John Milton said that a poet ought to be a poem himself. Likewise the preacher out to be a sermon himself.

In a letter to the students at Harvard and Yale, who were to carry on the great movement he had started, Whitefield wrote this sentence, which every minister would do well to bear in mind: “Henceforward, therefore, I hope you will enter into your studies, not to get a parish, nor to be polite preachers, but to be great saints.”

Quoted from Clarence Edward Macartney, Preaching Without Notes (New York: Abingdon Press, 1946), 156-157.