The Importance of Practicing What You Preach

In a section showing how "a Christian spirit disposes persons freely to do good to others," in the fourth sermon in his sermon series Charity and Its Fruits, Jonathan Edwards speaks about an essential element in doing good to others as we seek to instruct them in the things of Christianity.

Here's the essential element:

Persons may do good to others' souls, which is the most excellent way of doing good. . . . Men may do good to others' souls by . . . setting them good examples, which is a thing the most needful of all and commonly the most effectual of any for promoting good to others' souls. This must accompany those other means of doing good of others' souls, of instructing, counseling, warning and reproving, and is needful to give force to those means and to make them take effect. It is the most likely thing to render them effectual of anything whatsoever. And whatever warnings or reproofs are given without an answerable example, they will not be very likely to take effect. 

—Jonathan Edwards, Ethical Writings (vol. 8 in the Works of Jonathan Edwards; ed. Paul Ramsey; New Haven: Yale University, 1989), 207.