The kingdom needs you: the sower.
The Kingdom of God is what life looks like when Jesus is in charge. It has already begun through Jesus, but it’s not yet fully visible; it is present, but hidden, and we as His people are called not just to be in it, but to participate in God’s kingdom work in the world. The Parable of the Sower demonstrates Kingdom people as a quiet resistance force—joining God in pushing back against evil through love, witness, and action-- and teaches us three important principles.
First, sow generously: share the message of Jesus widely without worrying about results—God’s Kingdom is marked by abundance, not efficiency.
Second, recognize different responses: some hearts are hardened by busyness, some are shallow (driven only by emotion or intellect), and others are distracted by worries and wealth.
Third, cultivate good soil: make space for God, engage deeply with His Word, and allow it to shape every part of life. The promise is that, when we respond fully, God produces a multiplied harvest—bringing lasting love, joy, peace, and transformation, even in a broken world.
By Ed Flint
The new life Jesus promises.
Following on from last week's talk about who the real Jesus of the gospels is, today we consider the sort of life he promises to bring.
In his interaction with Nicodemus, Jesus promises something more radical than any religious, political or social leader has ever offered. He says that what humanity’s needs goes beyond sociological, economic, or political revolutions, and beyond psychological revolutions. Jesus says humanity's problems all stem from a spiritual problem, so only a spiritual solution will do. He says everyone must be born again. Only with the spiritual cleansing, washing and refreshing of the new birth found in him and by his Spirit, will lives be fundamentally changed.
As God himself, Jesus is uniquely able to provide this for all who turn to him.
By Ed Flint
Invite your friends to Alpha.
With our upcoming Alpha course beginning April 28th, we consider what it is we’re doing when we invite our friends to the course.
Ultimately we’re inviting them to meet Jesus. And He always meets people just as they are.
From his interaction with the Samaritan woman (John 4:1-30) we see that Jesus, fully human, is not afraid to admit his needs. He meets us on equal and humble footing: bestowing dignity, breaking down barriers, treating us equally, offering the supernatural water of life that fully satisfies, and bringing the presence of God into the midst of us. Jesus is the one we’re all made for. And by inviting friends to Alpha we’re saying: come and see!
By Ed Flint
Serving the city.
How do we seek out the lost sheep? What does loving the most vulnerable look like? How do we see and love people with the heart of Jesus?
Our guest speaker Bob Ekblad shares his story and experiences of working with people on the margins: folks struggling with addiction, inmates, immigrants, and so many other people who have been overlooked by society. He unpacks what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus: lambs called to seek out sheep in a world surrounded by wolves.
By Bob Ekblad
Easter Sunday 2026
The resurrection means everything good will be restored. Because of Jesus’ bodily, historical rising from the dead, a new day has dawned. Just as the power of sin touched every single part of creation at the fall, the power of the resurrection is redeeming every single part of creation since Easter. Sin and death has been swallowed up in the victory of God.
God is restoring everything- paintings and buildings, people and marriages, relationships and families, hearts and bodies, and the whole universe! So, when it comes to the future, we need not be pessimists nor optimists; instead we can be something far more powerful: resurrectionists!
He has risen! Hallelujah!
Live the revolution: down the narrow path.
Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount concludes with a choice: which road will we walk? The “narrow way” is not about securing a distant afterlife, but about embracing a transformed life here and now—one shaped by the Spirit’s ongoing work within us.
Set against the backdrop of Israel’s coming destruction, Jesus warns of the broad road that ultimately leads to a wasted life, disconnected from true purpose. For us today, this choice remains just as urgent. Kingdom people resist moralism in all its forms, reject shallow measures of success, and push back against radical individualism.
Instead, they commit to a shared life of formation—walking together, being shaped into the image of Christ, and offering themselves in willingness to be used by God. The invitation stands: enter the narrow gate, and discover the life you were made for.
By Hannah Flint
Live the revolution: do good.
The Sermon on the Mount is not merely about behavior, but about a deep transformation of the heart that enables Kingdom living from the inside out. As we conclude our series, we consider Jesus' closing statement: “do to others what you would have them do to you.”
