EP 55 SPIRIT FILLED PREACHING #holyspirit #biblicaltruth #boldpreaching #rightlydividingtheword

within institutional Christianity, it's not allowed. I mean, these are the unwritten rules that you need to follow to stay in, right?

You know, there's the Gospel Coalition Conference. We talked about that with Russell Fuller last month. I mean, to speak at that conference, you have to have compromised.

♪♪ Welcome to Tearing Down High Places.

My name's Average Joe, and I've got the pastors with me again. Thank you for coming to Tearing Down High Places.

Welcome, guys. Hey. Hi, Seth. Welcome back. Hey, guys.

It's great to be with you again. It's this time of the month. It's this time of the month. We got Pastor Seth coming in from Wisconsin.

Don't forget, we got Pastor Tim in the left corner. How are you, Pastor? Hey, I'm doing all right. Feeling blessed, not too stressed, feeling all right.

And Pastor Jeff. What's going on, Pastor Jeff? I like that sweatshirt you got there. This is, you know what this is?

Can you see it? I do. Big Eagle Armory. That's my favorite armory. If you need to get any weaponry here in the great state of New Jersey, just come to your castle.

Yeah, it's a great couple of guys there that run that gun shop. So the Big Igloo. Everybody in our church wears this because they go to our church now.

So this is everywhere. Shout out Big Igloo Armory. Yeah. I'll tell you what.

I'm going to say, you know, I bought a nice gun there, and I have not gotten a sweatshirt, though. I'm going to have to see what's up.

Hey, Chris, what's up? Where's my sweatshirt? I need an XL, baby. Yeah. I just got a handgun there, and I'm going for concealed carry.

Are you? Yeah, because you can do it now in New Jersey because of Trump's Supreme Court, which overthrew the

New York unconstitutional law. So now we have the right to do that even here in liberal New Jersey.

You got to be a good shot to get that, though. It's not that hard. Oh, it's not? Nah. It's not that hard.

A couple of guys in our church have gotten it recently, and they said it's not that bad. Does shooting threes from the

NBA range make you a good handgun shooter, too, or? I think these are very unrelated disciplines.

As you saw the evidence of my last time out. But it was so cold. My hands were freezing. So I don't know.

Maybe on a warmer day, I could hit the broad side of a barn. Man. Wow. Hey, let's keep talking about Big Blue Armory.

Maybe they'll become our first show sponsor. Let's go! Let's go! But no,

Seth's got a topic for us today. Spirit -filled preaching. What's that about,

Seth? What do you want to talk about today? Yeah, I've been thinking about this for quite some time because this is something that every church needs.

For a church to be healthy, every church needs a pastor who is full of the Holy Spirit, just like Stephen was when

Stephen preached before his death to the Jewish leaders. One thing we know about Stephen in Acts 7 is that he was full of the

Holy Spirit. Acts 6 says that about him. And so he preached with fire. So we need fire in the pulpits in America.

And my concern is I do think that a minority of churches truly have this fire in the pulpit.

And this doesn't mean that every church doesn't accomplish anything because we know what the

Scripture says. In Isaiah, it says that his word, when it goes out, it does not come back void.

So even if there isn't fire coming from the pulpit, the Spirit can still use that. However, when fire is preached from the pulpit, think of the great impact it makes.

We want to build soldiers of the cross in our church, and we don't want to be weak and mediocre. Those are the kind of churches that Jesus wants to spit out.

Like he says in Revelation, you're not hot nor cold, but you're lukewarm, and I will spit you out of my mouth.

So we want to have Spirit -filled preachers. So the question we want to ask today is, how does this happen?

What does Spirit -filled preaching look like? And if any pastors are listening, we want those pastors to have this.

Any laymen that are listening, we want you to be at a church where this is taking place. So this is the conversation we're going to have today.

Wow. And one of the other squares wrote a book on Spirit -filled preaching, didn't he?

Yes. So that was one of the chapters in my book, Fan Into Flame. And I do think that spiritual gifts are crucial.

And when you think about fire in the pulpit, a lot of people mistake fire for volume, or just emotion, or energy, or even being charismatic as in a personality.

You know, someone's got a charismatic personality. They're very engaging. They tell great stories.

Just an amazing storyteller. There's a vast difference between Spirit -filled preaching and charismatic personality, or just energy, or being loud.

I, in my book, describe it as logic on fire. And that comes from, there's like a documentary called

Logic on Fire about the life of Dr. Martin Lloyd -Jones. And the thing that gave him fire in the pulpit was not just the outward showiness, or anything like that.

In fact, at the beginning of a sermon, he would sound kind of dry. He was a medical doctor, and very well -schooled, very educated.

