How would you know your house is on fire? This may seem a silly question. Presumably, you would be able to smell the smoke, see the flames, feel the heat and hear the crackling blaze, hopefully even the early warning of the fire alarm.
Well, when reports started to come out from Asbury, Kentucky, of a new work of the Spirit, [in February 2023] I began to ask friends what revival might look like if God initiated such a movement in our city. One response was that the preaching might become more characterised by unction, or the Spirit’s anointing. The word is not commonly used these days, even among evangelicals. The OED records that it occurs less than once in every 2 million words, compared with three times per million in the early 19th century. As the former elder (or denominational equivalent) of one church told me when his church was searching for a new senior pastor, he was amazed to discover that even fellow elders were unfamiliar with the concept. In fairness, his brother elder was probably not alone.
Some apparently associate the term merely with the faithful preaching of the gospel. Yet Spurgeon would stress that it goes beyond just that. For example, he opened one sermon by asserting that ‘unless we have the unction of the Holy One, and are endued with power from on high, in vain shall we seek to preach good tidings to the meek, to bind up the broken-hearted, or to proclaim the opening of the prison to them that are bound’. It is perhaps similar to what the Welsh refer to as hwyl: ‘an emotional quality which inspires and sustains impassioned eloquence’, ‘a form of eloquence which seems to exert remarkable influence on the hearers’.
Wesley Duewel captured a common description of unction in his book title Ablaze for God. Martyn Lloyd-Jones said that ‘preaching is theology coming through a man who is on fire’. John Wesley captured the same imagery when he observed: ‘If the preacher will burn, others will come to see the fire’.
Lloyd-Jones, again, describes unction as ‘an access of power. It is God giving power, and enabling, through the Spirit, to the preacher in order that he may do this work in a manner that lifts it up beyond the efforts and endeavours of man to a position in which the preacher is being used by the Spirit and becomes the channel through whom the Spirit works’. In the language of the New Testament, unction characterises those who preach ‘in power and in the Holy Spirit’ (1Thess.1:5), ‘in demonstration of the Spirit and ... the power of God’ (1Cor. 2:4-5).
It is important to note that this is not a question of style. The two most powerful sermons that I recall ever hearing were from two very different preachers with very different styles of preaching: one enthusiastically bubbly, the other gently restrained. As it happens, the two sermons, delivered over 30 years apart, were on adjacent chapters in the same book of the Bible. Unalike in style, both compellingly expounded, in the words of Mark Dever’s Nine Marks of a Healthy Church, what was ‘said in a particular passage of Scripture, carefully explaining its meaning and applying it to the congregation’.
In his short book, Preaching in the Holy Spirit, Albert Martin helpfully notes: ‘The reason God has ordained preaching as His unique method for dismantling the kingdom of darkness and building the kingdom of His Son has more to it than the bare statement of truth. God has given this unique place to preaching because in preaching, the effect of truth on the redeemed man who preaches is both manifested and embodied in the very act of conveying that truth. [In his book, Thoughts on Preaching, J.W.]Alexander recognized this when he wrote that “the whole mass of truth, by the sudden passion of the speaker, is made red-hot and burns its way.” ’ (emphasis added).
As John Owen observed, preachers must have ‘experience of the power of the things we preach to others’. For, ‘no man preaches that sermon well to others that doth not first preach it to his own heart’. ‘To bring our hearts to preach’ he continues, ‘is to be transformed into the power of these truths; or to find the power of them, both before, in fashioning our minds and hearts, and in delivering of them, that we may have benefit; and to be acted with zeal for God and compassion to the souls of men’.
Yet, how would you recognise this unction of the Spirit, this fiery power of God? To return to the question with which we started, how would you know that your preacher is on fire? The answer is simple: for those of us who ‘have the mind of Christ’, our senses can unquestionably discern the Spirit: we can see, feel and hear the Spirit. As Al Martin, again, helpfully explains: ‘It will be evident to the discerning people of God that when [God’s servant] preaches the Word of God, he’s giving you something more than the cumulative effect of what he has by nature and what he’s acquired by discipline; there is something on that utterance that has no explanation but the present power and activity of the living God.’ Or, as the apostle Paul more succinctly put it, ‘the things of the Spirit of God … are spiritually discerned’ (2 Cor. 2:14).
Yet the full verse also carries a warning: not all have eyes to see or ears to hear. For, ‘the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned’. May we, in Christ, be ‘those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil’ (Heb. 5:14). May we ‘be transformed by the renewal of [our] mind, that by testing [we] may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect’ (Rom. 12:2).
Of course, God in His sovereignty can use any sermon and any preacher to achieve His eternal purposes. With the apostle Paul we can rejoice that ‘whether in pretence or in truth, Christ is proclaimed’ (Phil.1:18). Nevertheless, let us pray for revival. Let us pray that our preachers would be anointed with the unction of the Spirit. Let us pray, too, that we would be those who, in the words of John Stott, ‘allow the word of God to confront us, to disturb our security, to undermine our complacency and to overthrow our patterns of thought and behaviour’.
