I'd like to express my appreciation to the president, Dr. Cooley, for the

correspondence that I enjoyed with him before I came and though he's not here the previous dean, Dr.

Dvorak and the good exchanges I've had with Doug Stewart, the acting dean,

and whoever it was who made the decision

that I could come.

It's been a delightful time.

And I thought was the Lord. It's been a real pleasure to be with you and I hope it's not the last time that we can be with one another.

What I've been pleading for is the supremacy of God in preaching.

And that means to try to sum up where we've come from and bring us to the point where we are this morning.

It means a commitment to display and magnify God's glory as the constant goal of preaching and it means that the

all sufficiency of the cross of God's son is the validation of preaching and the humiliation of the pride of the preacher.

And today it means that the sovereign work of the spirit of God is the only power by which any of this can be achieved.

And so I want you to feel today how desperately dependent you are on the Holy Spirit in preaching.

I really believe that all true preaching is rooted in a feeling of desperation.

You get up 445, 5 o'clock, Sunday morning.

And you smell the smoke of hell on the one side,

or you feel the cool, crisp, clean breezes of the springtime of heaven on the other side,

and you grope your way to your study and you look down at this little manuscript and you pick it up and you walk around behind your desk and you get out on your knees and you feel so utterly, utterly hopeless and inadequate.

And you cry out to the Lord, how will I ever take words like this and make them an aroma of life to life and death to death?

And there is this feeling of desperation three hours before the service that unless God moves in here,

this is all over this Sunday morning.

I won't have anything that I need to do what needs to be done here.

...