Real Truth Matters Podcast

Michael Durham
  • 5.0 (48)
  • Christianity
  • Weekly

Walking and communion with God are not automatic. How then do you experience the reality of a personal relationship with God, or read your Bible and experience God’s presence? Put simply, how do you know God? These are huge questions that need serious discussion. Every Tuesday, Michael Durham of Real Truth Matters Ministries will lead in such a conversation. This podcast tackles the experiential side of Christianity with teaching, interviews, and question and answer episodes. If you want to grow in fellowship with God in the biblical manner known by the orthodox and sound men of God of the old paths, then tune in each week to the Real Truth Matters Podcast.

  1. Oct 27

    THE HUMILITY OF FAITH Part 2

    Send us Fan Mail Most of us want God to explain Himself before we trust Him. We have read the hard chapters, rehearsed the objections, and quietly told ourselves that peace will come once the questions are settled. It has not come, because it was never promised there. Romans 9 raises questions Paul never fully answers, and he never pretends otherwise. Faith is not blind, and it is not a leap into the dark. It is a leap into the light, resting on the best reason there is: God’s own revealed character. Faith does not say, “I understand everything.” No honest believer has ever said that and meant it. Faith says, “I understand enough about God to trust everything He does.” That is not a smaller claim. It is a higher one. It is one thing to trust God when we know why, and another thing entirely to trust Him when we do not. So Jesus said to Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” The man who must have everything explained will be crippled by anxiety. The one who trusts the God who understands is kept in peace. Where do we see that God’s heart toward us? At the cross. “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?” The gift was not given to the deserving. Christ died for us while we were still sinners, while we were enemies, while we were ungodly. The cross does not prove we are lovable. It proves that He is love, and every doubt about His goodness has to argue with Calvary before it can go any further. Then we follow Paul to the end of his hardest argument, and we find him not resolving the mystery but on his knees: “Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” Hard doctrine, unanswered mystery, open praise. That is the natural shape of mature faith. Abraham looked over Sodom and asked, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” We look at Romans 9 and ask the same thing in other words: shall not the God of all grace do right? If our theology does not lead us to worship, something has gone wrong, and the question was never whether we can explain God. It is whether we know Him. In This Episode Why “I understand enough about God to trust everything He does” is a stronger confession than “I understand everything.”What Jesus meant when He told Thomas that those who believe without seeing are blessed, and why demanding explanations steals our peace.How Romans 8:32 settles the question of God’s goodness: if He did not spare His own Son for His enemies, He will not turn cold toward His children.Why Paul’s argument in Romans 9 through 11 ends not in an answer but in worship, and why that is a sign of health, not failure.What it means for Christ to be real to us, not merely a fact we affirm, and how we know when we are out of fellowship with Him.Why we can be bold before God even in our ignorance: “I was blind, and now I see.”You may never receive the explanation you have been waiting for. Go to the cross instead, and look at a Father who gave up His Son for His enemies.

  2. Oct 20

    THE HUMILITY OF FAITH Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail You know the doctrines. You could explain election and defend the sovereignty of God across a kitchen table. Yet when providence turned hard, the first thing that rose in you was not trust but suspicion, and that has unsettled you more than you have told anyone. Two men stand before the same mystery. Abraham looks down on Sodom, knowing almost nothing of what God is about to do, and says, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). Centuries later, someone in a Roman house church hears Paul read of Jacob loved and Esau hated, and says, “Is there unrighteousness with God?” (Romans 9:14). Neither man had more information than the other. In some ways Abraham had less. He had no completed Bible and no cross behind him. The difference was never what they knew about God’s plan. It was what each had already settled about God Himself. From Romans 9:14, Michael Durham shows that faith begins with a settled conviction that God is the Judge, that He is righteous by nature, and that He cannot act against His own character. God is not a man, that He should lie (Numbers 23:19). So faith reasons forward. Unbelief says, “I don’t understand this, so God must be wrong.” Faith says, “I know God. I don’t understand this, so God must be right.” Joseph named his brothers’ evil for what it was and still read it through God’s goodness: “You meant evil against me; but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20). Michael tells of holding his five-year-old son’s head still in an emergency room while a doctor stitched a deep cut. The boy wept, but he never once asked why. He kept his eyes on his father’s face. Later, kneeling beside his wife after their newborn daughter was rushed away not breathing, Michael prayed the words of Abraham. We may ask God our questions. He welcomes them. But we must never put Him on trial. God is too good to be unkind and too wise to make a mistake. In This Episode Why do I know so much about God and still meet hard providence with suspicion?Abraham and the Romans 9 objector faced the same mystery. Why did one respond with worship and the other with accusation?Faith is not blind. It rests on the best reason there is: God’s own revealed character.There is a difference between asking God a question and demanding that He give an account.If our theology doesn't lead us to “God will do right,” something is wrong with our theology.Is God real to me, or only a compendium of what I have studied?Abraham had no cross behind him. We do, and the One who did not spare His own Son has already answered whether He can be trusted in the dark.

