In the early 1900s Methodist Bishop William Quail carried the idea further by asking and answering a rhetorical question: '"Preaching is the art of making a sermon and delivering it?' he asked. 'Why no, that is not preaching. Preaching is the art of making a preacher and delivering that!'"4

These were helpful, groundbreaking observations when qualified and not taken too far, at least not to the extent Bishop Quail did when he concluded: "Therefore the elemental business in preaching is not with the preaching, but with the preacher. It is no trouble to preach, but a vast trouble to construct a preacher. What then, in the light of this, is the task of a preacher? Mainly this, the amassing of a great soul so as to have something worthwhile to give -- the sermon is the preacher up-to-date."5

The bishop seems to have forgotten in his enthusiasm Paul's declaration, "For we do not preach ourselves" (2 Cor. 4:5). Indeed, many modern preachers do preach themselves with their endless personal anecdotes and inner therapeutic explanations and confessions. Nevertheless Brooks is right. The truth of God's Word "must come through [the preacher's] character, his affections, his whole intellectual and moral being. It must come genuinely through him."

And here is the great professional danger, because it is possible for us preachers to imagine that we have spiritually been to places we have never visited. Phillips Brooks observed that in the repeated loud proclamation of the grand truths of the faith we can become like railroad conductors who imagine by saying, "All aboard for Albany" or "All aboard for Chicago" that they have actually been there. We can beg men to repent and yet grow so familiar with the whole doctrine of repentance that we are dulled to the fact that we have never ourselves repented.6

C. S. Lewis saw the same thing: "Those, like myself, whose imagination far exceeds their obedience are subject to a just penalty; we easily imagine conditions far higher than we have actually reached. If we describe what we have imagined we may make others, and make ourselves believe that we have really been there -- and so fool both them and ourselves."7 Richard Baxter warned, "Lest they offer the bread of life to others which they themselves have not eaten."8

In the light of these realities, Lewis once advised a friend who was considering theological studies to forgo them, observing: "Someone has said, 'None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterized with holy things;' sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job .... I've always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I'd advise you to get on with your tent-making."9

So let us all be warned as we preachers live our days amidst the wonders of God's Word and the immensities of its great truths that what we preach must come through our souls. As the godly John Owen said: "If the word do not dwell with power in us, it will not pass with power from us"10 -- Balaam's donkey notwithstanding! However, nothing is more powerful than God's Word preached by one whose heart has been harrowed and sanctified by the Word he is preaching.