Church of the City New York

This Sunday, Pastor Sam continued our FREED series with a teaching on freedom from sin, drawing from 1 John 1:5–10, 2:1–2. He opened by naming what sin actually does to us: it separates, stains, sensitizes, steals, and spreads. The heart of the message, though, was not diagnosis. It was invitation. Through the lens of both guilt-innocence and honor-shame frameworks, Pastor Sam showed that Jesus doesn't just declare us innocent; He restores the relationship. Through the practice of honest, specific, and confident confession, we can walk out of the shadows and into the freedom that is already our inheritance in Christ.

This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series with one of the most personal questions it will raise: can you actually be free from your past?

He opened with a number—nine out of ten—his and Christy's combined score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment. The score wasn't shared for sympathy, it was shared to make the question real. As James Baldwin wrote, "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."

Sin works the same way. It exerts power by keeping you in what has already happened, but the antidote isn't denial. Pastor Jon called the answer, "eschatological realism" — a clear, inhabitable sense of the future God has for you. When you're living from that future, what the present holds over you loses its grip.

Paul is the guide. In Philippians 3, a man with a past that could have defined him entirely writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Biblical forgetting isn't numbing, rather it's the intentional release of failure, guilt, and the pride that can calcify even around our wounds. In Christ, we've been given an identity more defining than anything we've been through. Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.

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.

This Resurrection Sunday, Pastor Jon asked a question most of us don't say out loud: what happens to hope when it dies? He opened with the concept of "hope theory" — the idea that hope requires a vision, a pathway, and a sense that you can actually get there — and traced what happens when that vision collapses. The disciples on the road to Emmaus knew that feeling. They had built everything around Jesus, and then watched Him die. Walking away from Jerusalem, they said the most honest thing in the passage, "we had hoped..." Into that exact moment, Jesus shows up, not to people with their lives together, but to two people walking in the wrong direction. His next move of opening the Scriptures, sitting down at the table, breaking bread is less a lesson in theology, than an invitation back to life. All the information in the world doesn't close that gap. What changes everything is relationship with the risen Savior.

This Sunday, Pastor Jon concluded the "Come to Me" series by asking a question worth sitting with: why Jesus?

He pointed to a cultural moment where confident secularism is losing its footing, and the Christianity quietly growing is not the therapeutic, accommodating kind — it's the traditional, committed, and costly one. From there, Pastor Jon offered three reasons to come to Jesus: longing, forgiveness, and rest. He challenged us with the idea of "miswanting": the gap between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does, and made the case that Jesus doesn't shame us for our desires, but wants to save us from the lesser loves we've been chasing. Jesus's invitation in Matthew 11 is not to a system or a philosophy. it's to a person. One you come to, and keep coming to.