  3. Oct 13

    WHEN MAN SITS IN JUDGMENT OF GOD Part 2

    Send us Fan Mail A phone call in the night. A diagnosis with no cure. A prayer you have prayed through your tears for years, met only with silence. You know the door. You have stood at it. And you know the question that rises there before you can stop it. Episode Summary Michael Durham closes the message he began with Romans 9:14 by moving from the courtroom of the theologian to the courtroom of the grieving. He tells of his own mother-in-law, saved since childhood, who went blind late in life and asked him plainly, "Why? I've served the Lord since I was twelve." That question, he shows, is Job's question — the same objection dressed in personal grief instead of doctrine. For thirty-seven chapters Job demands his day in court, using the very language of a lawsuit: a case to present, arguments to fill his mouth, an audience with God he believes he is owed. And he gets it. But he never gets the explanation. What he receives instead is a sight of God's glory that makes the demand for an answer simply stop mattering — "now my eye sees You; therefore I abhor myself and repent." He steps down off the bench without a single question answered, because he finally sees who was sitting there all along. From there Michael widens the lens: this is not a debate confined to Calvinism or election. It is the oldest question there is — can God be trusted when His ways cannot be traced? He shows how the same accusation surfaces wherever the modern heart has already decided what must be true, whether about hell, about human sexuality, about the exclusivity of Christ, and how it can rise just as easily in a believer wearied by life. The answer is not an argument but a cross: the God who sits on the bench has already shown, at Calvary, exactly what kind of Judge He is — One who satisfied justice and bestowed mercy in a single act, at His own infinite cost. Grace, Michael says, is what restores God to His rightful seat. Every true conversion is Eden reversed — the sinner climbs down, and God resumes the throne that was always His. In This Episode What do you do with a "why" that God never answers — the way He never answered Job?Is questioning God's fairness really just an academic debate, or is it the oldest accusation in the human heart?How the demand for an explanation can hide inside a sincere prayer, even inside a believer's fight against besetting sin.Why did Job's encounter with God's glory settle him without a single question being answered?What the cross actually proves about the kind of Judge God is, when no other proof will do.Why is it more serious for a child of God to question His rightness than for an unbeliever to do the same?Neither Job, nor a grieving mother, nor you are owed an explanation — but each one is offered something better: enough of His glory that the explanations stop feeling necessary.

  4. Oct 6

    WHEN MAN SITS IN JUDGMENT OF GOD Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail You have done this before. Maybe not with words — maybe only with a feeling, quiet and unconfessed, the moment life didn't go the way you thought it should. In that moment, without ever meaning to, you stepped out of the dock and climbed onto the bench. In Romans 9, Paul is answering a painful question: if God's chosen people cannot be separated from Him, why is Israel — the elect nation — largely rejecting her own Messiah? His answer, drawn from Ishmael and Isaac, then from Jacob and Esau, is that not all Israel is Israel; God's mercy has always run on His own sovereign choosing, not on human willing or running. That answer provokes an objection every honest reader eventually asks: is there unrighteousness with God? Michael Durham shows that before Paul ever explains that mercy in verse 15, he stops to deal with something more urgent than confusion. Verse 14 is not primarily a question — it is a judgment rendered against the Judge, dressed up as a question. And Paul answers it not first with logic, but with the strongest negative the Greek language has: certainly not. God forbid. That order matters more than it first appears. A teacher interested only in the intellect would have moved straight to the explanation. Paul doesn't, because the deeper problem in the human heart was never a failure to understand — it is the presumption to judge. Michael traces this instinct back to Eden, where the serpent's promise to Eve was never really about fruit; it was a promise of jurisdiction, the power to decide for herself what counts as good and evil. Every sin since has restated that same claim. And this isn't only the unbeliever's problem — it is the believer's temptation too, whenever God doesn't perform to our expectations and disappointment curdles into an unspoken verdict against Him. Humility, Michael says, questions itself before it ever questions God. The man of Romans 9:14 never gets there. He questions God first, and never himself — and calls it conviction. In This Episode Is it really so wrong to ask whether God is being fair — or is the asking itself already the problem?Why did Paul answer the "unfairness" objection with a rebuke before he ever gave an explanation?What the serpent actually offered Eve in the garden, and why it was jurisdiction, not information.Why the sin of sitting in judgment of God never announces itself as sin — it feels like principled conviction.How this same temptation reappears in the heart of a mature believer, not just an unbeliever, when God doesn't keep pace with our expectations.Why a clay pot demanding an answer from its potter is not a picture of boldness, but of absurdity.There is a courtroom none of us have the right to enter — and mercy is only ever found by the man who leaves the bench and gets back on his knees.

