Sunday, I was reading about an obscure 17th Century puritan pastor and scholar Jeremiah Whitaker. He was renowned for his preaching, but it was something about his life that people remembered. Perhaps it was that his preaching, mediated as it was through the suffering of the preacher’s life, was magnified in its power.
Edmund Calamy, a colleague and friend, said this regarding Whitaker:
Such as were best acquainted with him reckoned, that it was disputable, whether he preached more by the heavenliness of his doctrine, or by the holiness of his life. But they conclude, that it is certain, he preached as effectually by his sickness and death, as by either his doctrine or his life.