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You have heard good preaching — careful, faithful, doctrinally sound. But you have never been in a service where no one moved afterward. Where the silence was not awkward but holy. Where God was so present that the man who preached simply sat down, and the room knew something had happened that no one had planned.

In this second conversation, Michael Durham and Mack Tomlinson press deeper into the question that haunts every honest pastor: what is the difference between preaching that informs and preaching that breaks something open? The answer, they argue, is not technique or gifting or preparation. It is the Holy Spirit. Not the Spirit presumed upon, not the Spirit spoken of theologically while left practically unaccounted for, but the Spirit present in power, filling the preacher with an authority the preacher himself cannot manufacture, making the words land with a weight that the congregation recognizes as coming from somewhere beyond the man. Paul told the Thessalonians that his Gospel came not in word only, but in power and in the Holy Spirit and in much assurance. Tomlinson and Durham grieve that most preaching today, for all its doctrinal excellence, has settled for the word only.

The conversation moves from principle to testimony — a service in Romania where couples began weeping and repenting mid-sermon without any invitation, a Banner of Truth conference where the preacher preached four times with an authority that moved men to tears, and a Lord's Day at Providence Chapel in March 2020, where God came in such unmistakable power that the congregation sat in holy silence for nearly an hour, men stood to confess sin, women prayed with tears, and no elder dared move to close the service. These are not stories offered as nostalgia. They are offered as evidence — that what the church has been told to stop expecting is precisely what the church most desperately needs.

In This Episode

• What it means that the Holy Spirit is not merely present in the regenerate minister but must be actively filling and anointing him for there to be true preaching
• Why Paul's claim that his gospel came "not in word only" is a quiet indictment of much that passes for faithful preaching today
• How hyper-dispensationalism and charismatic excess have together produced evangelical churches that are functionally afraid of the Holy Spirit
• Why a George Whitefield arising today would likely be opposed by good Reformed men — and what that reveals about how far the tradition has drifted from itself
• What happens when a church's order of service leaves no room for God to interrupt it — and why that is more serious than it sounds
• What the March 2020 service at Providence Chapel looked like, felt like, and meant — told by one of the elders who was in the room

The church does not need better-organized services or more carefully crafted sermons — it needs the Spirit of God to fall on the men who preach and the people who hear, and it needs elders wise enough to sit still when He does.

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You have sat under Bible teaching for years — careful, accurate, well-organized Bible teaching — and yet something is missing. The word has informed you. It has not undone you. And you are beginning to wonder if that is simply the way it is, or if something has been lost.

In this first conversation between Michael Durham and his longtime friend, Mack Tomlinson, the two men put their finger on one of the most consequential distinctions in the life of the modern church: the difference between teaching and preaching. It is not a small distinction. Teaching imparts information; preaching seeks an encounter. The teacher wants the congregation to understand something. The preacher wants them to meet Someone. And when that difference is blurred — when excellent doctrinal instruction is mistaken for the thing the New Testament calls preaching — the result is churches that are, in Durham's words, at the greatest height of theological knowledge they have ever known and hollow experientially at the same time.

Durham and Tomlinson trace this drift to the rise of the Bible Church movement in the early twentieth century, the narrowing of expository preaching to mean verse-by-verse commentary, and the loss of what the great preachers of previous centuries called a word from God — that burden over a text, in prayer, before a man dares to stand and declare it. Spurgeon did not preach until a text had, in his own words, bitten him. Whitefield, McCheyne, Bonar, Rowland — men rarely preached through books of the Bible. They preached a word they believed God had given them for that congregation, on that Lord's Day, at that hour. The recovery of that conviction, these two men argue, is not a minor adjustment. It may be the most urgent need in evangelical pulpits today.

In This Episode

• What the New Testament word for preaching actually means — and why the image of a herald changes everything
• Why a man can be an excellent teacher and not a preacher, and why the church desperately needs both to be distinguished
• How the Bible Church movement, for all its doctrinal faithfulness, contributed to the loss of true preaching in America
• What the classical definition of expository preaching actually is — and why most seminary students today have never heard it
• Why Spurgeon said he did not have the gifts necessary to preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible — and what that should do to our assumptions
• What it means for a preacher to have a word from God, why that language frightens Reformed people, and why it shouldn't

A congregation cannot encounter the living God through information alone — and the men who knew this best were the men who refused to enter a pulpit until they had first been broken open by what they were about to proclaim.

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You have been trying to manage your sin, improve your habits, and strengthen your resolve — and it is not working. It was never going to work. What God is after is not a stronger version of you. He is after the end of your confidence in you altogether.

Continuing in Romans 5, Michael Durham presses deeper into the question he raised in Part 1: why does God delay our perfection? The answer, he insists, is not merely doctrinal — it is intensely personal, and it cuts against every instinct we have to perform, improve, and present ourselves to God as something more than we are. Through Paul's thorn, Joni Eareckson Tada's decades in a wheelchair, Gideon's dwindling army, and the hard mercy of affliction, Durham traces a single unbroken line: God reduces us so that grace has room to be seen. The weaknesses we are ashamed of are not obstacles to His working — they are the very conditions He has chosen to work through.

The message closes with something that may be the most searching claim Durham makes in either part: that Christ is so committed to His people knowing the depth of His love that He is willing to suffer reproach in the eyes of the world to show it to us. He is still sacrificing. He has not stopped. And the delays, the failures, the years of slow and stumbling sanctification — all of it is not evidence of grace running thin. It is grace reigning. It has been reigning all along, and it will carry you home.

In This Episode

• Why sin management is not sanctification — and why the effort to manage sin may be the very thing keeping you from grace
• What Paul's thorn, Gideon's 300, and Joni Eareckson Tada's wheelchair have in common — and what they say to your weakness right now
• Why God allows affliction not to punish you but to show you what He already knows: that you cannot do this without Him
• What it means that Christ is willing to let His reputation suffer in the eyes of the world so that you can know how much He loves you
• Why the thief on the cross entered paradise grateful, but never learned what you have been given years to learn — the grace that keeps, restores, bears with, and carries home
• How the only obstacle to living by faith in God is your remaining faith in yourself

There is only one set of footprints — and they have always been His, carrying you further than you knew, deeper into grace than you have yet seen.