What is the one thing you have genuinely tried to stop, and genuinely failed to stop?

Watch a two-year-old in a nursery. The moment they can stand, they run — not because anyone told them to, but because it feels good. Open a door for a five-year-old and they are gone. So why does running feel like punishment to the rest of us? Jeff Sullivan is fifty and teaching himself to run again. Twenty minutes of warm-up for a twenty-minute run. Stiff hips from years of sitting. *I must look ridiculous to my neighbors.* The thing his body was built to do, he now has to relearn from scratch. That is the honest shape of Colossians 3:5. Paul lists what has to go — the anger, the greed, the words you wish you could take back — and almost nobody reads that list and thinks *actually, I'd like to keep those.* We agree with the list. We hate the list. And we still cannot seem to kill it.

Where in your faith are you practicing the piano — doing the right thing with no desire behind it?

Sullivan's mother had a rule: all four boys would learn piano. An hour a day, every day, unless you could get away with skipping it. It worked. He learned to play. He was, by his own account, passably bad at it. And the day he graduated, he never touched a piano again. His son was never made to take a single lesson. Then, headed off to college, he decided he wanted to play guitar. Nobody assigned it. He sat in his room with YouTube tutorials, found someone to coach him, played whenever he could. Today he plays in his church's worship band. Same family. Same house. Opposite outcome. The difference was not discipline — the piano had far more of that. The difference was *desire*. This is why Paul says it twice. *Set your hearts.* Then, in case you tried to file that under feelings and mo

Have you been treating your sin as a flaw to fix rather than a death to be raised from?

Sullivan quoted a line from Louie Giglio that is worth sitting with: *Sin doesn't make you bad. It makes you dead.* Read that twice, because almost all of us have quietly filed sin somewhere else. We treat it as a character flaw to correct. A disease to heal from. A problem to manage. A bad habit with a better version available if we try harder. Every one of those framings has the same hidden assumption: that the patient is alive, and needs improvement. Colossians says otherwise. *You died.* Not you struggled. Not you underperformed. Died. Which is either the most discouraging sentence in the chapter or the most freeing one, depending on what you do next. Here is why it is freeing. If sin is a flaw, the cure is effort — and you already know how that has gone. But if sin is death, the

Have you been measuring your faith by the drama of your story instead of by who did the saving?

Your story of coming to Christ probably does not look like the person sitting next to you on Sunday. Some are Saul on the Damascus road — full of rage and certainty one moment, undone the next, turned so hard and so fast that everyone who knew them has to learn their name again. Some are the disciples: three years of walking with Jesus in person and still, by every account, clueless, right up until the day the Spirit made sense of all of it. And some of you cannot name a day at all. Church as a kid. Grandparents in church. Maybe a Christian school. You have never not believed, and you have quietly wondered whether that counts, because there is no dramatic before-and-after to hold up. One of those is not better than the others. Sullivan's point is that every one of them has the same sin

Which discipline have you been treating as the finish line instead of the training?

Here is the sentence from Sunday most likely to rearrange something in you: Reading your Bible is not the goal. Learning Scripture is not the goal. Serving, giving, showing up — none of these is the goal. That should not be a relief and a threat at the same time, but it usually is. Look at what Paul actually tells you to put on: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience. Then forgiveness. Then, over all of it, love. Then the peace of Christ ruling in your heart. Every item on that list is an *interior* thing that radiates outward. Not one of them is a task you can complete and check off. So the disciplines are not the destination. They are how you teach your heart to become the destination — becoming love, becoming humility, becoming forgiveness, becoming kindness. Which r

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Greater Than (Week 6)

Greater Than Our Old Life · Group Guide

Colossians 3:1-17

Jeff Sullivan Sunday, August 16, 2026

Icebreaker

Sullivan says running should be the most natural thing in the world, and for most of us it is torture. What is something you were built to do that now feels impossibly hard?