Sermon Prep on the "hard, high road"

"What is more surprising and disquieting is the fact that those who might be expected ex officio to have a profound and permanent appreciation of literature may in reality have nothing of the sort. They are mere professionals. Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. I am thinking of unfortunate scholars in foreign universities who cannot ‘hold down their jobs’ unless they repeatedly publish articles each of  which must say, or seem to say, something new about some literary work; or of overworked reviewers, getting through novel after novel as quickly as they can, like a schoolboy doing his ‘prep’. For such people reading often becomes mere work. The text before them comes to exist not in its own right but simply as raw material; clay out of which they can complete their tale of bricks. Unfortunately, ambition and combativeness can also produce it. And, however it is produced, it destroys appreciation." C.S. Lewis - An Experiment in Criticism. 

Lewis was talking about professors and reviewers of books who view reading great works as merely a job and though they read, they no longer profit from them. They allowed their deadlines to hardened them.

I thought of sermon prep as I read this. It can become easy to ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ and become a sermon smith rather than feed off the Word in the study. Sunday is always just around the bend. It's coming and you have to have something to say. Though it can be stressful and difficult and does require great amounts of mental labor, prayer, and time; don't allow the continual work in the Text to harden your soul to where you are no longer speaking the Words of God, but performing your outline. The farmer that labors has to take the firstfruits (2 Tim 2:6).  You can make excellent outlines, but are you feeding your soul? But the consequences are far more grave for a man of God than a literary professor.