“What is spiritual power? First, It is the power that makes the hearers to see themselves as God sees them, and humbles them in the dust. It sends people home from the house of God not feeling better but worse; not always admiring the preacher, but often so tried that they perhaps resolve that they will never hear him again. But they know from their inmost soul that he is right and they are wrong. It is the power of conviction; the power that awakens the conscience and says to the soul, “You are the man.”It is the power of which the apostle speaks in connection with his own ministry: “by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”
They that possess this power will not always be popular preachers, but they will always be effectual workers. Sometimes the hearer will almost think that they are personal, and that someone has disclosed to them his secret sins. Speaking of such a sermon, one of our most honored evangelists said that he felt so indignant with the preacher under whom he was converted that he waited for some time near the door for the purpose of giving him a trashing for daring to expose him in the way he had done, thinking that somebody had informed on him. Let us covet this power. It is the very stamp and seal of the Holy Ghost on a faithful minister.
It is the power that lifts up Christ and makes Him real to the apprehension of the hearer. Some sermons leave upon the mind a vivid impression of the truth; others leave upon the mind the picture of the Savior. It is not so much an idea as a Person. This is true preaching, and this is the Holy Spirit’s most blessed and congenial ministry. He loves to draw in heavenly lines the face of Jesus and make Him shine out over every page of the Bible, and every paragraph of the sermon as a face of beauty and a heart of love. Let us cultivate this power, for this is what the struggling, hungry world wants to know its Savior. “We would see Jesus” is still its cry; and the answer still is, “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me.”
Next, this power leads men to decision. It is not merely that they know something they did not know before, that they get new thoughts and conceptions of truth which they carry away to remember and reflect upon, nor even that they feel the deepest and most stirring emotions of religious feeling, but the power of the Spirit always presses them to action— prompt, decisive, positive action. The power of the Holy Ghost leads men to decide for God and to enlist against Satan, to give up habits of sin and to make great and everlasting decisions. The Lord grant us so to speak in His name, in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that the result shall be, as Paul himself expresses it on writing to the Thessalonians, “Our word came unto you not in word only, but in power, and ye turned from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven, even Jesus, which saved us from the wrath to come.”