Warm sermons for steady Christian reflection.
True North Church gathers teaching and Passion Week devotionals from a Palo Alto congregation shaped by Scripture, prayer, and pastoral application. Its messages move from biblical passages into ordinary anxieties: waiting, grief, truth, pain, and the hope of being known by God.
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True North Church is a Christian sermon and devotional feed shaped by Scripture, congregational worship, and pastoral application. Its center of gravity is the spoken teaching of a local church in Palo Alto. The episodes are not built around banter. They are built around passages read aloud, interpreted carefully, and brought back to the pressures of ordinary life. A message on Psalm 90 turns anxiety about time into a question of presence, asking what it means for God to be a dwelling place across generations. The Easter sermon from John 20 moves slowly through Mary Magdalene, Peter, John, the empty tomb, and the difference between seeing facts, investigating them, and believing before full understanding has arrived. Another sermon considers truth through Jesus before Pilate and argues that biblical truth is not only factual, but personal and encountered in Jesus Christ. The teaching is warm, but it can become urgent. It asks what people do with pain, uncertainty, social pressure, ambition, and the desire for control. A sermon on Hannah in 1 Samuel treats suffering with unusual bluntness, naming the failures of those who respond to another person's anguish with cruelty, confusion, or shallow comfort. The church is described less as a place where problems are instantly fixed than as a community where restored people become witnesses to God's presence. Shorter Passion Week devotionals add a quieter rhythm. Andrew, Sylvia, and Grace each introduce Scripture with moments of silence, prayerful attention, and simple preparation for Holy Week. Across the feed, the format remains recognizable: a welcome, a biblical reading, a story or image, a theological claim, and a return to prayer. The language is accessible rather than technical. Greek word study, doctrine, and biblical context appear, but they are usually tied back to faith, worship, and daily obedience. The show is best understood as devotional teaching for listeners who want to sit under a sermon rather than sample a religious talk show. Its emotional range runs from reflective to grave to hopeful. It returns again and again to the conviction that God knows people by name, meets them in suffering, and calls their time, truth, and desires back into his care.
Made for: For listeners seeking Scripture-centered Christian teaching, congregational sermons, and short devotionals with prayerful pacing. It especially fits people drawn to pastoral reflection on time, truth, suffering, resurrection, and spiritual formation.
What sets it apart: True North Church pairs traditional sermon structure with emotionally direct applications drawn from family life, waiting, church community, and Passion Week practice. Its strongest moments make theology feel close to lived experience without turning the message into casual commentary.
Sermons and teachings from True North Church in Palo Alto, CA.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
True North Church pairs close biblical teaching with candid scrutiny of how Christian belief shapes suffering, exclusion, time, and communal life.
True North Church builds its sermons around sustained readings of scripture, then carries those readings into ordinary habits and church life. Lead pastor Jam works conversationally, using humor and personal stories without losing the thread of the passage.
That fig tree might catch you treating faith like a receipt.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Michael Lee turns a sermon on time into a steady invitation to find home in God's presence.
Michael Lee, lead pastor of All Nations Community Church, shapes this single-episode sermon around time, waiting, and the quieter question behind the urge to know when: who is with us while we wait?
A warm Easter sermon finds patient faith between seeing, believing, and understanding.
Jay's Easter sermon follows Mary Magdalene, Peter, and the other disciple to the empty tomb, then settles on a simple but useful distinction: seeing is not always the same as understanding.
A focused sermon on truth as a person, aimed at Pilate's compromise and the false shelter of religious certainty.
Truth lands here as something more demanding than a tidy idea. Reading John 18:33-38 with 2 Timothy 4:1-5, Jam places Pilate's weary question, "What is truth?" beside Paul's warning about people turning from sound teaching.
A pastoral reading of Hannah's pain, honest prayer, and the church's witness to restoration.
Jam frames Hannah's anguish around the ways suffering can expose what people believe about God, themselves, and one another. The sermon stays close to Penina's public humiliation of Hannah on the journey to Shiloh, and to Elkanah's imperfect but tender attempt to honor her with…
A fig tree and a temple frame a direct warning against treating faith as something earned.
The withered fig tree frames a focused reading of Jesus' confrontation with the temple in Mark 11:12-25. The episode moves from empty leaves to overturned tables, tracing how worship can become transactional when sacrifice, exchange, and religious practice start to feel like…
A hard scene in Mark becomes a direct challenge to turn holiness outward when someone comes needing hope.
True North Church reads Mark 7:24-30 through the uneasy encounter between Jesus and a Gentile woman pleading for her daughter. J.M., the lead pastor, treats the scene as a warning about holiness turned inward: God's people had begun using it to guard status rather than shine…
Two Bible translators unpack Scripture's hardest passages, from Revelation's 666 to the Witch of Endor.
Live sermons with Easter-shaped urgency.
A pastor introduces a sermon on Colossians 1:15-20, emphasizing the true meaning of humility as exemplified by Christ's supremacy and reconciling work.
A reading of Romans 7:7-25, exploring the struggle between the law, sin, and human nature, and the deliverance through Jesus Christ.
Pastor Jay preaches on laying down our false self using the story of David and Goliath from 1 Samuel 17:38-49.
Andrew reads Mark 11:12-25, and Eugene opens with a pastoral update about Pastor Jay's father, who suffered a severe fall, had emergency brain surgery, and is in a medically induced coma.
Pastor J.M.
Pastor Jam reads and reflects on 1 Samuel 24:1-7 and Matthew 9:20-22, focusing on David's restraint and reverence for God's anointed.
True North Church pastor Jay uses Daniel 2:1–19 to challenge church communities built mainly around comfort, shared interests, and familiar social circles.
True North Church’s “A Theology of Time - Psalm 90:1-17” centers on Michael Lee reading Psalm 90, calling it the oldest psalm in the Bible and tracing it to Moses in the wilderness.
True North Church’s Jay preaches from John 20:1-18 on Easter Sunday, beginning with Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb and the discovery that Jesus’ body is gone.
A devotional for Thursday of Passion Week reflecting on Jesus washing the disciples' feet in John 13:1-17.
A devotional for Wednesday of Passion Week, focusing on Matthew 26:6-16, with a call to silent reflection.
A devotional for Tuesday of Passion Week focusing on Matthew 22:34-40, emphasizing the greatest commandments to love God and love your neighbor.
True North Church, with lead pastor Jam, reads John 18:33-38 and 2 Timothy 4:1-5 to frame a sermon on "truth" and "post-truth." Jam links the 2016 word of the year, a UC Santa Barbara professor named Thomas Carlson, and the idea that truth has become "irrelevant" in public life.
Jam opens at True North Church by describing his mother’s story as an immigrant, including eight miscarriages between his sister and brother and the shame he felt comparing her suffering to his own complaints.
A reading and exposition of Romans 7:7-25, exploring the struggle between the law, sin, and human nature.