Yesterday, I posted that we should be praying for fires when the Word is preached in our local churches (see here).
Below are more quotes on unction or Spirit empowered boldness and clarity.
“We are not inspired as the apostles were, but the Spirit of inspiration illumines our minds and grants unction to our lips as we, too, seek to combine spiritual truths with spiritual words.” Edmund Clowney[1]
“It appears to me that in the Bible, it is the message that is anointed by God as much as the messenger. Unction seems to live in God-given messages, as fire dwells in lava. The fire is in the message and the warning to the preacher is not to let it cool. Unction is not so much poured out as lifted up and delivered . . .when we faithfully reiterate Scripture, when our exposition exhales what the Lord has breathed into it, when our hearts are impassioned with Bible truth and our characters are refined by its heat, there is unction.” Lee Eclov[2]
“What is preaching? Logic on fire! Eloquent reason! Are these contradictions? Of they are not. Reason concerning this Truth ought to be mightily eloquent, as you see it in the case of the Apostle Paul and others. It is theology on fire. And a theology which does not take fire, I maintain, is a defective theology.”[3] David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.
“What is [unction]? It is the Holy Spirit falling upon the preacher in a special manner. It is 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.” David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.[4]
[1] Edmund P. Clowney and Gerald Lewis Bray, The Church, Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 251.
[2] Lee Eclov, "How Does Unction Function?," in The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching, ed. Haddon Robinson and Craig Brian Larson (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), 82, 84.
[3] D. Martyn LLoyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972), 97.
[4] Ibid., 305.