  5. Sep 29

    THE HIGH PRIEST WE NEED Part 2

    Send us Fan Mail You sinned again this week — the sin you promised the Lord and yourself you were finished with. And when you knelt to confess it, the prayer stalled somewhere between your knees and your lips, because a voice inside insisted: not this time. Michael Durham returns to Hebrews 7:26 to press further into what kind of priest could actually help men like us — men who wanted to obey this week and didn't. Under the old covenant, uncleanness moved in one direction only. Touch the leper, and you became the leper. That was the law every Israelite lived under, and it's the law we still expect grace to obey when we come to God stained from sin's failure. But when the leper reached for Christ — "If You are willing, You can make me clean" — Jesus reached back, and for the first time in years, a hand touched that man's skin and did not recoil. The disease did not move to Jesus. His holiness moved to the leper. That is the doctrine buried in one word: undefiled. Your sin cannot contaminate Him any more than darkness can stain the sun. Michael also unpacks the phrase "separate from sinners," because it's easy to hear that as distance — as if Christ withdraws from us the moment we fail Him again. It means the opposite. He came near tax collectors and sinners without ever becoming one of them, and He comes near you in your worst week without being stained by it. And when Hebrews calls Him "made higher than the heavens," the writer isn't finishing on abstraction; he's anchoring us. Our hope is not tied to a ship the waves can still reach — it's fastened inside the veil, in the presence of God, where our High Priest has already gone before us. He doesn't argue your case by tallying your tears or your repentance. He argues it by presenting Himself. That is the only plea heaven has ever needed. In This Episode: Why does grace not just tolerate your uncleanness at a safe distance, but reach in and reverse it?What does "separate from sinners" actually mean — and why is it not the alienation you assume it is?Can a man who keeps failing the same way, year after year, believe Christ is not yet finished with him?Why is your own repentance never the argument your High Priest presents on your behalf?What does it mean that your hope is anchored beyond the veil, where the storm cannot reach it?Whatever ledger your conscience is keeping, He is not asking you to settle it before you come — He is asking you to come.

  6. Sep 22

    THE HIGH PRIEST WE NEED Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail There is a courtroom you enter every day, whether you meant to or not, and your own conscience has already taken the stand against you. You know the charge. You have known it for years, even if you have never said it out loud. The question this morning is not whether you will stand trial — you already are. The question is who will stand beside you. We are not sinners in the soft, apologetic sense our culture has taught us to be comfortable with — we are criminals against a holy God, and criminals need more than sympathy in the courtroom. They need an advocate whose own record cannot be turned against him. Hebrews 7:26 gives us five words for the High Priest we need, and this first message dwells on two of them: holy and harmless. Christ's holiness was never achieved the way ours is achieved, through failure, repentance, and slow recovery. It was simply who He was, from the cradle to the cross, and it is that unearned, unbroken record He now clothes us in. We are not standing before the Father on the strength of this morning's devotion or last night's failure. We are standing in Him. The second word cuts just as deep in the other direction. Holy describes His relationship to the Father; harmless describes His relationship to us. Here is a Priest who holds absolute power over every secret you have ever kept, and who has never once closed His fist. He did not call down twelve legions of angels. He did not expose what He knows. He met the adulterous woman and the weeping sinner in Simon's house with the same word: go in peace. If someone with authority over you has ever used it as a weapon instead of a shelter, do not judge Christ by those hands. He is not in the room to hurt you. He is in the room to rescue you — and He has already spent His power doing it. In This Episode Why the difference between calling yourself a sinner and admitting you are a criminal against God matters more than it soundsHow Christ's holiness differs from ours — not grown through repentance and recovery, but complete from the beginningWhy the Father can look at you and call you His holy child, and how that is not wishful thinking but the actual mechanics of the GospelWhat it means that Christ is harmless — not weak, but powerful and refusing to use that power against youWhy the pain and hardship in your life is not evidence that God has turned against youHow Christ dealt with the woman caught in adultery and the sinful woman in Simon's house, and what that says about how He deals with youWherever you have been keeping score this morning, stop — and look instead to the Priest who has already settled the account.