His “Golden Rule” is the simple yet demanding summary of his teaching to this point. He calls believers not just to avoid harm but to actively pursue good through restoration and generosity toward others. Ultimately, Kingdom people are those who resist judgmentalism, practice self-awareness, and extend to others the same gracious kindness that they themselves receive from God.
By Ed Flint
Live the revolution: treasures.
The Revolution Jesus is leading us into has to work its way into our systems of valuing - exposing what we treasure.
Jesus presses this issue because He is fully aware of the duality resulting from trying to live in both Kingdoms - of Mammon and of God - at the same time. The result will be crippling anxiety and paralyzing worry. So… His solution is to choose relentless focus on the Kingdom of God and to let that choice inform our attitudes and behaviors around money, time, and other measures of value.
By Bill Dogterom
Live the revolution: The Lord’s Prayer.
Today we focus in on The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus’s teaching on what is called prayer in Matthew 6:5-15, and how prayer is for everyone at all times. We also learn about the radical state of practicing the presence of God through prayer without ceasing as exemplified by the life of Brother Lawrence.
By Paul Maertens
Alpha Holy Spirit Sunday
In a break from our 'Live the Revolution' series, and at the conclusion our most recent Alpha Course, we dedicate our Sunday Service to the subject of the Holy Spirit: Who is the Holy Spirit? What does the Holy Spirit do? How can we be filled with the Holy Spirit?
The Christian life is not just about faith in Jesus - who He is and what He has done. Putting our faith in Jesus is the vital first step. But the Holy Spirit is the one in whose dimension of life we go on to experience God throughout the rest of our lives. So without Him we have nothing. But with the power of the Spirit in our lives, we can live the fruitful, meaningful, joy-filled, empowered lives we were made for.
By Ed Flint
Live the revolution: for the audience of one.
Having shown what a kingdom heart and the kingdom life looks like, Jesus concludes His Sermon on the Mount with a series of warnings about inhibiting the kingdom life.
The first concerns the desire for approval from anyone other than God our Father. When our motivation to give, pray and fast is clouded by what others think of us, we need to beware. Kingdom People are called to devote themselves to the audience of One - our loving Father in heaven. When we do this we receive the greatest of rewards - more of him - his presence, peace, love, and power.
By Ed Flint
Live the revolution: love they neighbor.
What does this revolution actually look like in real life? Torah Law was always about love — love of God, self and neighbor — but somewhere along the way it had became something to manage, manipulate, and weaponize. In six startling case studies, Jesus takes Israel’s Law, and traces the trajectory from the seed in the heart to the fruit in the world, and brings his focus to the image of God in every one of us.
Jesus goes after contempt, objectification, power abuse, image-management, retaliation and tribal loyalty. This is not moral tightening or any sort of new rules: it is relational restoration, the root of all kingdom justice! With bonkers (and so misunderstood!) contextual wisdom, turning cheeks and walking extra miles actually become ways of expressing agency, calling out injustice and inviting even our enemy into relationship. Challenging teaching, for our challenging times!
By Hannah Flint
Books referenced in talk
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard
The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls by Rich Villodas
Live the revolution: beyond the goodness of Pharisees.
Matthew 5:17-20
Having announced his kingdom, invited all to enter it, and described that people of the kingdom as salt and light, Jesus elaborates on how kingdom people live.
Our goodness is to surpass that of the Pharisees. This is life beyond legalistic righteousness. So, Jesus hasn’t come to tell us to live righteously, he has come to make us into the sort of people who live righteous lives. His interest is in the heart, not outward appearance.
The challenge to us is this: does following the law come naturally? We become such a person only when we allow the power of God’s love to transform us daily into the kingdom people we have become.
By Ed Flint
Live the revolution: salt and light.
Jesus turns things upside down when it comes to who is invited into his kingdom - it’s everyone, really everyone. What’s more, the invitation to receive the blessing of his kingdom is not dependent on anything that we might deem a qualification or a disqualification. But Jesus doesn’t end his teaching there. And neither must we. Entrance into his kingdom is just the first step.
