but demonstrations of His work in our lives. When we encounter Jesus, He makes us salt and light to everyone watching. He drives home the point that we cannot make ourselves do these things. We are incapable of doing enough good things to be salt and light. This only comes from His work on the cross for us. We are righteous, and we look righteous on the outside, when His grace grips us...

"Blessed are those who..." is how Jesus begins the most influential sermon ever preached. This section of the sermon is called the 'Beatitudes,' and is a description of Jesus' kingdom. It is the opposite of the kingdom of this world. In Jesus' kingdom, the people who understand their position before God are those who are blessed. Those who choose God's ways and choose repentance are those who reap blessing, if not here in this life, they reap blessing in eternity for faith in Jesus. 

Jesus invites us to fish for people, and we do that by doing what Jesus did. Jesus proclaimed hope to the broken places of the world. Everything is not alright, but  hope for the world has dawned. That hope is found in the message of Repentance. Jesus went where the people are and he took them as He found them. He did not sit around and expect people to come to Him but the opposite: wherever people gathered, that's where He proclaimed Hope. These people were broken and sick. He healed their physical ailments but didn't stop there and a...

Jesus' Temptation in the Wilderness in Matthew 4:1-11 gives us a peek at Satan's playbook. Satan allures us with the desires of the flesh (I want to FEEL that), the desires of the eyes (I want to HAVE that), and the pride of life (I want to be KNOWN for that). This is how Satan tempted Jesus, and this is how the enemy attacks us. We respond by running to the cross in faith, knowing we belong to Jesus. 

Matthew 2:13-23 continues the story of the Wise Men from earlier the chapter. They find themselves in the middle of a political assassination plot as the king they visit allows fear and power to dictate his decisions. He decides to eliminate all of the two-year-old-boys in Bethlehem, the city where Jesus was born. While that story transpires, God is writing a different story. In the night, an angel appears to Joseph to take Jesus and Mary to Egypt. After some time, and after Herod dies, an angel appears to tell him to return to the region of Judea. However...

Have you ever felt like your prayers hit against Heaven like a wall? This past Sunday, we looked at 9 reasons why we may be unavailable to hear from or speak to God. Often, we talk to God with our own selfish agenda, thinking we know better for our lives. Other times, we hold onto our sin. We can also ignore the needs of others and that diminishes our connection with God. 

There is hope for us when we trust in God's ways over our own. We must come to the place of acceptance of this attitude, turn f...

In this message, we see through Lazarus, Paul’s thorn, and even Jesus in Gethsemane that God’s silence and delays are never indifference, but loving purposes meant to draw us closer and shape us more like Christ. This sermon invites us to trust a good Father who withholds lesser things to give us something greater—not just relief, but himself.

Why does God sometimes feel silent, or answer our prayers with “no”? In this message, we see through Lazarus, Paul’s thorn, and Jesus in Gethsemane that God’s delays and “no’s” are never indifference, but loving purposes...

What do we do when God doesn’t answer our prayers the way we hoped? This message reminds us that God is a good Father who only gives good gifts, and sometimes that means saying “no” or “not right now” out of love. We’re invited to trust his wisdom, resist the lie that he’s holding out on us, and believe that what he gives (or withholds) is always for our good.

Prayer isn’t about saying the right words, it’s about coming to a gracious Father through Jesus. This sermon explores what prayer really is, why God sometimes answers differently than we expect, and how God uses prayer to transform our hearts, not just our circumstances.

In the midst of confusion, fear, and uncertainty, God steps in. Matthew shows us that Jesus is not only the promised King, but Immanuel—God with us—who enters our broken reality to save, lead, and redeem.

Matthew begins with a genealogy to show that Jesus is the promised King, and that broken, unlikely people are welcomed into his family. Through Christ, we’re not just ruled by the King; we’re invited in.