GC2 Church

About GC2 Church

These podcasts are an extension of the teaching ministry of GC2 Church, located in San Diego, CA. Our name comes from the essence of Jesus' ministry: fulfilling the Great Commission while living the Great Commandment. GC2 Church offers gospel-centered, biblical teaching that aims to inspire and equip disciples to go make disciples. For more information, please visit: www.gc2church.org.

Publisher

GC2 Church

Category

religion & spirituality

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Apr 2023

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

137 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Ezekiel 8-11 | Behind Closed Doors

   Sermon Big Idea: When we give our allegiance to the wrong things, we move away from God, but God's final move is always toward His people. Sermon Overview: We've all used Google Maps or Google Earth to look at a neighborhood from 30,000 feet. From that height, everything looks great: clean streets, neat rows of houses, green parks and good schools. Zoom in a little and it still looks fine. But imagine if the next update let you go past the front door, into the office, the classroom or the living room, to see what people are really doing behind closed doors. That view would be far more uncomfortable, and far more honest. In Ezekiel 8–11, God does something like this with His own people. He takes the prophet Ezekiel on a visionary tour behind the closed doors of the Jerusalem temple, showing that what looked impressive from a distance had drifted far from what it was meant to be. It raises a question for each of us: what would God find if He walked through every room of our hearts? The Glory Offended (Ezekiel 8) In 592 BC, while living in exile in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel is carried in a vision about 600 miles back to the temple in Jerusalem. From a distance it still looks impressive. Up close, Ezekiel is taken through four scenes that get worse the deeper he goes: an idol that "provokes jealousy" at the temple gate, a secret room where seventy elders burn incense to carved animal images, women weeping for the Babylonian god Tammuz, and twenty-five men with their backs to God's house, bowing to the sun. Their reasoning was simple and dangerous: "The LORD does not see us; the LORD has abandoned the land" (8:12). Israel didn't fully replace God. They supplemented Him with backup gods, and that kind of hidden idolatry is still a temptation for Christians today. The Glory Defended (Ezekiel 9) Before judgment falls, God sends a man dressed in linen to put a mark on everyone who "sighs and groans" over the city's sin (9:4). Then judgment begins "at My sanctuary," with the leaders who knew God best (9:6; compare 1 Peter 4:17). This symbolic vision points to Jerusalem's real fall to Babylon in 586 BC. It shows that God's wrath isn't random or cruel. It is His holy, personal response to betrayed covenant love, and He takes no pleasure in it (6:9). Ezekiel's response is a model for us: he falls on his face and cries out for mercy. God's people are called to feel what God feels about sin, with grief and prayer instead of indifference or self-righteousness. The Glory Departed (Ezekiel 10–11) Next comes one of the saddest scenes in Scripture. The glory of God, His visible presence among His people, slowly leaves the temple: first to the threshold (10:4), then to the east gate (10:19), and finally to the Mount of Olives east of the city (11:23). The priests kept working, the rituals continued, and the building still stood, but God was gone. This is a sobering warning: we can be religious and empty at the same time. When we give our allegiance to the wrong things, we drift away from God even while our outward religious life keeps going. The Glory Anticipated (Ezekiel 11:14–21) The people left in Jerusalem assumed they were God's favored ones and the exiles were outsiders. God turned that upside down. To the displaced and discouraged exiles He said, "I have been a sanctuary for them" (11:16). Then He gave one of the most hopeful promises in the Old Testament: "I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them; I will remove their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh" (11:19). God's answer to a divided heart isn't "try harder." It is a new, undivided heart that He gives. The Gospel: Fully Seen, Fully Covered The glory that left the temple didn't disappear forever. About six centuries later it returned, not to a building, but in a person: "The Word became flesh… we observed His glory" (John 1:14). Jesus went into exile for us on the cross, so that everyone who trusts in Him could be brought near. God still sees

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   Acts 8:25–35 | Unexpected Obedience

