Real Truth Matters Podcast

Michael Durham
  • 5.0 (48)
  • Christianity
  • Updated 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. 3h ago

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. Sep 1

    BLESSED IS HE WHO IS NOT OFFENDED Part Two

    Send us Fan Mail Somewhere along the way, we decided that happiness requires an explanation. That we cannot be at peace with God until He accounts for Himself. But what if the very desire to have God explain His ways to you is the thing standing between you and the happiness He promises? Michael Durham continues in Luke 7:18–23, turning from John's crisis to Jesus' answer: "Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard." Jesus does not defend Himself to John. He points to His works — the blind seeing, the lame walking, the dead raised — and lets them speak. Durham presses further into what John actually expected: a Messiah who would overthrow Rome. Jesus was doing something far larger — defeating the tyranny of sin itself — and John's stumbling was never really about whether Jesus was the Christ. It was about whether John would trust the Messiah when the Messiah refused to act like the Messiah he had imagined. From there, Durham unpacks the word "offended" — not mere insult, but the idea of stumbling, tripping over Jesus Himself because He will not conform to our expectations. He is careful to distinguish this from a false asceticism that treats unhappiness as spiritual virtue; the Beatitudes themselves promise blessedness, and Psalm 100 commands gladness. True happiness, Durham insists, is not tied to circumstances but to the unshakable character of Christ. He closes with four practical postures for the believer standing where John stood: cooperate with God rather than demand explanations, bring Him into the difficulty through prayer rather than silence, look for where He is already leading rather than waiting for full clarity, and — above all — do not run. Whatever God is doing, however confusing His providence, the call is not to understand Him but to trust Him. In This Episode Why Jesus answered John's doubt with works, not explanationsWhat John's expectation of a political Messiah reveals about our own expectations of GodWhy the word "offended" really means stumbling over Christ HimselfWhy happiness in the Christian life was never meant to depend on understanding God's waysFour practical postures for trusting God when His providence makes no sense — cooperate, pray, watch for His leadership, and don't runWhy fleeing from a confusing providence only deepens the confusion, and staying is itself an act of faithHe is not asking you to understand Him. He is asking you to let Him be God — and to be happy while He does.

  7. Aug 25

    BLESSED IS HE WHO IS NOT OFFENDED Part 1

    Send us Fan Mail There is a particular kind of doubt that only comes after you have been right about God once. Not the doubt of the unconvinced, but the doubt of the man who saw the dove descend, heard the voice from heaven, and now sits in a cell wondering if he imagined the whole thing. We know that cell. Most of us have sat in some version of it. Michael Durham opens Luke 7:18–23 with a question we don't expect from the man who introduced the world to the Lamb of God. From prison, John the Baptist sends word to Jesus: "Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?" It is not curiosity. It is crisis. The man who baptized Christ, who heard the Father's voice, who preached with more certainty than almost anyone in Scripture, is now offended at the very Messiah he announced — because Jesus has not moved the way John expected Him to move. Durham traces this same pattern through Abraham, Joseph, and David: men who thought they had God figured out, and were proven wrong every time, not because God failed them, but because He refused to conform to their plans. The burden of this message is not John's biography. It is ours. We build our expectations of what God must do, and when He does something else — something slower, harder, less explicable — our faith wobbles exactly the way John's did. Durham insists this is not evidence of unbelief; it is the normal cost of walking by faith and not by sight, and the antidote is not a better explanation of our circumstances but a return to the unchanging character of the God who is directing them. Jesus does not defend Himself to John. He simply points to His works and lets them speak. That answer, Durham argues, is the one we need too. In This Episode Why disappointment with God is not the same thing as unbelief — and why John the Baptist proves itWhat it means that God is, by His nature, a non-conformist to our plansHow Abraham, Joseph, and David each faced the same crisis of unmet expectationWhy bad circumstances do not mean you have been faithlessWhat it looks like to walk by faith when you cannot walk by sightWhy the evidence of God's faithfulness was never meant to be found in His timingHis purposes have not stopped moving toward you. They have simply stopped moving the way you expected — and that is where faith, not certainty, is asked to carry you the rest of the way.

  8. Aug 18

    A DISCUSSION ABOUT PREACHING Part 3

    Send us Fan Mail You have driven home from church more than once wondering whether anything actually happened up there, or whether you simply performed a well-constructed talk. You cannot always tell the difference between a sermon and true preaching — not from the pulpit, and sometimes not even in the moment. This is the ache no seminary prepared you for. In this concluding conversation on preaching, Michael Durham and Mack Tomlinson turn from theology to practice and take up a word the modern church has largely surrendered to abuse: anointing. They trace it through the apostolic preaching of Acts — Peter, Stephen, Philip, Paul — men who often spoke without notes because the Holy Spirit gave them, in the hour, exactly what the moment required. But they do not stop at first-century extraordinary gifting. They press into what the anointing means for the ordinary man in an ordinary pulpit this Sunday: that God's presence resting on a preacher is not a Pentecostal excess to be embarrassed by, but a biblical reality every faithful man must seek, and every faithful congregation must pray for. The conversation turns practical and searching. Durham confesses that decades of preaching have taught him that preparation without desperate prayer is presumption, and prayer without preparation is likewise disobedience — the two must marry before a man ever climbs the steps to the pulpit. He and Tomlinson discuss Spurgeon's whispered confession of dependence before he preached, the difference between degrees of anointing across church history, and the sober reminder from men like Andrew Bonar and Kenneth MacRae that the same Spirit who sends revival also sustains the plodding, faithful, unspectacular work of ordinary ministry. The episode closes not with formula but with an invitation: to want, again, what only the Spirit can give. In This Episode What the New Testament actually means when it uses the word anointing, and why the term has been hijackedHow the apostles preached in Acts — often extemporaneously — and what that reveals about dependence versus preparationWhy sermon preparation without agonizing prayer is one danger, and prayer without preparation is anotherSpurgeon's private prayer of dependence in the moments before he stepped into the pulpitThe difference between the ordinary, sustaining work of the Spirit and the extraordinary seasons of revivalWhat Andrew Bonar and Kenneth MacRae's diaries teach about a life given over to seeking God's power in preachingIf you have ever stood in a pulpit, or sat under one, and sensed that something more was possible than what you have known — you are not wrong, and He has not stopped giving what only He can give.

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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
    197
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Real Truth Matters Podcast
  • Show Website
    Real Truth Matters Podcast

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