"I don't want a 'great sermon'. I want to feel the presence of the God I am worshiping and to know that I am considering some great and glorious subject. If I do get this I do not care how poor the sermon is.

I suggest to you that our greatest danger is the danger of professionalism. We do not stop sufficiently frequently to ask, what are we really doing? There is the danger of just facing a text and treating it as an end in itself with a strange detachment. It is all intellectual. Nor should our preaching be just emotional, or only to the conscience. Far too often it is one or other of these things. There is no life, no power! We of all people ought to have it...Scripture has to be fused into a message, with point and power - a sermon has to be something that is moving and which sends people away glorying in God.

We have got to bring a message and deliver it 'in demonstration of the Spirit and of power'. M'Cheyne did not just prepare sermons. He had the burden of the people on his soul and he came from God with a message. This was the glory of a man like C.H. Spurgeon. His sermons had form and thrust and made an impact. This whole notion of a message needs to be recaptured. The hardest part of a minister's work is the preparation of sermons. It is a trying process. There is an agony in it, an act of creation."

DM Lloyd-Jones, Westminster fraternal, Oct 9, 1968, quoted in "The fight of faith" by Iain Murray (p603/604)