Park Hill Church Podcast

What happens when a man who has everything decides he built it all himself? In Daniel 4, King Nebuchadnezzar looks out over Babylon and takes the credit. Within the hour, the man who treated people as tools for his empire is living with the animals. Daniel, whose home this king destroyed, doesn’t gloat. He grieves, then tells the king the truth anyway, and that mix of love and honesty is the model for how we speak to power today. Pride and compassion can’t live in the same heart, and worship is what restores sanity: beasts look down at the grass, but humans were made to look up.

Who are you bowing to when the music starts and everyone around you is already on their knees? In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s golden statue, and the people who turn them in aren’t enemies from outside but coworkers who had been waiting for the chance. This week, David Wade walked through the story in three movements: the quiet confrontation with culture, the truth that Babylon’s friendships last only as long as you stay in line, and why no one is meant to follow Jesus alone. Their “even if he does not” was only possible because they stood side by side, and the fourth figure in the fire shows that God doesn’t always keep his people out of the flames but always walks into them.

What are you worth when you stop being useful? Babylon has an answer, and in Daniel 2 it's rubble or rewards: King Nebuchadnezzar demands the impossible from his advisors, then orders them all killed when they can't deliver. This week in The Book of Daniel, we watched Daniel meet that same logic with tact, patience, and a prayer meeting with his friends, and then tell the most powerful man alive that his power is borrowed. The kingdom Daniel pointed to doesn't measure you by what you produce, because the stone the builders rejected came down to us, was written off as useless, and turned out to be the most useful thing God has ever done.

Babylon didn't just take Daniel's home. It handed him a new name, a new language, and a new menu, and expected him to become someone else. This week, Tim McDonald picked up our Daniel series with a young man who refused to let an empire tell him who he was, without hating the city or hiding from it. Drawing the line at the king's table was never really about food. It was about belonging, and the name God speaks over you outlasts every name the culture hands out.

Jerusalem falls. The temple gold ends up on a shelf in a pagan god's treasury. To everyone watching in 605 BC, the verdict was obvious: Babylon's god won. This week, Evan Wickham launched our new ten-week series through the Book of Daniel, and it starts with the one claim nobody in that room could see: the Lord handed Nebuchadnezzar that victory. For the next ten weeks, alongside our sister churches Neighbors and All Saints, we're asking what it means to live as exiles under a King who is still, actually, on the throne.

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.