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Last night I watched a movie and came away stirred in a way I wasn't fully expecting.

A Great Awakening — released this past April by Sight and Sound Films — tells the story of the unlikely friendship between George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin, and Whitefield's role in igniting the First Great Awakening. It's a film about preaching, prayer, passion, and perseverance. And it pressed on something I've been carrying for a long time.

The authority of preaching does not come from my ability to speak or to build a sermon. It comes from the Word of God. I am simply called to preach it.

That's what this episode is about.

Whitefield didn't preach because the conditions were favorable. He preached because he was called to. He preached outdoors when the churches closed their doors to him. He preached to coal miners with blackened faces who had never heard the gospel. He preached across the Atlantic — thirteen crossings between England and the American colonies. He preached until the day he died, literally — his last sermon delivered standing on a barrel outside a tavern in Newburyport, Massachusetts, holding a candle that burned down to a stub as he spoke.

That kind of preaching doesn't come from confidence in your craft. It comes from confidence in what you've been called to proclaim.

There's also the thread of Benjamin Franklin that I can't stop thinking about. Whitefield appealed to Franklin to trust Christ — and Franklin didn't respond in the moment. But decades later, the seed was still working. He remembered Whitefield's words in 1789 and called the Constitutional Convention to pray.

Most preachers will never know the full reach of what they said on a given Sunday. Whitefield didn't know what his last conversation with Franklin would produce. He just preached. He just kept preaching.

Three things to carry into this week: pray before you preach, trust the Word not the outline, and keep preaching — no matter what the days ahead look like.

Preach and pray. Pray and preach. Trusting God will awaken our churches, our nation, and our world.

That's still the call.