In preparing my sermons my custom was, after taking some rest on Monday, to get into my study early on Tuesday morning.  To every student the best hours of the day are those before the sun has reached the meridian.  Then the mind is the most clear and vigorous.  I have never in my life prepared sermons a dozen times after my supper.  Severe mental work in the evening is apt to destroy sound sleep; thousands of brain workers are wrecked by insomnia.  To secure freedom from needless interruption I pinned on my study door “Very Busy.”  This had the wholesome effect of shutting out all time-killers, and of shortening necessary calls of those who had some important errand.  Instead of leaving the selection of my topic to the risk of any contingency, I usually chose my text on Tuesday morning, and laid the keel of the sermon.  I kept a large note-book in which I could enter any passage of Scripture that would furnish a good theme for pulpit consumption.  I also found it a good practice to jot down thoughts that occurred to me on any important topic that I could use when I came to prepare my sermons.  By this method I had a treasury of texts from which I could draw every week.  Let my readers be careful to notice that word “Text.”  I have known men to prepare an elaborate essay, theological, ethical or sociological, and then to perch a text from the Bible on top of it.

“Preach my word” does not signify the clapping of a few syllables as a figure-head on a long treatise spun out of a preacher’s brain.  The best discourses are not manufactured, they are a growth.  God’s inspired and infallible Book must furnish the text.  The connection between every good sermon and its text is just as vital as the connection between a peach-tree and its root.  Sometimes an indolent minister tries to palm off an old sermon for a pretended new one by changing the text, but this shallow device ought to expose itself as if he should decapitate a dog and undertake to clap on the head of some other animal.  Intelligent audiences see through such tricks and despise them.  “Be sure your sin will find you out.”  When a passage from the Holy Scripture has been planted as a root and well watered with prayer, the sermon should spring naturally from it.  The central thought of the text being the central thought of the sermon and all argument, all instruction and exhortation are only the boughs branching off from the central trunk, giving unity, vigor and spiritual beauty to the whole organic production.  The unity and spiritual power of a discourse usually depend upon the adherence to the great divine truth contained in the inspired Book.  The Bible text is God’s part of our sermon; and the more thoroughly we get the text into our own souls, the more will we get it into the sermon, and into the consciences of our hearers.  To keep out of a rut I studied the infinite variety of Sacred Scripture; its narratives and matchless biographies, its jubilant Psalms, its profound doctrines, its tender pathos, its rolling thunder of Sinai, and its sweet melodies of Calvary’s redeeming love.  I laid hold of the great themes, and I found a half hour of earnest prayer was more helpful than two or three hours of study.  It sometimes let a flash from the Throne flame over the page I was writing.