Real Truth Matters Podcast

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You 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 Episode

• What the New Testament actually means when it uses the word anointing, and why the term has been hijacked
• How the apostles preached in Acts — often extemporaneously — and what that reveals about dependence versus preparation
• Why sermon preparation without agonizing prayer is one danger, and prayer without preparation is another
• Spurgeon's private prayer of dependence in the moments before he stepped into the pulpit
• The difference between the ordinary, sustaining work of the Spirit and the extraordinary seasons of revival
• What Andrew Bonar and Kenneth MacRae's diaries teach about a life given over to seeking God's power in preaching

If 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.

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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.

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You have been a Christian for years, and you are more aware of your sin today than the day you were saved. That is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It may be the clearest sign that something has gone profoundly right.

Opening in Romans 5:20–21, Michael Durham takes up one of the most disorienting questions in the Christian life: why would a God who justifies us in a moment not sanctify us in the same breath? The question is not academic — it lives in every believer who has failed again, doubted again, and wondered whether their ongoing struggle is evidence that grace has not fully taken hold. Durham's answer is neither a comfort nor an excuse. It is something richer: God's purpose in leaving us imperfect is not a concession to our weakness but a deliberate display of His grace, one that could not be seen any other way.

From the mirror of the law that exposes without cleansing, to the ocean of grace that swallows sin without being diminished by it, this message moves the listener toward a reckoning — with the depth of their corruption and the even greater depth of what has been given to cover it. The Christian who feels more sinful at forty years of walking with Christ than at the beginning is not losing ground. He is gaining sight. And the grace that met him at the start has not been rationed out. It super-abounds still — not in spite of what we are, but precisely through it.

In This Episode

• Why God's glory is magnified more through a believer's ongoing struggle than through instant perfection
• What the law was designed to do — and why it cannot do what only grace can
• Why growing awareness of sin after conversion is a mark of spiritual health, not spiritual failure
• How the failures of this week are not evidence that grace has run out, but that we need more of it than we thought
• What it means that God loves us not merely in spite of our imperfections, but through them — as a father loves a child, not as a judge tolerates a defendant
• Why losing fascination with Christ is always cured the same way: seeing yourself as you are, and seeing Him as He is

Your remaining corruption is not proof that grace has fallen short — it is the very stage upon which grace continues to shine, and the deeper you see your need, the more precious He becomes.

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You haven't walked away. You still show up, still pray, still read — and that's exactly what makes this so dangerous. Lukewarmness doesn't announce itself. It simply makes you comfortable enough to stop fighting for what you once couldn't live without.

Episode Summary
In this second message on the Laodicean church, Michael Durham presses into the anatomy of spiritual drift — not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, respectable kind that leaves a man's Christianity intact on the outside while hollowing it out from within. He traces three marks of lukewarmness that most believers will recognize but have never heard named so plainly: the loss of a felt need for Christ, the exchange of intimacy for activity, and the slow ceasing of war against sin. The diagnosis is precise because it has to be — a man cannot repent of a condition he has not yet admitted he is in.

But this message does not leave the listener in the wreckage of self-examination. Durham turns to Revelation 3 and insists that revival, for the individual believer, is not something to wait for — it is something to do. It is repentance: the purging of what has displaced Christ, the receiving of cleansing, and a fresh vision of the One whose glory was never diminished, only forgotten. And the price of returning is not merit — it is surrender. You bring yourself to the altar. He brings the fire.

In This Episode

• Why a man can pray, preach, and serve — and still be living without God
• The difference between tolerating sin and warring against it, and why that difference defines everything
• What it means that lukewarmness is not the presence of sin but the absence of conflict with it
• How repentance is more than confession — it is beholding Christ until the heart is smitten again
• Why Jesus tells a spiritually bankrupt church to "buy" from Him, and what that paradox actually demands
• What it looks like to put yourself on the altar when your desire for God is barely an ember

He stands at the door not to condemn what you have become, but to restore what you once were — and He has not lost His desire for you, even in the years you lost yours for Him.

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You haven't walked away. You haven't denied the faith. You still attend, still serve, still read. But somewhere along the way, the ache went quiet — and what frightens you most is that you've grown comfortable with its absence. Lukewarmness doesn't arrive with a warning. It arrives looking like stability.