He would sound kind of dry. He was very deliberate. But as the sermon went on, he kind of ramped up in intensity.

So you did see that intensity building through the sermon, because he was upholding the Word of God as the very authority of God.

So when Jesus spoke, he spoke as one having authority. And so there was that authoritative tone to him.

But what made him so good as a preacher was that the same study that he invested as a medical doctor, he took into preparation for a sermon.

He had learned how to work hard to prepare well, to be very well -read, to read broadly, to make an application from the different disciplines of life, but ultimately to handle the text with precision.

So he'd put in the hours, he would figure out what is the central proposition of this passage, and he would drive that home again and again.

And in his mind, there was clarity of thought. It wasn't just like the charismatic preacher that's just stream of consciousness, whatever pops into the head, and a

Bible verse is just like a springboard to jump to some random analogy.

Rather, he had clarity of thought. He was able to reason from the text and what the author really intended in that context, but then drive that into the heart of the listener and keep pounding it and pounding it until somebody was really changed by it.

That's great. Wow. So Martin Lloyd -Jones is an example of logic on fire. Yes.

Yeah. You mentioned the charismatic personality. That can be mistaken for a spirit -filled preaching.

And of course, we could talk about the utterance of knowledge, right? That a charismatic in the spiritual gift sense will say,

I have a word from the Lord, and that could be seen as spirit -filled preaching, and that's nonsense.

And then you have some people who are like actors, so they're charismatic in that way.

You listen to the person, and they just light up when they get into the pulpit like they're a great orator.

I mean, Barack Obama was considered a great orator, right? And some would say there was power when he spoke.

But really, he was acting, and he was good at it, but it wasn't genuine. And I think that's the difference between a spirit -filled preacher and an actor.

And actually, the Apostle Paul talks about this in 1 Corinthians 2. He says, When I came to you, brothers,

I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the

Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

So Paul, you see this in the book of Acts. He's going to all these different places on his missionary journeys, and he is preaching the

Word, and he's preaching the Word with power. And we see the results.

I mean, sometimes the results are positive, right? Sometimes it was hostility. But no matter what the results were, one thing is clear.

He preached in the power of the Holy Spirit. And not preaching a word or your word.

You're preaching the Word, the Word of God. So when I first became a youth pastor, and Paul says this to Timothy, Preach the

Word, right? Rob Randall, a former elder at our church, said, Preach the Word, the

Word, the Word, the Word, the Word. Whatever you're doing at youth group, the Word is most important. And that stuck with me, and that was great.

That was great teaching and great preaching. And it also alleviated some stress of all the other things that you're worried about running a youth group or all the other things that happen on a

Sunday service or whatever it is that you're doing. If you have the Word as the main focus, and you're preaching that, and you're expositing that right, and you're looking at the text just like Jeff said, you have your logic or what is it?

Logic on fire or logic on fire. I think that there's a responsibility to preach the

Word and rightly divide that. But then there's also on the flip side of that, if you're sitting in the audience, you should be.

It's amazing that the Word of God, there's something in that for every single person that comes into the church and sits down.

So it's also up to the congregation to sit there and discern what's being said and make sure it is biblically true.

And I think like a good preacher like Jeff, I'm edified every time I go to church on Sunday and I hear Jeff speak because he's preaching the

Word and rightly dividing it. I might go to a different church and someone gets really emotional.

And even Jeff was saying, he saw a video of a guy running around the aisles and baptized himself, jumped in the baptismal pool, gets out, runs around the aisles.

It might feel good in the moment, but when you leave, were you really edified? Were you really propelled to go do good works and preach and evangelize and disciple people?

Probably not. But when you're hearing the Word preached and you're there knowing that God has something for you through the

Word, that's when it becomes powerful and logic is set on fire in my opinion. So in 1

Corinthians 12, there's a list of spiritual gifts. And one of them is word of knowledge and another is word of wisdom.

Knowledge in that case has to do with content of things that can be known. And wisdom is skill in life.

It's applying what the Word of God teaches us to various areas of our life. You guys are familiar with Bethel Church out in Redding, California.

They really popularized a guy named Sean Bolts. And they said that he would get words of knowledge.

And they thought that that knowledge was like bits and pieces of information that could not have been known except by a supernatural gift to the preacher.

So Sean Bolts would get up on stage and he'd be like, 842, 842, anybody, anybody?

And there's this huge audience of people until somebody yells out, that was my address when

I grew up. You must be talking about me. And then he would give some kind of vague quote, word of knowledge regarding that person's life.

And it would always almost be God is going to use you so powerfully. You're going to be the next powerhouse evangelist.

But he would use that quote unquote word of knowledge. Until recently, it was discovered just in recent weeks that Sean Bolts was like data mining from people's social media.

