A weekly podcast featuring sermons and special events from The Gateway Church in downtown Des Moines, Iowa.
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In this guest sermon, Pastor Carlos Sims opens Psalm 126 to explore one of the most countercultural invitations in scripture: the path to joy runs directly through lament. Drawing from the Israelites' cry for restoration and the hope of the gospel, Carlos makes the case that bringing our tears honestly to God is not a detour from joy— it's the very seed of it.
The week the world got its first trillionaire, Psalm 49 has something to say. Written by the Sons of Korah—descendants of a man who had everything and reached for more—this ancient wisdom song cuts through the noise with a bluntness that feels almost rude: people, despite their wealth, do not endure. Matt Crummy traces the story behind the psalm and the subtle danger of ambition dressed up as piety. What Korah couldn't accept, his family line turned into a song—and it turns out the question it asks is still the right one. Is nearness to God enough?
What if the secret to happiness isn't what most of us are chasing? Opening a summer series in the Psalms, Dominic Jackson starts where the collection does—Psalm 1—and the question it puts on the table: what does it actually mean to be blessed? Along the way, the sermon moves from that question into a deeper one about formation: not just what we read, but what we chew on. What we consume shapes who we become, and Psalm 1 offers a clear-eyed theory of the difference between a life that's rooted and one that's just drifting. And as a bonus: a working definition of biblical meditation that involve
Paul's instruction to build up one another turns out to be less about mentorship and more about the everyday texture of how we talk to each other—and whether we actually listen. Working through Ephesians 4:29–32, Dominic Jackson looks at what "unwholesome talk" actually costs: the person speaking, the person being spoken to, and God himself.
How do you confront someone you love without losing them? In this message, Pastor Dominic works through Galatians 6:1–2 and Matthew 18:15–20 to build a practical, honest guide to spiritual restoration—one that takes both courage and humility. Before you send that text or schedule that coffee, there are questions worth asking yourself first. And when you do have that conversation, Jesus gives us a framework that's as relevant today as it was 2,000 years ago.
When researchers asked a thousand people to describe Christians in three words, the top answer wasn't loving or faithful. It was judgmental. Working through Matthew 7:1–6, Dominic Jackson takes one of Jesus' most familiar — and most misused — teachings and asks what he actually meant. Why are we unqualified to judge? What is the fundamental attribution error doing to the way we see other people? And what does it mean that the plank and the speck are made of the same wood? This sermon doesn't resolve the tension between judging and being judgmental — that's next week — but it does ask a harder
On his last night of freedom, Jesus didn't perform a miracle. He did a chore — the lowest, most menial one imaginable. Working through John 13 and Galatians 5:13–14, Dominic Jackson takes the foot-washing story and looks at it from angles that are easy to miss after twenty readings: that Jesus washed Judas' feet too, that the Greek word translated "example" literally means tracer or template, and that the most significant acts of service usually don't make the news or the photo. The invitation isn't to do loving things. It's to become a loving person — one small act at a time.
The New Testament is full of instructions for how the church should treat itself — unity, love, humility. But in 1 Peter 4, written during one of the bloodiest periods in church history, Peter reaches for a word that isn't about the church at all. Not philadelphia — love of brothers and sisters — but philoxenos: love of the stranger. Working through 1 Peter 4:7–11, Dominic Jackson traces what hospitality actually means in its biblical sense, why Peter's call to extend it without grumbling puts our own excuses in sharp relief, and what it might look like for a church to function less like a mem
Worship doesn't just express what you love — it trains you to love it more. In part two of a two-week look at Romans 12, Matt Crummy picks up where last week left off and explores what worship actually does over time. Drawing on the Drake Relays, a failed high school track career, two British climbers who may or may not have reached the summit of Everest, and Alexander Schmemann's image of a stereoscope, he builds a case for why transformation is slow, embodied, communal, and worth it. Counter-formation isn't about being different for its own sake. It's about being slowly reoriented — body, ha
What if worship is less about thinking correctly about God and more about being formed by him — body, habit, and desire? Romans 12 opens with a "therefore" that hinges on everything Paul has just argued about the mercy of God, and Matt Crummy uses that hinge to explore what worship actually is. Drawing on James K.A. Smith, Augustine, and Eugene Peterson, he traces the idea that we are fundamentally creatures of desire, shaped by the liturgies we practice — whether we name them that or not. The stadium concert, the shopping trip, the weekly rhythm — all of it is forming us toward some picture o
What does Jesus actually mean when he says to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow him? Working through Matthew 16:24–26, Dominic Jackson takes three instructions that are easy to flatten into one vague call to try harder — and pulls them apart. Denying yourself isn't self-loathing. Taking up your cross was the most scandalous image imaginable to its original audience. And following Jesus means letting go of the version of Jesus you've been trying to control. The invitation at the end of it all isn't about doing more. It's about learning, as Eugene Peterson puts it, how to die — and d
The same empty tomb. Two groups of people running in opposite directions with completely different stories to tell. Working through Matthew 28, Dominic Jackson opens with a simple observation — that how we look at something often matters more than what we're actually looking at — and carries it all the way to the resurrection. Are we living in the best moment in human history or the worst? Is Easter the greatest hoax ever told or the beginning of everything? The answer, he argues, depends entirely on where you're standing. For skeptics and longtime believers alike, the invitation is the same o
Peter is a fisherman, an ordinary man who walked on water and then sank, who declared he would never deny Jesus and then did it three times before sunrise. Working through snapshots of Peter's life across the gospels, Dominic Jackson traces the story of someone who keeps failing and keeps getting restored. From the beach where Jesus first calls him to the charcoal fire where Jesus finds him after the resurrection, it turns out to be less a story about Peter's faith and more about what Jesus does with people who have already counted themselves out.