   Sermon Big Idea: When God calls us to unexpected obedience, we need to rethink our plan, realign our approach, and refocus our confidence. Sermon Overview: Guest speaker Keith, one of GC2 Church’s missionary partners who is serving with Cru in Long Beach, spent a decade with his wife planting churches and discipling leaders in southwestern China, and he expected to stay there for life. When the pandemic hit, God redirected them to Southern California, which Keith called their own "desert road." He connected this to Philip in Acts 8. Philip was in the middle of a revival in Samaria when an angel sent him down the desert road toward Gaza, roughly 75 miles, without telling him why. Rethink our plan. Using Proverbs 19:21 and 1 Samuel 15:22 ("to obey is better than sacrifice"), Keith said Philip's success wasn't measured by crowds or conversions. It was sealed the moment he said yes and started walking. Obedience is our part, and the outcomes belong to God. If we prayed for someone, showed kindness in Jesus' name, or took a risk to share our story, that counts as success. He gave examples from the ministry: prayer walks that opened the door to a Cru chapter at Long Beach City College, and a Vietnamese-refugee missionary who moved to LA knowing no one. That missionary's conversations with students at a skate park grew into a high school ministry that now serves about 20 campuses. Realign our approach. In verses 29–31, the Spirit told Philip to go and stay near the chariot. Philip didn't launch into a sermon. He asked an honest question: "Do you understand what you are reading?" Keith said a presentation often puts up a wall, while real conversation builds a bridge. He illustrated this with the Chinese word guanxi, meaning relational connection, and with campus stories. These included listening to a Hindu student without debating him, praying with a student who broke down over a health issue, and Susan's weeks of caring for a Buddhist student, including pickleball, until she came to faith. His point was to build a connection, not give a presentation. Refocus our confidence. The eunuch was already reading Isaiah 53, which showed that God had prepared his heart. When the door opened, Philip began from that scripture and "preached Jesus to him" (v. 35). Drawing on Romans 10:14, Hebrews 12:2, and Romans 1:16, Keith said the power is in the message, not the messenger. We are called to be faithful witnesses, not brilliant debaters, and that frees us from feeling inadequate. His closing story was about "John," a high schooler from a broken home. After coming to Christ, John shared the gospel with his mother himself, and she and others in his family believed. He then started a middle school ministry. The final application was embracing a "Pray, Care, Share" lifestyle. He challenged everyone to write down five names to pray for, care for, and share Christ with, and to leave the results to God.

3. 

   23 Sept 2026

   Ezekiel 4-5 | The One-Man Street Performer

   Sermon Big Idea: God’s methods may surprise you — His commitment to reach you never will. Sermon Overview: Think about the last time you were walking through a public space — maybe Balboa Park in San Diego or a busy downtown sidewalk — and something stopped you in your tracks. A musician. A mime. A magician. Someone doing something so unusual, so captivating, that you couldn’t help but pause and watch. These performers are known as buskers, and they’ve been drawing crowds for centuries. Some of the world’s most celebrated artists — Ed Sheeran, Bob Dylan, and countless others — began their careers not on concert stages but on street corners. Today, some of the most-watched street performances in the world have racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. There is something uniquely powerful about a performance in an unexpected place. When art meets the ordinary rhythms of daily life — when a show begins in the middle of a sidewalk rather than behind a curtain — people stop, gather, and pay attention in a way they wouldn’t if they were sitting comfortably in assigned seats. This is exactly the world of the Old Testament prophets. We tend to imagine the prophets as preachers delivering theological lectures from behind wooden pulpits. But in the ancient world, the prophets were far closer to what we might call performance artists. They didn’t just say things. They did things. They enacted their messages, dramatizing divine truth in ways designed to draw crowds, provoke reactions, and force uncomfortable confrontations with realities people were desperately trying to avoid. As the old saying goes: a picture is worth a thousand words. The prophets understood this instinctively. God certainly did. If you were to vote for the most dramatic prophetic street performers in all of Scripture, Ezekiel would sit near the very top of that list. His performances in Ezekiel 4 and 5 are some of the most shocking, physically demanding, and theologically layered acts in the entire Bible. They were not random or bizarre for the sake of spectacle — they were precisely calculated communications, each one targeting a specific dimension of Israel’s spiritual crisis. Pastor Jason explores all four of those sign-acts, unpacks their meaning for the original audience in the Babylonian exile, and traces the theological threads connecting them all the way to the cross and how we can apply them as disciples. Sign 1: The Brick (Ezekiel 4:1–3) — God's Warning Is an Act of Mercy God tells Ezekiel to take a clay brick, scratch Jerusalem onto it, surround it with a miniature siege — walls, ramps, battering rams — and place an iron plate between himself and the city, setting his face against it. The iron plate is the key: in covenant language, God "setting His face against" Israel was the declaration that the universe's greatest defender had become their adversary (Leviticus 26:17). But here's the reframe — a warning before consequences arrive is not cruelty, it's mercy. God doesn't ambush. He announces. Whatever feels uncomfortable or disruptive in your life right now may not be God being harsh. It may be God building a model in the street, saying: Pay attention before the real thing arrives. Sign 2: The Lying Down (Ezekiel 4:4–8) — Sin Has Weight, Duration, and History Ezekiel lies bound on his side for 390 days, then 40 more — publicly motionless for over fourteen months — bearing the iniquity of Israel and Judah. The Hebrew word used is nasa (bear/carry), the same word used in Leviticus 16 to describe what the scapegoat did on the Day of Atonement: the nation's sins confessed over it, then driven into the wilderness carrying the guilt away. Those 430 days weren't about a recent failure — they represented centuries of accumulated covenant unfaithfulness. Sin has weight and history, and God was taking every bit of it more seriously than Israel ever had. But Ezekiel could only enact the drama — he was an arrow pointing toward a target he couldn

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