Sometimes you read a quote that profoundly shapes your outlook of an entire area of life. For me, the following quote by John Angell James has mightily shaped my view of preaching.
This then was the earnestness of the apostle; one constant, uniform, and undeviating endeavor to save men’s souls by the truth as it is in Jesus…
Is it probable there can be any earnestness in the hearers, when there is none in the preacher? “How is it,” said a minister to an actor, “that your performances, which are but pictures of the imagination, produce so much more effect than our sermons, which are all realities?” “Because,” said the actor, “we represent fictions as though they realities, and you preach realities as though they were fictions.”