Park Hill Church Podcast

Whose Caesar are you actually serving? At House of Learning this week, Preston Sprinkle unpacked a political identity that has nothing to do with picking a side and everything to do with picking a King. Walking through exile, Babylon, and the political shockwave buried inside ordinary words like "gospel" and "Lord," he made the case that every empire — Babylon, Rome, or the one we live in now — runs on the same borrowed power, and every Christian answers to a citizenship that predates all of them. This isn't a call to disengage from the world we're in. It's a call to stop mistaking it for home. Faithfulness in exile was never a private matter, and it was never meant to be figured out alone.

In Exodus, Moses runs, doubts, and complains — while a string of women, from two defiant midwives to Pharaoh's own daughter, actually make Israel's redemption possible. This week, Preston Sprinkle traced that same pattern into the ministry of Jesus: a hemorrhaging woman models the faith the Twelve keep failing to find, a Syrophoenician mother out-argues Jesus himself, and a poor widow gives "her whole life" while the wealthy give leftovers. Meanwhile the male disciples doubt, misunderstand, and scatter. Mark is building an argument: true greatness in God's kingdom looks like service, not status — and again and again, it's women who embody it first.

Have you ever said "I love you, I'm just not in love with you anymore"? Culture treats love as a feeling that happens to you — and can just as easily leave. But Paul doesn't let us off that easy. In Romans 13, love isn't chemistry, it's a debt that never gets paid off, a choice made whether or not the feeling shows up. This week, Evan Wickham closed our series Life in the Sanctuary by naming the real danger — not some outside enemy, but our own slumber, our own slow drift out of love and into indifference. The night is nearly over and the day is almost here, even if it doesn't feel like it yet. So wake up. Cut the supply lines to whatever's kept you numb. And clothe yourself with Christ — on purpose, in public, starting with the water.

Most of us think "fun" means being left alone with a screen and no one asking anything of us — but what if that's actually the opposite of fun? This week at Park Hill, Evan Wickham dug into Romans 12:9–21 for Family Sunday and landed on a definition of fun from psychologist Dan Allender that flips the script entirely: fun is doing harm to evil, together. Paul's list of instructions in this passage — honor others above yourself, practice hospitality, bless those who hurt you, feed your enemy — isn't a burden list or a hidden map for finding God's will. It's the will of God, lived out in ordinary relationships, and every item on it is both costly and deeply fulfilling. Evil's whole strategy is to keep you comfortable and alone. Jesus breathed his Spirit into his disciples so they wouldn't have to hold up that list on their own strength — and neither do we. Every time you stay in a hard conversation, sit with the person nobody else will, or feed the enemy you'd rather resent, you're not just being nice. You're crushing the serpent's head under your own feet.

What does worship look like on a Monday afternoon? This week Evan Wickham opened our new series through Romans 12–13, Life in the Sanctuary, with a reframe: worship isn't a song, it's your body — your calendar, your appetites, the way you talk to your family when you're stressed. Paul calls us to stop being shaped by the world's patterns and instead be transformed from the inside out, so we can actually discern God's will instead of guessing at it. And that transformation was never meant to happen alone — Paul writes "bodies," plural, "sacrifice," singular. We don't just need each other. We are each other.