Jesus continues his Sermon on the Mount by painting a picture of what Kingdom people look like. Fundamentally, they are ontologically changed. Kingdom people are salt and light. They don’t try to be, or should be, or can be salt and light. They are. Such a radical change only happens when we allow God to resurrect us. And we can only be resurrected if we’re willing first to die to what we were.
Salt stops things decaying, makes things pleasurable, and helps things grow. Light is the presence of Jesus shining out of us and redeeming the world. The world needs us to be who we are - salt of the earth and light of the world.
By Ed Flint
Live the revolution: blessedness.
When it comes to "living the revolution" the question arises - for whom is the revolution good news? Who gets to join in - and who is excluded? So, from the outset of His revolutionary invitation, Jesus makes it clear - even those who have been discarded and set aside socio-culturally are able to join Him in turning the world right side up.
But, it will come at cost - they, once joined, can no longer define themselves by exclusion! Qualification is in Jesus' hands - not theirs. And so is the mission to which He sends us.
By Bill Dogterom
Live the revolution: introduction to the sermon on the mount.
Many of Jesus’ most familiar teachings come from the Sermon on the Mount, the aim here is not to treat it as a list of moral instructions, but to understand the new day Jesus was announcing. Set against a deeply divided and oppressed Israel, Jesus’ announcement that “the kingdom of heaven has come near” was not a threat of judgment, but a declaration that the long wait for God’s action was over. The Sermon re-centers the Law, not as a path to salvation, but as a vision of life under God’s reign—and Jesus’ rhetoric shows it was never meant to be achievable through human effort.
From the opening line of the Beatitudes onward, He makes clear that the kingdom is available to all who can admit they can’t do this on their own (spoiler - that’s all of us - that’s the whole point!) Rather than driving us to despair over our shortcomings, the Sermon on the Mount trains us to live within a reality Jesus opened up to every one of us, through God’s presence and the power of His Spirit.
By Hannah Flint
Books referenced:
The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God by Dallas Willard
The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls by Rich Villodas
Jesus fantastic.
In Paul’s letter to the Colossians (Colossians 1:15-23) he presents Jesus as so attractive as to be utterly compelling. We’re called to do something similar, in our similarly pluralistic context of Los Angeles: to present Jesus as he is--unapologetically the center of the universe.
Jesus is the one everyone is looking for: he’s the only one who fully satisfies us, the only one who is supreme over us, and the only one who continues to sustain us. In a world that is so obviously broken and in pain, let us invite everyone we know to meet him; the one who makes us whole. He’s fantastic.
By Ed Flint
Taste and see that the Lord is good.
As we head into 2026, let us consider a simple invitation from Psalm 34: Taste and see that the Lord is good.
From Genesis to Revelation, the scriptures demonstrate God inviting us to receive his wonderful love in tangible, authentic, and embodied ways. Through Jesus, the hard work has been completed, and our job is to receive from him. What gets in the way of us “tasting and seeing” the goodness of God? Let us run (with abandon) into the perfect Arms of love as a community this year.
By Nelly D’Alessandro
Advent: a weary world rejoices.
As Advent draws to a close, we reflect on the phrase, the thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices. We're reminded daily of the weariness of our world, but what was going on when Jesus was born? Why was the ancient world so weary?
In this talk, we dive into what was happening politically and culturally for the people of Jesus' time, explore what we get wrong about the Nativity, and how by reframing our understanding of Luke 2, we can better understand the Hope that Jesus brings. Because hope does not belong to a select few: it's for everyone.
By Rebekah Covington
Advent 2025: Prince of Peace.
Christmas declares ‘Glory to God and on earth, peace’. Peace, which is more than just an absence of conflict, but rather everything being right and good with the world, is what God intends for his world. But we know all too well how peace-less the world can be: there’s a lack of peace globally, in our communities, and in our own hearts and minds.
This is because the lasting peace Jesus promises is always dependent on him. And without him, we can never experience the peace He brings. But when we embrace Him as the center of our universe, our community, our personal lives, he does what no-one else can do. He destroys the peacelessness that afflicts us, and re-creates us so that we have peace with God, other people and ourselves. This is the message of Christmas!
By Ed Flint