So he would get the audience list of who was going to be in that audience. And he would do

Facebook searches for any kind of information that he could mine from them, which is why he was always up there with an iPad.

And it was finally exposed. Bethel Church even kicked him to the curb and admitted that what he was doing was a false gift.

But it was only them that ever made him popular in the first place. So the reason this is so important to realize is that a word of knowledge, a word of wisdom, is not just like some supernatural number or disconnected thought that might somehow apply to somebody.

It's the actual content of God's word. And then wisdom would be how does that apply to life?

So that's where the Spirit of God has to teach us how to make application of this text rightly divided and then applied in the lives of the people.

Yeah, that's a very important point, Jeff, because it's interesting. There's a book called

Power Through Prayer written by E .M. Bounds. And he was a Methodist pastor over 100 years ago.

And he talks about preaching that kills. And he's saying this lecture preaching, highly academic, little application, no application is preaching that kills.

So you're highlighting there's knowledge. We've got to communicate the content here, but we also have to apply it, apply it to the world in which we live in.

And I think that's a great weakness in the church right now is all this conversation.

We've seen this so much. You know, let's just preach the gospel. Let's just preach Jesus. Let's just preach the text while all this other stuff is happening in the world.

I love that when you guys had Matt Mayer on here and he said, what in the word is going on out there?

I love that. So what in the world is going on out there? We got to bring the

Bible to bear. So like for example, JD Vance talks about Ordo Amoris.

We should try to maybe fit that in a sermon here sometime soon because it's a big topic.

People are thinking about it. Let's bring the Bible to bear on that. What's Ordo Amoris for us in the cheap seats?

Oh, it's order of love. So that's Latin for order of love. And it's in the context of the immigration crisis that Vance was talking about this, saying we have to order love the right way, which means we have to prioritize our own family, our neighbors, our own citizens in our own country over foreigners.

He said this is a Christian concept and he's absolutely correct about that. And yet the woke crowd is all up in arms about him saying this because they focus on a passage like, you know,

James says, we got to care for the widow and the orphan. And we do, right? But that doesn't nullify we have to honor our father and mother.

We have to train our children. We have a great responsibility to take care of our own.

As pastors, you know, Jeff and Tim, your responsibility is to your church, your local church.

Anything you do outside is secondary to Cornerstone. Anything I do outside is secondary to Eureka Baptist, right?

So this is a big conversation right now and pastors need to be able to apply the word to this big conversation that's happening.

Well, our culture does not know how to love. They know how to emote. They don't. They think love is just warm, squishy feelings.

Yeah, that's true. You know, there was a great, there's a great article in the dissenter. You guys read the dissenter? I think

Jeff, you might have turned me on to that by chance. So they had an article, opinion article.

It says, if you really want to help refugees, kick them out of our nation. And they get into the details of how these people are never going to, these people that may be coming here for a better life, that are motivated, they're never going to fix any of their nations that they live in if they're coming here, right?

Anyway. Yeah, and just on that point too, if what they've done to get here is fundamentally sinful, meaning it's illegal, you're violating the law of the nation to come here, you need to fix that before you can grow.

So got to go back to where you came from and come in through the legal channels. I mean, this country is not lacking in generosity in terms of letting immigrants in.

More than a million every year come in the right way. And the country would be more than welcoming if there wasn't such a flood of people coming over the border illegally.

So just do things God's way and you'll be blessed. Yeah. In Logic on Fire, I think what it looks like in our day is as we bring the

Bible to bear on the times in which we live, we are going to have confrontation, not just with the world, but with the compromised church.

So when we praise JD Vance for correctly understanding the scriptures, we are going to face opposition from the outside who says, you're a bunch of Christian nationals.

But we can't be concerned about what they're going to say. We just have to say it and say this is the truth.

I don't care how unpopular this is. I don't care what Big Eva thinks about this because Big Eva has been one of the great drivers of promoting illegal immigration.

With all these immigration tables that they have, like Russell Moore and people like that, they have everything backwards.

And Isaiah 520 talks about light is darkness, darkness is light, sweet is bitter, bitter is sweet.

So we're confronting a compromised church with the word of God saying, you have everything backwards.

You're taking your cues from the world, not from the scriptures. Yep. Also, when you get accused of stuff, like being a

Christian nationalist, I think people are quick to get defensive and say, no, I'm not.

But something like that, it's like, okay, one, what is a Christian nationalist? If you're a

Christian and you love God and love others and you love your country, is it bad to be a Christian nationalist?

If you want to call me that, okay. I feel like you don't need to get defensive over some things. But the devil will use people to accuse you.

