There is nothing like worship, when it is real, for destroying every shred and atom of a man’s self-importance. A minister of God who carries a sense of his importance about with him, even into the pulpit, is a dreadful and pathetic sight: but who will say it is unknown?

If you are to lead others in worship, you must be truly sharing in the act of worship yourself. No doubt this sounds self-evident: yet it does need to be emphasized. It means, for instance, that you are not to occupy the time of hymn-singing conning the Scripture lessons or fidgeting with a sheaf of intimations or moving restlessly about the pulpit or scanning the congregation for absentees. It is unnatural for you to bid your people lift up their hearts to the Lord and then fail to join your voice with theirs in the common act of praise. Moreover, it is by realizing the attitude of worship in your own spirit that you will best find deliverance from awkward mannerisms, from the blight of self-consciousness, and even from that deadly menace, the “pulpit voice,” than which nothing is more infallibly destructive of the atmosphere of reality.  And if you will remember that the sermon itself should be an act of worship, a sacramental showing forth of Christ, will not that save you from a multitude of pitfalls?

You are not likely to become pompous or pretentious or pontifical if you are truly seeing Jesus and helping others to see Him. You will not scold or rate or lecture when God’s Word is on your mouth. “Have you ever heard me preach?” Coleridge asked Charles Lamb one day; to which Lamb replied, “I never heard you do anything else.” But it is a different preaching which creates the hush that tells when Christ is in the midst. There is nothing like worship, when it is real, for destroying every shred and atom of a man’s self-importance. A minister of God who carries a sense of his importance about with him, even into the pulpit, is a dreadful and pathetic sight: but who will say it is unknown?

‘There are a sort of men whose visages
Do cream and mantle like a standing pond
And do a willful stillness entertain,
With purpose to be dress’d in an opinion
Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit;
As who should say, ‘I am Sir Oracle,
And when I open my lips let no dog bark!’

Not that the corrective of a stiff and ostentatious formality is to be a slovenly and casual informality! “Some people imagine,” declared the late Bernard Manning of Cambridge, “that informality in the pulpit in itself induces a belief in their sincerity or genius. It induces only a belief in their bad taste, and makes us want to get under the seats. Do not behave with a triviality, a casualness, a haphazardness, as if not merely God were absent, but as if all decent people were absent too.”

There is one thing, and one thing only, which can rescue the preacher from the immense besetting dangers of his position, and that is to have his own spirit bathed in the atmosphere of worship, awed and subdued and thrilled that Christ should come so near. In the words of a great tribute once paid to John Brown of Haddington by no less a critic than David Hume, “That’s the man for me, he means what he says: he speaks as if Jesus was at his elbow.”

- James S. Stewart, D.D., Preaching