I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teachings.
His words had power because they accorded with his thoughts; and his thoughts had reality and depth because they harmonized with the life he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had been dissolved into the precious draught.
Let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself.
Always carry with you into the pulpit a sense of the immense consequences which may depend on your full and faithful presentation of the truth.
The orator is thereby an orator that he keeps his feet ever on a fact.
Settle in your mind, that no sermon is worth much in which the Lord is not the principal speaker. There may be poetry, refinement, historic truth, moral truth, pathos, and all the charms of rhetoric; but all will be lost, for the purposes of preaching, if the word of the Lord is not the staple of the discourse.
Every sermon ought to have the doctrine of Christ in it in form or in solution.