But we have to rightly be able to answer some of those accusations that happen. Yeah, Paul was an

Israeli nationalist. I mean, look at how much he loves his people.

You know, I would rather be cut off. I mean, Romans 9, then my people perish.

That's a good one. I think any of the greats from church history in our day would say, yeah, you should love your

American citizen because these are your people. And Acts 17 talks about these allotted places, these boundaries that the

Lord has set up. He put us here. We should have a special love for our community. And obviously, I mentioned

America, but you guys have a special love. You are to have a special love. And I know you do. Mount Laurel, New Jersey.

And St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. These are our people. And we want them to know

Christ. We want them to walk in His ways. And they are our neighbor, right? We are to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Who is our neighbor? It's those who are close in proximity to us. We can't love someone who is on the other side of the world.

We don't know the person. We can pray for them, I suppose. But we can't love them. Certainly, in the same measure, we can love the people in our own community.

Yeah, and in that prodigal, I mean, in the story of the Good Samaritan, the proximity of the situation is a big part of the point.

The guy was happening along the road and saw somebody who had fallen to bandits. And because of that proximity, the priest and the religious people should have helped, but they didn't.

They failed to see who their neighbor was in that very situation. But the Samaritan in proximity was willing to step out and help.

So I think that there's something about that that we miss from the story. We can't just this nebulous love for the world.

It's kind of like the beauty pageant queen. You know, I want world peace. It doesn't mean anything.

That's so funny, Jeff, because on the podcast last night, we actually talked about that very thing. The left loves the idea of loving.

The idea of loving. Yes. Not actually loving. So it's like, we're for the immigrants, but they're not going to pay for them.

They're not going to take them. Right. They're not going to sacrifice. We're going to take care of them with our tax dollars.

Actually, they're going to take care of them with your tax dollars, not theirs. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that.

When the left... Oh, sorry, Seth. No, you go, Tim. I was going to say, when the left or the world talks about love, you have to say the princess bride theme when you say,

I don't think that word means what you think it means. Right. They don't really know what love really means.

Not even close. That means that they could never truly love someone the way they're really supposed to love someone unless they're taught the love of Jesus.

And the world had no idea what love was until they saw Jesus love people. I really don't think it's loving to take

Tim's money and give it to Jeff. I don't. Really not. Here, Jeff, have some of Tim's money.

Here, Seth, you too. Would you like some of Tim's wallet? Okay. Yeah, that's not what it is. I could love you today.

Yeah, and that's insane because the liberal thinks that higher taxes to do social programs is loving.

You're looking after the poor or the single mothers in the inner city, but the government doesn't have any money apart from what they take by taxation, and that taxation is backed by the sword.

So the government is using the sword to force you to pay for someone else.

That's the opposite of love. And where do you get your money that they're taxing?

It's by your work, right? So you work to get paid, and that's your money that you've earned by work. But if the government takes it by the sword, they're basically making you a slave because they're taking your work, your forced work, to redistribute it somewhere else.

So what they're calling love is actually hate. It's actually slavery. They enslave you in order to do some social program, whereas it should be that Christians voluntarily go to the inner cities and help.

On Sunday this week, we're going to be highlighting a ministry to Kensington, which is probably the worst part of inner city

Philadelphia, one of the most dangerous and worst places in America. But the church goes there.

We were going there in the fall. Now there's a woman in our church who goes to work with addicts. There's another guy in our church who wants to go and help people with their homes, people that can't keep up with electrical problems in the homes and things like that.

That's what the church should be doing as much as we can and as far as we're able because they're in proximity.

It's a 15 -minute drive for us to get to Kensington, and there's people there that have need, and we want to do that.

But if the government tries to force people to do that by taxation at the edge of the sword, that's not love.

That's oppression. That's slavery. That's right. Have you guys heard of the name

Adrian Rogers? He was a key figure in the conservative resurgence of the

Southern Baptist Convention, which was about 35 years ago. He once said, the problem with today's preachers is that no one wants to kill them.

Joe, I think you have a clip to show, right? Yeah. Yeah, I talked right to that subject.

Check it out. Conservatism is pretend salt. It acts like salt, tastes like salt, smells like salt.

If I asked the two of you, when you're sitting at the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, think about this. We're at the

Marriage Dadgum Supper of the Lamb. By the way, there will be a tomahawk rib eye there. It'll be Wagyu.

But just before we bite into that rib eye, David tells his story in real time, and then

Hannah tells her story. Then Mary tells hers. Then Joshua tells his. And then they get to us.

They get to me. And can you imagine if it's like this? I'm an American Christian. I'm like, well, there's this thing called

Instagram, and people made fun of me. I can just imagine the patriarchs going, okay, so when did they cut your head off?

