Is there any stage of the preaching process that we should not be bathing in prayer? When people are first exposed to training in homiletics there is often an initial concern. Is this “process” reducing a highly spiritual ministry to a series of stages, techniques and professionalism? That would depend on the instructor, but I’d hope the answer would be no.
We should be praying at every stage. We should prayerfully select the passage and make sure it is a true literary unit. We should prayerfully study the passage and determine author’s purpose and idea. We should prayerfully consider our congregation and determine appropriate sermon purpose, idea, strategy and details. We should even pray about delivery, and of course we should be praying for the people as well as ourselves throughout the process.
Prayer does not result in a bypass around the work. Praying as we select the passage does not mean we will receive direct revelatory guidance about what to preach. Praying during passage study and sermon preparation does not excuse us from the long hours of wrestling with the text or the often grueling work of crafting the preaching idea, and so on. So we don’t pray begging for a hard work bypass. If we do receive an objective direct revelation then we should obey, but prayer is not primarily about that. Prayer is a lot about dependence, about humility, about asking for wisdom as we do our part of His work.
Let us be preachers who do not shy away from the work involved in our ministry, but let us also be preachers who never fail to pray at every stage in the process.
Biblical Preaching 
Excellent posts on preaching, Peter. Prayer can never be stressed enough.
“On this one will I look: On him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at my Word.”–Isaiah 66:2.
There are some who think that a man must be very self-confident and very self-assured to stand and preach. I have found the opposite to be true. “Rightly dividing the word of God” should be one of the scariest things a man could ever do, and should be approached with all lowliness and humility and, yes, prayerfulness, from the jotting down of the first word to the delivery of the last “Amen.”
fourpointer’s got a point. But the failure of modern preachers isn’t at the point of their digging into the Word for their sermon. It’s at the point of digging into it for living their lives. God isn’t “looking” upon them, so why should anyone else?