A DISCUSSION ABOUT PREACHING Part 3

Send us Fan MailYou have driven home from church more than once wondering whether anything actually happened up there, or whether you simply performed a well-constructed talk. You cannot always tell the difference between a sermon and true preaching — not from the pulpit, and sometimes not even in the moment. This is the ache no seminary prepared you for.In this concluding conversation on preaching, Michael Durham and Mack Tomlinson turn from theology to practice and take up a word the modern church has largely surrendered to abuse: anointing. They trace it through the apostolic preaching of Acts — Peter, Stephen, Philip, Paul — men who often spoke without notes because the Holy Spirit gave them, in the hour, exactly what the moment required. But they do not stop at first-century extraordinary gifting. They press into what the anointing means for the ordinary man in an ordinary pulpit this Sunday: that God's presence resting on a preacher is not a Pentecostal excess to be embarrassed by, but a biblical reality every faithful man must seek, and every faithful congregation must pray for.The conversation turns practical and searching. Durham confesses that decades of preaching have taught him that preparation without desperate prayer is presumption, and prayer without preparation is likewise disobedience — the two must marry before a man ever climbs the steps to the pulpit. He and Tomlinson discuss Spurgeon's whispered confession of dependence before he preached, the difference between degrees of anointing across church history, and the sober reminder from men like Andrew Bonar and Kenneth MacRae that the same Spirit who sends revival also sustains the plodding, faithful, unspectacular work of ordinary ministry. The episode closes not with formula but with an invitation: to want, again, what only the Spirit can give.In This EpisodeWhat the New Testament actually means when it uses the word anointing, and why the term has been hijackedHow the apostles preached in Acts — often extemporaneously — and what that reveals about dependence versus preparationWhy sermon preparation without agonizing prayer is one danger, and prayer without preparation is anotherSpurgeon's private prayer of dependence in the moments before he stepped into the pulpitThe difference between the ordinary, sustaining work of the Spirit and the extraordinary seasons of revivalWhat Andrew Bonar and Kenneth MacRae's diaries teach about a life given over to seeking God's power in preachingIf you have ever stood in a pulpit, or sat under one, and sensed that something more was possible than what you have known — you are not wrong, and He has not stopped giving what only He can give.