Like, when did they dismember you? And you're like, well, no, they didn't. They just made fun of me. And they're like, that's it?

That's it. That's it. They wrote nasty things about me on Facebook. Yeah, I mean, come on.

So is your point that if people want to kill our pastors, they're doing a good job?

Yeah. Yeah. We have such a culture of pleasing man in the pulpit and being political.

And we talked about this before. And not political in the way we're talking about, but political in the way of we don't want to offend anybody.

We can't talk about these specific issues that are facing our society.

But we do have that great responsibility to bring the Bible to bear on the times in which we live.

So when we do that, we will face opposition. And so like Adrian Rogers said, they're going to want to kill us.

And maybe not like stop our heartbeat and end our life, but they will want to cancel you.

And we might come to a time in America where we do go to jail, we do so on and so forth.

But right now you will face opposition if you speak out on those things. Within institutional

Christianity, it's not allowed. I mean, these are the unwritten rules that you need to follow to stay in.

You know, there's the Gospel Coalition Conference. We talked about that with Russell Fuller last month. I mean, to speak at that conference, you have to have compromised because they don't speak on these issues.

Seth, what you just said was like so encouraging because that just makes me want to keep going and going. And I have never even received a death threat.

I don't know about you, Jeff or Seth. I have at times felt like these people want to stone me.

I think that's how Moses felt at one point. But no, I've never received death threats for preaching.

Yeah, Jeff has been shunned. And I too have been shunned from a specific place.

So that happens where they just don't even acknowledge you even exist anymore.

But they want to be in the club. So if you speak against the club, they will kick you out of the club.

So I mean, my encouragement to pastors out there is don't play the game any longer. And we shouldn't undersell that because when betrayal comes from a close friend or from people that you think are

Christians, it does hurt a lot. So we shouldn't undersell it. But when you do look at some saints who got their head cut off, it does look like it's like, okay,

I can handle this. So that type of testimony does give encouragement to the rest of the saints.

So that was good, Seth. So, Jeff, John the Baptist talks about the fire of the

Spirit. What passage is that? You've got Luke 3 .16. You've got

Matthew 3 as well. Luke 3 .16, I believe, is about baptism by fire.

And there's question as to whether that's referring to the fire of hell or the power of the

Holy Spirit. And I think it's both because in Acts 1, the language parallels and draws upon it.

And I think that the Spirit has to be empowering the preacher. So you mentioned Stephen earlier.

It says that he was full of the Holy Spirit. It also said he was full of wisdom. So full of wisdom and the

Holy Spirit. You have to have both. You have to have knowledge of the text and the help of the Spirit. Joe, do you have a moment here where I could just highlight my five favorite preaching books?

Oh, yeah. I'll hold them up to the screen. I don't know if you can find another way to bring them up too, but let me show you something here.

These are the books that I have on preaching that don't make the cut, but they're all good.

What do you mean they don't make the cut? I have a top five, and these are not in the top five. Oh, not the top five.

To be a preacher, you've got to study homiletics. You've got to study how to preach and learn from the best. Abe Kuruvilla is one of the best from Dallas Seminary.

Is that number five? No, that's honorably mentioned, I think. Oh, honorable mention. No, these are honorable mentions.

Okay. You've got Jax News. Haddon Robinson's a good one. Clint Archer was a personal coach to me.

He's the Master Seminary guy that I consulted just for help in getting better as a preacher. I would recommend their program, the

Master Seminary. You can have someone just kind of work with you. I had Clint Archer. Very good. We also had a preaching camp at our church that I want to tell people about.

It's Timothy Warren for Dallas Seminary. He will come out and help preachers. Tim Robinson and we had a bunch of other guys who have now gone on to preach.

Ben Honeyford and his associate pastor, kind of elder over there, Duncan, learned how to preach from Timothy Warren as well.

You can do preaching camps with Timothy Warren, but as far as books go, I'm going to give you my top five. If you're a young preacher or someone who's wanting to get better as a preacher, number five,

John MacArthur, Rediscovering Expository Preaching. Tremendous book.

Number four. Drum roll. John Piper, Expository Exaltation.

Now, John Piper, I don't fully recommend as the greatest leader in evangelicalism anymore because of some of the woke things he did around the elections.

Also, because he said that if somebody broke into his house, he didn't know if he would fight or kill that person in defense of his wife.

I lost a lot of respect for him when he said that. I saw J .D. Hall talked about that was one of the most crushing moments in his life when he heard

Piper say that. But I will say, and I need to say, this is so important. John Piper is still one of the great preachers of the

Word of God. And in terms of how he exalts in the truth of God's Word, I think a lot of young preachers and all of us need to learn from that.

The fact that when he reads the Scripture, it's with authority. When he proclaims the Scripture, it's with exaltation.

