He could not understand how a man could prepare a sermon weeks before it was given. "I must give it red-hot," he would say. His most remarkable gift was his power of almost perfect composition. It was noted that he was one of the few preachers who spoke better than he wrote. His sermons were reported by stenographers and they needed little correction.
He was able to create literature in the very act of delivery. He once said, "I have always found that my own comfort and efficiency in preaching have been in direct proportion to the depth of my daily communion with God. I know no way in which we can do our work but in fellowship with God, in keeping up the habits of the student's life, which needs some power of saying 'No' and by conscientious pulpit preparation. The secret of success in everything is trust in God and hard work."
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Until after middle age he preferred textual preaching, but in his later years he began to do expository work. His Expositions of Holy Scripture are in thirty-one volumes, which he completed in his retirement. He approached his text in the spirit of a learner. He did not bring his ideas to the Bible but strove to discover and explain God's thoughts that he found there. There is a greater amount of sound exegesis in Maclaren's preaching than in any other preacher.
Robertson Nicoll, in his obituary notice of Maclaren in The British Weekly, said: "It is difficult to believe that his Expositions of Holy Scripture will be superceded. Will there ever be again such a combination of spiritual insight, of scholarship, of passion, of style, of keen intellectual powers? He was clearly a man of genius and men of genius are rare. So long as preachers care to teach from the Scriptures they will find their best guide and help in him."
As an example of his homiletical skill turn to a sermon in his exposition of Genesis, entitled "A Coffin in Egypt." The text is Gen. 50:26: "They embalmed him and he was put in a coffin in Egypt."
Maclaren begins: "So closes the book of Genesis. During all the period leading up to the Exodus, Israel is left with a mummy and a hope. For three centuries that silent coffin in Egypt preached its impressive messages. What did it say?
"That coffin was a silent reminder of immortality. It was a herald of hope. It was a preacher of patience. It was a pledge of progression."
He concludes: "The average Christian of today may well be sent to school to Joseph on his deathbed. We have a better inheritance and fuller, clearer promises and facts on which to trust. Shame on us if we have a feebler faith."
Ernest H. Jeffs, in his Princes of the Modern Pulpit, says: "The charm of Maclaren's preaching was intellectual and artistic. It lay in the logical closeness and firmness of his exposition, architectural culmination of proof and argument, warmth and richness of his metaphor and illustrations; and under all this was the stern challenge to righteousness and repentance, breaking into sunshine, so to speak, when the emphasis changes from the God who judges to the Jesus who redeems."
