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Before we ask how to preach, or even why we preach, there's a prior question most preachers never stop to answer: what gives preaching its weight in the first place?

It's not the preacher's gifting. Not his training. Not his platform. The power of preaching to convict, convert, comfort, and call a person to repentance comes from one place — the authority of the Word being preached. And that leads to the thesis of this episode: a message of supreme authority demands supreme clarity. The preacher who muddles the Word hasn't just failed at communication. He's failed at stewardship.

In this episode, Jonathan McClintock builds the case from Scripture itself — the God-breathed Word of 2 Timothy 3, the Spirit-carried prophets of 2 Peter 1, and the most vivid picture of authority in all of Scripture: Jesus in the wilderness, answering every temptation with "it is written."

You'll work through:

• Why "God-breathed" (theopneustos) changes everything about how you handle the text
• What it means that the Living Word relied on the written Word to defeat the enemy
• How the authority of Scripture is actively at work through the Spirit every time it's preached
• The freeing truth that you don't have to manufacture conviction — and the sobering truth that obscurity puts obstacles in front of the Spirit's work
• One question to ask of your main idea before this Sunday

This is part of a series drawn from Course 3 of the Clear Preaching Academy — a full theology of preaching.

The authority was never yours to generate. Your job is to get out of its way — and preach it clearly enough that nothing obscures the breath of God.