You teach a little by what you say. You teach most by what you are.
We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the giant. Stories with fiery serpents and leviathans and sermons in whirlwinds. Stories in which murderers are blinded on donkeys and become heroes. Stories with dens of lions and fiery furnaces and lone prophets laughing at kings and priests and demons. Stories with heads on platters. Stories with courage and crosses and redemption. Stories with resurrections.
There is all the difference in the world between preaching merely from human understanding and energy, and preaching in the conscious smile of God.
A good teacher knows how to capture a child’s imagination; an extraordinarily gifted teacher knows how to draw out child-like inquisitiveness in their audience.
As, then, a consummate master teaches both by example and by precept, so Christ taught the obedience, which good men are to render even at the cost of death, by Himself first dying in rendering it.
Rufinus
It is the duty of the pulpit to say the same things over and over and over again. They must be clothed in different phraseology, and illumined by fresh illustration, and approached by a new line of thought; but the things that are really worth saying must be said repeatedly.