What! Speak coldly for God, and for men’s salvation?

Can we believe that our people must be converted or condemned, and yet speak in a drowsy tone? In the name of God, brethren, labour to awaken your own hearts, before you go to the pulpit, that you may be fit to awaken the hearts of sinners.

Remember they must be awakened or damned, and that a sleepy preacher will hardly awaken drowsy sinners. Though you give the holy things of God the highest praises in words, yet, if you do it coldly, you will seem by your manner to unsay what you said in the matter.

It is a kind of a contempt of great things, especially of so great things, to speak of them without much affection and fervency. . . .

Speak to your people as men who must be awakened, either here or in hell.

— from the Works of Richard Baxter, quoted by Steven Lawson in The Kind of Preaching that Blesses