He loves the Word of God, and he wants to see people apply it. And in his book, Expository Exaltation, that comes through.

There has to be joy in the Word of God and delight in it, and I think that's really important. Number three.

Biblical Preaching by Haddon Robinson. It's a classic. It's one of the ones I had in seminary, and it is really helpful.

Number two. Privilege the Text by Abraham Kuravilla. And it's really strong hermeneutics, but it's just letting the text have the privilege in the sermon.

So often, the actual meaning of the text is lost in the sermon. And here is my all -time favorite preaching book.

And it's what I have used for both how I structure my own sermons with an introduction that's relevant to life that then leads into a main idea, a sub -introduction that kind of sets the context of the book, and then the point -by -point exegesis, the exposition of the actual text, then leads to an apparition section.

And the book is an Indian guy, Ramesh Richard, Preparing Expository Sermon.

I love this book so much. It's helped me to learn how to prepare a sermon.

Because the fire, the logic on fire doesn't start when you step into the pulpit on Sunday morning.

It starts on the Monday before, in my case, where you spend the whole day in the text.

And you exposit what's there. You learn it. You learn it inside and out. And you prepare a sermon for that, but let it still be extemporaneous so that the

Spirit is able to move through you as you're preaching. With new ideas or applications or illustrations that come to mind in the moment.

Yet if you're well enough prepared, then you can continue on with what God has already given you and not lose your train of thought when something new comes into mind when you're actually delivering the sermon.

So that's my recommendation for young preachers. Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, I had a professor in seminary.

He said boring preaching is a sin. So we need to put lots of effort into preparing our sermons.

One thing I ask myself is what I want to listen to this. Is it interesting to me?

And if it's interesting to me, I hope it's interesting to the people who are there. And of course, it's interesting not just because we are interesting, but because the text is interesting.

The focus is on the text. And that's where the application piece comes in. We need to bring this alive to the people who are listening.

So we need to bring the right application, the right illustrations. And a big part of preparation is prayer.

We need to go to God in prayer, not only in our preparation, but also leading up to the sermon.

Just that the Lord would bless this sermon and work in the people's hearts. Save someone.

There'll be unbelievers in there, and we need to preach. And I like what you said,

Jeff. We need to give ourselves flexibility. We don't want it to be too rigid. We have to read every single word.

I mean, I write out my sermons, but I always give myself latitude to be free. And I should know it well enough where I could just start talking.

I don't even need to read every word. But I do like to write it out because I want to do my best.

That's what Paul told Timothy. Do your best. Present yourself a worker who rightly handles the word of truth.

So we want to do our best. And I think when we look at what is a healthy church, it starts with the pulpit.

It does. If you have a lousy pulpit, if there isn't fire in the pulpit, no matter how many good things, other good things you have in the church, the church is not going to be healthy the way

God wants it to be healthy. So we as pastors, we need to deliver good sermons week after week after week to have a healthy church.

And then everything else flows down from that. Great. And let me plug in for Tim Robinson's prodigal son sermon.

You can go to CornerstoneSJ .org and click on sermons and go back. What was it like right after Christmas?

Right, Tim? Yeah, December 29th. Yeah, if you find that sermon, that was one of the most remarkable sermons you're going to find.

It was so gospel centered. It handled the text so well in terms of drawing out what was there and how it all connected.

Because the prodigal son parable didn't stand alone. There was the lost coin and the lost sheep, and those tied into the lost son.

And Tim tied it all together and made a heartfelt, warm application. I would not be surprised if people got saved listening to that sermon.

So you did a great job, Tim. Thanks, man. I think also people praying for me really helped.

Someone like Jill Deegan, who's filled with the Spirit, was praying that the Spirit would help me preach.

And I think that I got extra filled up because of people praying for me and holding me up in prayer.

So I think there's power in prayer. And then, yeah, when the Spirit's with you and God is for you, then no one can be against you.

And to be able to be confident and preach, that's good, Seth. You had some good advice there. Knowing, like, now

I'm going to think, would I be able to listen to myself and things like that. That's good stuff. How do you guys know you have the power of the

Spirit when you're preaching? Oh, man. That's a good question. Maybe Jeff can answer that one first.

There's a number of different things. One is when you're very confident that what you're saying is what the text meant.

And especially at places where it's a little bit debatable. But you've really done that digging, and you understand not only the

English, but you've understood the Greek behind it and how those words were used previously in the same book.

And you know that this point is something that will change somebody's worldview.

The light bulb moment is going to happen. And so internally, when you have that confidence, and it really comes from preparation,

I think a lot of times people are not confident in the pulpit because they haven't put in the work.