  7. Sep 15

    THE PROMISE OF HEALING Part 2

    Send us Fan Mail Do you love your dull heart? Do you delight in the distance you feel from God, content to sit in your seat, silent and estranged, while the Father's table sits open and waiting? Part one named the ache. This message asks the harder question: do you actually want to be healed of it? Michael returns to Hosea 14:4 to show us a God who heals gently, without lecture, without rebuke, because His anger turned away from us before we ever turned back to Him. He grounds this in the cross, where Christ bore the full wrath that was ours, so that when God disciplines the wandering believer now, it is the discipline of a Father who chases the one He loves, not the wrath of a Judge settling accounts. Using the physical process of healing, a wound plugged, cleansed, and restored, he shows how the Spirit does the same work in a hardened, callused heart. He identifies three ways the Spirit brings this healing: a gracious invitation to return, spoken plainly and without condition; a longing planted in the heart for the Lord's fellowship that no husk of this world can satisfy; and the remembrance of the gospel itself, the wrath He bore, the pit He pulled us from, the grace that saved us and must save us still. The answer to backsliding is never a resolution to try harder. It is a fresh look at the cross. Michael closes by asking, plainly, whether we will come like the lost sheep crying to be found, or remain silent in the seat, and he leaves no room to pretend that question does not matter. In This Episode Am I actually content with the distance I feel from God, and what does that contentment say about me?Why does God's discipline of a wandering believer never carry His anger or wrath?What does the Spirit actually do to heal a hardened, calloused heart?Is repenting the same as promising God I will try harder from now on?Why must remembering the gospel, and not renewed effort, be the cure for a wandering heart?The question was never whether God is willing to heal you. That question is settled. The only question left is whether you will let the Shepherd find you.

  8. Sep 8

    THE PROMISE OF HEALING Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail You loved God more last year than you do today, and you know it. You have not walked away from Him, not exactly, but something has cooled, and you carry the quiet dread that He may be finished with you. Michael Durham says otherwise, and he says it from the mouth of God Himself. We do not like to admit how far our hearts wander in even one good hour, let alone one bad week. Michael takes us to Hosea 14:4, where God says to His backslidden people, "I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from him." He shows us that spiritual declension is not an exception in the Christian life but the normal drift of a soul left to itself, the way a swimmer moving upstream slips backward the moment he stops fighting the current. We are not meant to merely believe our depravity as a doctrine. We are meant to feel it, so that the feeling drives us into a desperate dependency on the God who alone can hold us. But the text does not leave us in our drift. It anchors us in a covenant that our failures cannot break. Michael traces the certainty of that healing and the love that motivates it from Micah's wonder that God would pardon iniquity to Christ's own prayer for a faltering Peter to the promise that God's attention turns most tenderly toward the child who is sick and unwell. The initiative is always His. He does not wait for us to find our way back to Him before He moves. He moves because His love will not let Him do otherwise, and He is moving toward you this day. In This Episode Why does my love for Christ grow cold even when I have not consciously chosen to walk away from Him?Is it enough to believe my sinfulness as a doctrine, or must I actually feel my need for God?Can I trust that God has not given up on me when my devotion has been so inconsistent?What does it mean that God takes the first step toward the backslider, before any repentance has occurred?How does the covenant God made with Peter assure me that my own restoration is certain?Backsliding is real, but the covenant standing behind it is more real still. He is not waiting for you to come find Him. He is already seeking you.

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About

Walking and communion with God are not automatic. How then do you experience the reality of a personal relationship with God, or read your Bible and experience God’s presence? Put simply, how do you know God? These are huge questions that need serious discussion. Every Tuesday, Michael Durham of Real Truth Matters Ministries will lead in such a conversation. This podcast tackles the experiential side of Christianity with teaching, interviews, and question and answer episodes. If you want to grow in fellowship with God in the biblical manner known by the orthodox and sound men of God of the old paths, then tune in each week to the Real Truth Matters Podcast.

Information

  • Creator
    Michael Durham
  • Years Active
    2009 - 2026
  • Episodes
    200
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Real Truth Matters Podcast
  • Show Website
    Real Truth Matters Podcast

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