“”The business of preaching is not merely to make the hearer feel a little happier while he is listening or while he is singing particular hymns; it is not meant to be a way of producing an atmosphere of comfort. If I do that I am a quack, and am a very false friend indeed. No, the business of preaching is to teach you to think. We may have to be severe, to chastise you, and to show you that your thinking has been altogether wrong. And not only so, but also to show you that you have not grasped the doctrines, because the comfort that is given by them is a deduction drawn as the result of working them out for yourselves.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Romans 8:17-39 – The Final Perseverance of the Saints, p. 24.

Similarly, Ray Stedman from “The Glory of Preaching,” presented at the 1982 Congress on the Bible: “It is the business of the preacher to change the total viewpoint about life of every member of his congregation, and to challenge the secular illusions of our day, and strip them of their deceitfulness, and show people how human wisdom fails, . . . and point out to them what that failure is doing to them if they follow it. The instrument is the exposition and proclamation of these mysteries of God.”