If you're very well prepared, and you know that this is what the Bible says, you're kind of excited to share that truth.

But if you walk in there, and you've got nothing, you're just like, that's a scary place to be.

But if you've got some nugget, some truth that you know is gold, and you're happy to share that to the people.

And then another way you know is you can tell by the light bulb moment on their faces. And it's different people every week.

But you can tell when somebody's eyes are gripped on you when you're speaking. And you know that the

Lord is doing something in their heart. And of course, it helps that later on, somebody says, Oh, we came in talking about this very thing.

And that's been on my mind for a week. And I can't believe you talked about that, or whatever the case is.

So that kind of feedback, that of course, makes you more confident for the next time. But you can kind of read it on people's faces.

There's times when people are yawning, and their eyes are getting droopy. And you know, man, you need to pray in your spirit.

And you need to trust God to break through that because you're not connecting. So you can kind of tell the difference between when you're connecting and when you're not.

It's interesting because there's the piece of, I know what the word says. I can't wait to tell them.

And then there's also a piece of, and I totally agree with you on that. There's also the piece of, I had no plans on saying this.

But I'm going to say this right now. And everyone's like, everyone's awake. And everybody is like, that's exactly what we needed to hear.

And it's like the spirit brings it to mind. And I'm just amazed at that. In His power,

He does that. And sometimes if I feel like it's getting dry,

I might – those are usually the moments where He comes to my rescue. It's like, okay, you got to say this. And then boom,

I have them for the rest of the sermon. I think that happens with Jeff a lot.

Jeff, where you'll say something that you might not have meant it to be funny or something would pop up.

Or like when someone in the crowd kind of answers your rhetorical question and then you kind of respond back to that.

Like I love that stuff. And it's usually a little kid, which is even better. Yeah, that is awesome.

So that happens at your church where someone says something to Jeff? Yep, every once in a while.

Jeff, when you spoke at our church, remember that? Someone quoted a passage and you paused and listened to them quote it.

And then you're like, we're making this interactive. Yeah, yeah. So the one time he's preached at Eureka Baptist, that happened.

Yeah, it happens a lot. I hear it a lot when Jeff's pointing out something in history.

And then you'll hear Rich Ventura answer it before anyone else gets a chance to think about it.

Yeah, Rich Ventura is a man. He is like a Bible, a walking Bible commentary.

He knows so much. And he vocalizes a little bit during first service, but it's in a good way. We have a great time with it.

And Jen's other uncle, Rich's brother, sits there with his wife and kind of talks about the sermon in their seats with each other and with the

Lord as you're speaking. And they're following along and kind of talking with you under their breath. So I don't know if it's like part of it.

That's never been distracting or anything to me. But one thing I know about Uncle Mike, too, is he has so much

Scripture memorized. Because he was a mailman and he would walk around just reciting Scripture, entire chapters or books of the

Bible. Wow, that's amazing. I find it encouraging. Oh, yeah, totally. And Tim, you're pretty vocal, too.

You might be third place as far as most vocal. Because you'll throw out amens from the back row and it really hits you.

Yeah, I love that. We have a guy in our church who does that. But how does that make you feel, though, when you're preaching,

Seth, and you hear people are tracking with you or they yell amen or hallelujah? Does that happen a lot or like, that's right?

When I first came here, we're a bunch of Scandinavian. Nobody showed any emotion.

And then over time, we've gotten people like that. And you can feel the energy in the room. I mean,

I think that's amazing. I think it should be that way. I mean, there should be excitement. There should be, like you said, expository.

Be careful what you ask for. Yeah, you know what? You have to kind of put a check on that, too.

Because I don't like it when it's like chaos in the room while the preacher, you know. I've heard that so many times where the same guy just yells out something every other sentence.

Right, yes. It has to be like once or twice in the course of a sermon and well -timed.

Correct. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Because it can be distracting where it's like, okay, we've heard it enough.

At Christmas time, everyone should get two or three tickets. And every time they do it, they hand in a ticket for the following year.

Oh, they get them for the whole year, yeah. That's what I love about the spirit. Go ahead,

Tim. Sorry. When I preached my first sermon in Kensington, I felt as though like I wasn't completely ready.

But I was happy to be able to get the opportunity to preach. I think I was maybe 26 or so.

And I feel like everything that I was preaching was a little out of order. But like it was true and it was good stuff.

But there was like this group of old ladies that sat in the front. And they were yelling like amen to everything

I said. But like some of them, it was very encouraging to me being a young pastor.

I want to hear like some feedback. But after a while, I felt as though they weren't really listening to me.

They just kind of wanted to be a part of it. So I had mixed feelings about that afterwards.

