“Be yourself….God has given to each man his own individuality, and standardisation is emphatically no part of the divine intention for your ministry.  How intolerably dull it would be if every preacher had to be cut to the same pattern!…Do not think that personal idiosyncrasies are merely to be suppressed and levelled out.  Be yourself.  … but also forget yourself. You are to use for the delivery of the word every faculty God has given you, and simultaneously you are to renounce yourself utterly so that in the end the messenger shall be nothing, the message everything. You are not to cramp or stifle your individuality, but you are to offer it so completely to God upon the altar that when the worship service closes, the dominating thought in the worshippers’ minds will be, not of any obtrusive human proficiency or cleverness, but only this – ‘The Lord was in his holy Temple today!’ ”

James S Stewart

Heralds of God, 1946

“What is the rule then?  It is: be natural; forget yourself; be so absorbed in what you are doing and in the realisation of the presence of God…that you forget yourself completely.  That is the right condition.  That is the only place of safety.  That is the only way in which you can honour God.  Self is the greatest enemy of the preacher, more so than in the case of any other man in society.  And the only way to deal with self is to be so taken up with, and so enraptured by the glory of what you are doing, that you forget yourself altogether.”
 
D M Lloyd-Jones
Preaching and Preachers
Zondervan, 1972   p264

“The sheep want good food and they’ll know whether you’ve worked hard during the week to prepare something good, or whether you’ve microwaved their meal on Saturday night.”

H B Charles Jr

“Novelty may fix our attention not even on the service but on the celebrant. You know what I mean. Try as one may to exclude the question, ‘What on earth is he up to now?’ will intrude. It lays one’s devotion waste. There is really some excuse for the man who said, ‘I wish they’d remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.”

C S Lewis