Episode Summary

In this message from Revelation 3:14–22, Michael Durham addresses one of the most dangerous conditions in the Christian life — not scandalous sin, not open rebellion, but the slow, undetected cooling of a heart that once knew the fire of God. The Laodicean church believed it was thriving. Christ told them they were naked. That gap between what we tell ourselves and what we actually are before God is the diagnostic center of this message, and Durham holds up the mirror without flinching.

The recovery Christ offers the Laodiceans — and us — is not a program or a new spiritual discipline. It is a return. Revival, rightly understood, is not becoming something new; it is recovering what was once real and has since gone cold. Durham draws the line between what only God can do in revival and what we must do in preparation — and he refuses to let sovereign grace become the excuse for a will that will not press in. The call is simple, searching, and urgent: be zealous and repent.

In This Episode

• Why lukewarmness is more dangerous than outright rebellion — and why the self-deceived church is always the last to know
• What Christ means when He says He would rather you be cold or hot, and why the lukewarm are, in His words, unusable
• How the spirit of material sufficiency quietly kills spiritual desperation — and why we don't feel the loss until God's power has already lifted
• The difference between a heart that merely wants God and a heart that wants Him enough — and why that distinction is where revival lives or dies
• What heart preparation actually looks like before God moves, and why sovereignty and human responsibility are not in conflict here

The God who pursued you when you were not yet His has not stopped pursuing you now. The ache you've been missing — He put it there. And He can restore it.

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In A Lost Sheep, A Lost Coin, A Lost Son, Part 2, RTM founder and director Michael Durham explores the startling contrast between two kinds of lost people: the openly rebellious sinner and the outwardly moral, self-righteous sinner. Through Jesus’ powerful parables, this message exposes the danger of trusting in religious performance while revealing that both the prodigal and the elder brother stand equally in need of grace. If you have ever assumed that goodness, morality, or church involvement can make you right with God, this episode offers a sobering and life-changing challenge.

At the heart of this message is a breathtaking portrait of Christ as the true Elder Brother who came to seek, rescue, and restore the lost. With tenderness and gospel power, Michael Durham shows that Jesus is not ashamed of broken sinners but willingly bears their shame, clothes them in His righteousness, and brings them home to the Father’s table. Whether you identify with the prodigal who has wandered far away or the religious person who has trusted in self instead of Christ, this episode points to the same hope: a Savior who pursues the lost and a Father who receives them with joy.

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In A Lost Sheep, A Lost Coin, A Lost Son, Part 1, RTM founder and director Michael Durham opens one of Scripture’s most beloved chapters to reveal the astonishing heart of God toward sinners. Through three unforgettable parables, Jesus answers a question that still troubles many hearts: Can God truly receive those who have wandered far from Him? This message exposes the tragedy of our separation from God while magnifying the relentless love that seeks, pursues, and welcomes the lost. If you struggle to believe that God’s mercy could extend to someone like you, this episode speaks directly to that fear.

With warmth, clarity, and gospel power, this message confronts both the despair of the guilty conscience and the pride of self-righteous religion. You will discover that sin is more than breaking God’s law—it is leaving the One who loves us most—and yet His love remains steadfast even when we run from Him. Filled with hope for prodigals, grieving parents, and anyone longing for assurance of God’s grace, this episode offers a compelling glimpse into the joy of a Father who delights to bring lost sons and daughters home.

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What does it mean to truly believe in Jesus Christ? In One Thing Necessary, Part 2, Michael Durham confronts the shallow, intellectualized faith that fills many churches and calls listeners back to the heart of genuine Christianity: devoted trust in a living Savior. This message exposes the danger of knowing doctrine without truly knowing Christ, and challenges the listener to examine whether their faith rests merely in facts about Jesus or in Christ Himself.

With piercing clarity and pastoral urgency, this sermon reveals that saving faith is far more than agreement with biblical truths. Jesus calls men and women to follow Him, surrender to Him, and entrust every part of life into His hands. This is a powerful call to abandon empty religious routine, rediscover the beauty and worth of Christ, and live in wholehearted devotion to the One who was wholly devoted to saving sinners.