But I think to a point, like Jeff said, it's very encouraging if it's limited. But when it's like the entire service and you're kind of just saying stuff that is just secondary to your points,

I feel like there doesn't need to be commentary every sentence. Do you guys have a sermon that was your most memorable sermon?

I guess my last one is usually – sorry, go ahead, Jeff. I have memorable titles because my kids make fun of me.

One of them was the Rainbow Cult of Death. The Rainbow Cult of Death.

And we were talking about the rainbow in Genesis 9 and how there's a rainbow cult of death now that the homosexuals have taken our symbol.

Oh, that's funny. That's good. Yeah. What about you, Tim? You go ahead, Tim. I feel like mine is usually just the last one that I preach for Sundays because I only preach,

I guess, a few months. Every few months when Jeff is on vacation or he goes away to a conference or whatever

I'm called to do it. So it's not like – Jeff preaches 50 -something times a year. So I feel like you might find something more memorable.

But for me, it's the last time I preach for a Sunday. But for youth group, I don't know. I don't think that I have certain ones that I remember where I'm like, that was my favorite one or my most memorable one.

I don't think so. Well, Seth, I'd like to hear what yours was. But I know that your election sermon went viral.

So when you preached before this most recent election, the Lord really used that. Would you count that as one of your most memorable?

Yeah, I would put that high up on the list. Yeah, because I expected maybe a couple hundred people beyond our church to listen to it.

And it was like 22 ,000 people viewed it. So that surprised me.

But I think it was because people weren't hearing it at their church. And so they're like, OK, let's hear what a pastor has to say about this.

And so I preached a sermon on that. But honestly, the most memorable sermon I ever preached was the first sermon

I ever preached. And this was August 7th, 2011. And at this time,

I was a sales rep for a running shoe company. And six months before, I did a clinic at a store, at a

Sheil store, which is a Midwest company, where one of the guys who was listening to me present, he called my boss a couple of days later.

In fact, it was I think it was the next day he called my boss and he said it was the worst presentation he had ever seen.

And so as a 23 -year -old at the time, I was like stunned, you know, devastated.

I'm like, I can't public speak, you know, this isn't a talent I have.

And I remember thinking those thoughts. And around this time, though, I sensed the Lord was leading me towards ministry.

And so on August 7th, 2011, I preached and it felt totally different than any other public presentation

I had ever done. You know, I felt alive. I felt like this is why I'm on the earth to do this very thing.

And after the sermon, everyone's like, you should be a pastor and you have this gift.

And I mean, lots of people said that. And so what it showed me was it wasn't that I couldn't public speak.

It was the content. I wasn't passionate about this. I was passionate about the Word of God.

And once I was able to communicate that, it showed me, yes, this is the calling on my life.

And I think that part of the power of the Spirit in our lives is we didn't choose this as a career.

We chose this because this is our calling. This is what we're supposed to be doing. This is why we draw breath is to proclaim the

Word of God. And so when we get up there in the pulpit, this is the big picture. I mean, we talked about the small picture of preparation and all of that.

But the big picture is the Lord has put us on the earth for this very purpose. And so we need to fulfill that purpose.

And of course it's going to work because this is why He put us here. The Dallas Seminary tagline is

Caruso. And Caruso means proclaim, preach. And I think we can kind of, as we wrap it up here,

Joe, if we could pull up 2 Timothy 4. Be ready in season and out of season.

Reprove, rebuke, exhort in all righteousness. I think that's really where it comes down to.

Like you said at the beginning, if a church has the Word of God proclaimed in the power of the

Holy Spirit, you need spirit and truth in the pulpit. If you have that, the church can power through any force of darkness that comes against it.

Because it's the Word that can't be bound. It can't be chained.

What does Paul say? But the Word of God cannot be chained. So that's our power.

That's what we have. And where the Word of God is heralded, Caruso, where it's preached, then the church will conquer in the world.

We will keep taking ground. There might be speed bumps. There might be, you know, sometimes you tip over or whatever.

But you get back up and you keep moving forward. And as long as you have spirit and truth in the pulpit, the church will keep marching on.

And don't let the lay guys off the hook, guys. The lay guys need to know their

Bible and have it ready in their pocket to pull it out and to get into it correctly.

And preach on the corners as your pastor equipped you to do.

Yeah, and the sermon isn't complete in the preaching of it. It's in the hearing of the Word as well. So that's where the

Berean mindset comes in. The person coming in and sitting in the pew listening is an active participant in that sermon event.

They're to be a Berean. They're to receive the Word of Truth like the nourishing food that it is.

So unless they're hearing that way, then the whole thing isn't happening the right way. Yeah. Lay people need haters too.

Yes. So let's close it up, guys. You ready? You see a brother down, lift him up.