FREED | Past - Jon Tyson
Church of the City New York
COTC NYC
4.8 • 919 Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Sunday, Pastor Jon continued the FREED series with one of the most personal questions it will raise: can you actually be free from your past?
He opened with a number—nine out of ten—his and Christy's combined score on the Adverse Childhood Experiences assessment. The score wasn't shared for sympathy, it was shared to make the question real. As James Baldwin wrote, "people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them."
Sin works the same way. It exerts power by keeping you in what has already happened, but the antidote isn't denial. Pastor Jon called the answer, "eschatological realism" — a clear, inhabitable sense of the future God has for you. When you're living from that future, what the present holds over you loses its grip.
Paul is the guide. In Philippians 3, a man with a past that could have defined him entirely writes about forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. Biblical forgetting isn't numbing, rather it's the intentional release of failure, guilt, and the pride that can calcify even around our wounds. In Christ, we've been given an identity more defining than anything we've been through. Scripture gives us a redemptive orientation toward time: a past that has been redeemed, a present marked by wonder, and a future held open by hope.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | All right, friends, if you would remain standing for the reading of God's word, we're going to be in |
| 0:08.8 | Philippians chapter 3, verse 10 through 14. Paul writes this, I want to know Christ, yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his |
| 0:25.0 | sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the |
| 0:32.0 | dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on towards |
| 0:39.3 | to take hold of that which Christ Jesus took hold of me. |
| 0:44.3 | Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have a taken hold of it, but one thing I do, |
| 0:51.3 | forgetting what is behind and straining towards what is ahead, I press on towards |
| 0:57.6 | the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. |
| 1:03.1 | This is the Word of the Lord. |
| 1:05.2 | Folks, good evening. |
| 1:06.9 | Just a couple of things before we jump into God's word tonight. |
| 1:10.2 | First one, I want to |
| 1:11.0 | remind you of our church is committed to being a church that praise not just in a prayer |
| 1:16.0 | room not just in our own lives about building altars for the presence of God here in New York. |
| 1:21.1 | This Thursday night at 7.30 p.m. we are doing citywide prayer at Wellspring Church out in Queens. |
| 1:28.3 | And I want to urge you to give your Thursday night to seeking God. |
| 1:34.0 | It starts at 7.30. |
| 1:35.6 | We only do this a couple times a year, four times a year, I believe. |
| 1:38.4 | But it's where we gather with churches from all over New York to call upon the name of the Lord |
| 1:43.8 | for a movement of the Holy Spirit |
| 1:45.2 | here in the city. Something powerful happens when believers come together from different churches |
| 1:50.6 | and traditions to seek God. So that's this Thursday night, 7.30 p.m. I'm asking you to come as |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from COTC NYC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of COTC NYC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.