Simeon described the three great aims of his ministry thus: "To humble the penitent, to exalt the Savior and to promote holiness." For him Christ was the center of all subjects for preaching and the Gospel was the sure remedy for sinners. He preached with an earnestness and an intensity of fervor that was uncommon in his day. His hearers were convinced that he deeply felt what he was saying and meant every word of it.
His delivery has been described as remarkably lively and impressive. His mannerisms and gestures were peculiar at times but they were forgotten as the people listened with breathless attention to an ambassador for God delivering a powerful message to each one of them. His distinct articulation and eloquence of style fixed the attention of the hearers not on the messenger but on the message.
James McGraw cites his "simplicity without tameness, eloquence without ornamentation, passion and earnestness without affection, a difficult goal for any preacher to achieve, but excellently practiced by Simeon, according to those who heard him preach" (McGraw, Great Evangelical Preachers of Yesterday, 32).
His preaching was soul-moving. It has been said that no sermon is what a sermon ought to be if it is not also an action. Simeon's sermons were actions. They appealed to the poor and unlearned as well as to the educated minds of the scholars at Cambridge.
Simeon was a self-taught preacher. He once confessed that in the first seven years of his ministry "he did not know the head from the tail of a sermon." It was after he discovered Jean Claude's "Essay on the Composition of a Sermon" that he grew in confidence. He published this book by Claude, a Huguenot preacher, together with a hundred of his own "skeletons" as illustrations of how his principles could be carried out.
His method of preaching can only be judged by a study of his magnum opus, Home Homileticae -- twenty-one volumes containing 12,536 sermon outlines on passages from Genesis to Revelation. His lectures on preaching reveal his understanding of the art which he so capably developed in his own ministry. He said that the sermon must have unity of theme and message, that it must be intelligible and interesting. Spurgeon said that the pastor who would keep his church full must first preach the Gospel and then practice it with three adverbs in mind: earnestly, interestingly, and fully.
Simeon believed that the preacher should not becloud a text but rather "let it speak." He advised preachers to know what they mean to say and how to say it so as to arrest and receive attention. He insisted upon care in exposition, clearness of arrangement, and directness of appeal. He advised them to prepare their material carefully and fully, but to leave the wording of it to the moment of delivery. In advising a natural extempore delivery and a conversational tone, Simeon revitalized and revolutionized English preaching among those who followed his pattern.
He recorded one incident that shows his inner feeling. "When I was an object of much contempt and derision I strolled forth one day, buffeted and afflicted, with my New Testament in my hand. I prayed earnestly to my God that he would comfort me with some counsel from his Word, and that on opening the book I might find some text to sustain me. The first text that caught my eye was this, "They found a man of Cyrene, Simon by name and him they compelled to bear his cross." You know that Simon is the same name as Simeon. What a word of instruction was here, what a blessed text for my encouragement, to have the cross laid upon me that I might bear it for Jesus ... What a privilege. It was enough. Now I could leap and sing for joy, that Jesus was honoring me with a participation of His sufferings."