When Jesus is arrested in the garden, he already knows exactly what is coming—and he surrenders anyway. Working through John 18, Dominic Jackson traces the arrest of Jesus and holds up two contrasting ways of moving through the world. Jesus humbles himself while others seek power. Jesus protects while others attack. Jesus gives his life while the world chooses death. At the center of it all is a choice the crowd is forced to make between two prisoners—a political revolutionary ready to destroy Rome's enemies by the sword, and a nonviolent rabbi who heals the ear of the soldier sent to arrest h
What does it look like to actually be alone with your thoughts—and why do most of us avoid it? In Luke 5, at the height of his popularity, Jesus doesn't lean into the momentum. He withdraws. Dominic Jackson looks at the practice of silence and solitude in the life of Jesus and asks what it might look like to recover that practice in a world designed to keep us distracted.
What does Christian art have to do with how followers of Jesus should relate to the world? Dominic Jackson opens with the question he wrestled with as a young film student—why is so much Christian art so bad—and uses it as a doorway into a bigger one: how should Christians actually see the world around them? Working through the tension between John 15 and John 3:16, he proposes a framework of four kingdoms—the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the world, the kingdom over the world, and the kingdom of me—as a way of navigating what it means to be in the world but not of it.
What does it look like to follow Jesus when what you really want is what he can give you — security, community, meaning, answers? In John 6, Jesus calls out a crowd still thinking about yesterday's free meal and declares himself the bread of life. The people want a sign. They want bread from the sky. They want what God can do, not God himself. Dominic Jackson explores what it means to hunger for God himself rather than the benefits that come from him, and introduces the church's Lenten fast as an invitation to disrupt the ordinary and rediscover an appetite for God.
Dominic Jackson explores Jesus’ command to “be perfect” and confronts the quiet pressure many feel to measure their spiritual lives through performance, comparison, and self-evaluation. Drawing from the Sermon on the Mount and the story of the rich young ruler, he reframes perfection not as flawlessness, but as wholeness—a life fully oriented toward God. Rather than calling us to achieve moral perfection, Jesus invites us into a deeper trust that reshapes how we understand sin, growth, and identity. At the heart of the message is a challenge to release the need for control and to surrender wha
As the Movement series continues, Dominic Jackson turns to the theme of formation—the lifelong process of becoming like Jesus. Rooted in Matthew 28, this sermon looks at the Great Commission as an ongoing invitation to apprenticeship. To follow Jesus is to be continually shaped: receiving and responding to God’s love, embracing his teachings, embodying his rhythms, and walking in community with others. Dominic challenges a shallow view of faith that stops at a moment and invites us into something deeper and slower. Formation is not about perfection or information—it’s about transformation over
In a moment marked by anger, division, and confusion, Dominic Jackson turns to the words of Jesus in Matthew 5 and asks a deeper question: what if the problem isn’t just what’s happening around us—but something beneath it? Through a striking contrast between the “way of the kingdom” and the “way of the empire,” this sermon invites us to reconsider how we respond to injustice, conflict, and cultural tension. Are we being formed more by power, outrage, and control—or by the upside-down vision of Jesus in the Beatitudes? Dominic explains how the kingdom of God doesn’t advance through force, domin
Continuing the Movement series, Dominic Jackson explores what it means to be a people of presence—with God, with one another, and in our own lives. Anchored in Matthew 28, he reframes the Great Commission not just as a call to go, but as a call to be with: a God who draws near to us, a community that shows up shoulder to shoulder, and a life that resists distraction in order to be fully attentive. From mountaintop encounters in Scripture to the quiet reality of our daily habits, Dominic asks a simple but searching question: not is God present?—but are we? In a distracted and disconnected age,
In this opening sermon of the Movement series, Matt Crummy explores a word that many of us instinctively distrust: authority. Drawing from Matthew 28 and the famous image of The Treachery of Images, he invites us to consider how easily we confuse distorted images of authority—coercion, control, manipulation—with the real thing. In contrast, the risen Jesus meets a group of hesitant, doubting disciples not with force or pressure, but with nearness, presence, and a steady kind of authority that heals and invites. Rather than demanding certainty or performance, Jesus shares his authority and send
As Gateway steps into a new year, Dominic Jackson invites the church to reflect on a simple but searching question: what kind of community are we becoming? Through two contrasting stories—one of radical welcome and one of painful rejection—he explores how the church can either embody the heart of Jesus or distort it. Drawing from Hebrews 13, Dominic reframes hospitality not as entertaining or hosting, but as something far deeper: loving the stranger as family, not just making space for them, but making them feel like they already belong. In a culture marked by loneliness, fear, and disconnecti
Matt Crummy reflects on joy through the story of the Magi in Matthew 2:1-12. Beginning with Edward Hopper’s painting Nighthawks and the idea of liminal, in-between spaces, he explores how Advent situates us between Christ’s first coming and his promised return. The Magi become a picture of people who reorient their lives around what they love most, traveling far to seek the long-promised King. Drawing on Daniel’s role as chief of the wise men, Thomas Aquinas’s definition of joy as “caused by love,” and Augustine’s line that “our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” Matt invites us to p
Dominic Jackson reflects on what it means to let “the peace of Christ rule in your hearts” (Colossians 3:15) in a world that feels anything but peaceful. He begins by examining anxiety and invites us to see that peace is not simply calmness or the absence of conflict, but shalom—wholeness, restoration, and reconciliation in the midst of the mess. Christ’s peace comes as a gift we receive rather than an achievement we earn. We are invited to look forward to the healing of all things, look back to Christ’s first coming, look around at our present worries with honest prayer, and then pass peace o
