“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