Having considered the many and numerous failures in serving the Lord, in his Words to Winners of Souls Horatius Bonar identifies the tenth and eleventh of 14 specific sins that we must confess, that of note preaching as we should nor honoring God’s Word:

We have not fully preached a free gospel. We have been afraid of making it too free, lest men should be led into licentiousness; as if it were possible to preach too free a gospel, or as if its freeness could lead men into sin. It is only a free gospel that can bring peace, and it is only a free gospel that can make men holy. Luther’s preaching was summed up in these two points—“that we are justified by faith alone, and that we must be assured that we are justified”; and it was this that he urged his brother Brentius to preach; and it was by such free, full, bold preaching of the glorious gospel, untrammeled by works, merits, terms, conditions, and unclouded by the fancied humility of doubts, fears, uncertainties, that such blessed success accompanied his labors. Let us go and do likewise. Allied to this is the necessity of insisting on the sinner’s immediate turning to God, and demanding in the Master’s name the sinner’s immediate surrender of heart to Christ. Strange that sudden conversions should be so much disliked by some ministers. They are the most scriptural of all conversions.

We have not duly studied and honored the Word of God. We have given a greater prominence to man’s writings, man’s opinions, man’s systems in our studies than to the WORD. We have drunk more out of human cisterns than divine. We have held more communion with man than God. Hence the mold and fashion of our spirits, our lives, our words, have been derived more from man than God. We must study the Bible more. We must steep our souls in it. We must not only lay it up within us, but transfuse it through the whole texture of the soul.