Preaching and personality

In his article entitled, "How Sermon Writing Can Harm Your Soul: Facing up to the preacher's peculiar impurity" on Preachingtoday.com, Lee Eclov refers to Phillip Brook's classic statement, "Preaching is truth passed through personality," then goes on to write,

Anything true and beautiful passing through my personality is liable to become impure. No doubt about that! My sinful attitudes and my foolish pride can stick to God's word like bacteria on fresh fruit.

But there is also something impure about preaching where truth has not passed through personality. I suppose that every sermon inevitably carries the personality of the preacher, but I'm here to tell you that there are sermons where truth has not passed through this preacher's personality. And such sermons were impure. They may be true, but they're not actually sermons.

Recently, I was reminded again of the fact that God deliberately inspired four different Gospels to place in the New Testament canon precisely because different people would be reached by different portrayals of the same Savior. May God help us all to allow the Word to be made flesh again through our unique, individual lives before it comes out of our lips...!