Instead of leaving the selection of my topic to the risk of any contingency, I usually chose my text on Tuesday morning, and laid the keel of the sermon.

I kept a large note-book in which I could enter any passage of Scripture that would furnish a good theme for pulpit consumption.

I also found it a good practice to jot down thoughts that occurred to me on any important topic that I could use when I came to prepare my sermons.

By this method I had a treasury of texts from which I could draw every week.

Let my readers be careful to notice that word "Text." I have known men to prepare an elaborate essay, theological, ethical or sociological, and then to perch a text from the Bible on top of it.
"Preach my word" does not signify the clapping of a few syllables as a figure-head on a long treatise spun out of a preacher's brain.