HERALDS OF GOD
be pleasing God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.
There is no short-cut to escape the burden and the toil. Any evasion of the cost will inevitably rob a man's ministry of power. Any refusal to accept the relentless, implacable discipline will result in diminished spiritual influence. Put into your sermons your unstinting best. When Carlyle was toiling at his French Revolution, he wrote to Emerson: "That beggardly Book hampers me every way. To fling it once for all into the fire were perhaps the best; yet I grudge to do that. It is impossible for you to figure what mood I am in. One sole thought. That Book! that weary Book! occupies me continually. For the present, really, it is like a Nessus' shirt, burning you into madness; nay, it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable, insensible, to all other mischiefs." Surely we, who have to wrestle with the Word of truth for the immortal souls of men, must ask no easier way. "What," cries Richard Baxter, "have we our time and strength for, but to lay both out for God? What is a candle made for, but to be burnt?"
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It may be well at this point to underline two guiding principles which the preacher must constantly keep in sight.
Remember, first, that what you are hoping to produce is a sermon—not an essay, not a lecture, not a
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