Christchurch Miami Audio Podcast

Jeff Sullivan is fifty and relearning how to run — twenty minutes of warm-up for a twenty-minute run, stiff hips, the whole thing feeling like punishment even though a two-year-old does it for fun. That is the shape of Colossians 3:5. Paul lists what has to go and almost nobody disagrees with the list; we just cannot kill it. Sullivan's answer runs backward through the chapter to verses 1-4: set your heart, set your mind. The difference between forced piano lessons he quit the day he graduated and the guitar his son taught himself is desire, not discipline. And underneath desire is something God does. Quoting Louie Giglio — sin doesn't make you bad, it makes you dead — Sullivan argues that the reason effort never worked is that effort was never the right category. Dead people do not need coaching; they need someone who can conquer death. The chapter closes with clothing yourself in compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience, and with the reminder that the disciplines are not the goal — becoming love, humility, forgiveness and kindness is.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

Jay Reynardus came to faith as an adult, read "be holy, for I am holy," and did the obvious thing: he built a list. Go to church. Feed the poor. Stop the Friday nights. He called it the religion of Jay, and he could not keep it. In Colossians 2:16-23 Paul gives five reasons that kind of self-made religion never works — it is of the world, it is perishing, it is human tradition, it only looks like wisdom, and it is something we made up ourselves. Then he turns the question on its head. The answer is not a what; it is a who. Union with Christ is the foundation of holiness, communion with Christ is the means, and holiness is the result — a byproduct of proximity, like fruit on a branch that only has to stay attached. You do not break a chain by gritting your teeth against it. You break it by loving something greater. Do you want to be holy? You need one thing: more Jesus.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

A naval commander unlocked a drawer, then a box, then a sealed envelope every single morning, just to read one line: "Port is left. Starboard is right." Decades of service, and he still needed the basics. Kent Keller opens Colossians 2:6-15 on that note — because Paul is doing the same thing for a young church being told that Jesus was a fine start but not quite enough.

Paul's answer is a question about roots. "As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him." Where are you rooted, and how deeply? Because in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him — your sins forgiven, the record of debt nailed to the cross, the powers that accused you disarmed and put to open shame.

The warning follows the promise: see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit. Every false hope makes the same offer — identity, fulfillment, security — and none of them can carry the weight. Jesus is greater than every one of them.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

Which way is true north? Pastor Kent Keller asks a room full of people to point, and gets a scattering of opinions — which is roughly how most of us navigate suffering. In Colossians 1:24-2:5, Paul writes from prison and calls his own suffering necessary: not because Christ's atonement was somehow insufficient, but because God put him where he could write the letters that have ministered to the church for two thousand years. Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, put it this way — a man can endure almost any "what" as long as he has a "why." Paul's why is the mystery God kept hidden and has now revealed: Christ in you, the hope of glory. The goal of all of it is to present every believer mature in Christ, firmly rooted in the truth.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

How do you put into words a Jesus who is greater than words? Pastor Kent Keller opens with Coco the gorilla — who, having no vocabulary for an earthquake, could only sign "darn floor, bad bite." We're not so different. In Colossians 1:15-23, the apostle Paul reaches for the language of an early Christian hymn to declare the supremacy of Christ — a Jesus who is greater than everything.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

What do you do when your circumstances feel bigger than your faith? Guest teacher Jay Reynardus opens the book of Colossians — and the answer isn't a technique to try harder. It's a Person who is greater.

Paul thanks God for a small, struggling church because he sees the three unmistakable marks of God's children in them: faith, hope, and love. And here's the freeing part — none of it is something you manufacture. If you have faith, it's because of God. If you have love, it's because of God. If you have hope, it's because of God. It's all gift. It's all grace.

Look at what God has already done, all past tense: He qualified you, gave you an inheritance, delivered you from the domain of darkness, transferred you into the kingdom of His beloved Son, redeemed you, and forgave you. "He reached into the darkness where you lived and pulled you out — when you were His enemy." When you see that, the little hopes and shallow loves of this world get revealed for what they are. So keep your eyes on Christ.

"It's Him. It's always Him. It will always be Him."

— Preached at Christchurch Miami on July 12, 2026, by guest teacher Jay Reynardus (Colossians 1:1-14).

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

Is America a Christian nation? On the weekend the country turned 250, Pastor Kent Keller takes the question head-on from Acts 17 — where the early Christians were dragged before the authorities for proclaiming "there is another king, Jesus."

His answer is more careful, and more freeing, than either side expects. We can thank God for a nation profoundly shaped by Scripture — the Mayflower Compact, "a city upon a hill," the Declaration's four references to God — while remembering that the founders deliberately refused an official state church, because faith can never be forced. The gospel persuades; it never coerces.

Underneath the whole debate is the confession the church has made for 2,000 years: we have no king but Jesus. Grateful citizens; faithful first to Christ.

"We have no king but Jesus."

— Preached at Christchurch Miami on July 5, 2026, America's 250th.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

Do you ever think about eternity?

Pastor Kent Keller closes our "But What About?" series with the biggest question of all. For Kent this is no abstract exercise — much of his work as a pastor is sitting with people in their final hours, and just two weeks ago he buried a lifelong friend. He preaches this knowing exactly where his friend is this morning.

Preaching from Revelation 21, this message walks through three truths about what happens when we die: death is a reality but not a finality, a real enemy that Jesus has already defeated; heaven is a way station, not our final destination; and this earth will be perfected, not rejected — a new heaven and new earth where God comes down to dwell with His people and wipe away every tear.

"Everybody lives forever. The only issue is one of location."

— Preached at Christchurch Miami on June 28, 2026.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

What does it mean to be a man? On Father's Day — preaching from his deployment in the Middle East — Pastor James Drake walks through David and Goliath and finds three men, but only one who understands true manhood: biblical masculinity is strength surrendered to God for His glory and the good of others. We're not David in this story; we're Israel, until our Champion steps forward. Jesus is the greater David. So run toward your giant — faith moves, fear hesitates.

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.

What about the hypocrites in the church — and what if one of them is you?

When NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope, its mirror had been ground with breathtaking precision — against the wrong standard. It passed every test it gave itself, blind to its own blindness. In this message from our What About? series, Elder Rick Closius shows that this is exactly what hypocrisy and self-righteousness do to the human heart.

Working through Jesus' parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14) and Paul's verdict in Romans 3, Rick exposes the trap of comparative righteousness — measuring ourselves against other people instead of the holiness of God — and then turns the mirror on himself: after 32 years as a deputy sheriff, "I'd become the very Pharisee." But the parable ends in mercy. The tax collector who could only cry, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner," went home justified — declared righteous as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.

Go home justified today — not because your mirror is flawless, but because your Savior is.

📺 Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ao9IBoGUi2Y

📖 Daily devotionals + study guide: https://app.christchurchmiami.org/2026-06-14-what-about-hypocrisy/resources/

Your next step

• Plan your visit: Sundays at 11 AM in Kendall.
• Get the Christchurch Miami app for iPhone and Android.
• Go deeper with the daily devotionals and the group guide for this sermon.