Guest Preacher, Granada Church David McCloud  ·  Colossians 4:2-18  ·  Sunday, August 30, 2026

Paul closes Colossians from a Roman prison — no food unless someone carried it in, no plumbing, no assumption that a prisoner's life had value — and he does not ask to be let out. Guest preacher David McCloud of Granada Church, closing the Greater Than series, follows three things Paul does instead. He looks UP, asking God to open a door for the message rather than the cell door. He looks OUT, treating a prison as an opportunity the way three men cutting the same stones can be breaking rocks, making a living, or building a sanctuary. And he looks AROUND, ending the letter with a long list of hard-to-pronounce names because he has no intention of doing any of this alone. One of them is Aristarchus, who appears five times in the New Testament and never speaks a recorded word — he is simply present, every time, in the hardest moments. What David calls the ministry of staying, where a person's presence is a present. Your circumstances are a privilege, he says, and then, without softening it: and yes, there will be some suffering.