Sunday’s coming and hopefully your message is not too far away now. Allow me to engage you in a brief conversation about your message. Perhaps this is the kind of conversation you have with your spouse or a staff member of your church. So we chat about the passage, the main idea as you see it, perhaps the tension you plan to build into the message. We go back and forth, all very cordial and maybe with some humor thrown in. Then I ask,
“How will you apply this message?”
What is your answer? If your answer is vague and fluffy, this says a lot about how you will preach the message (although the question might prompt some extra preparation in this area!) If your answer is specific, with concrete and tangible contemporary examples of the message applied, then things are looking good for Sunday.
So. How will you apply the message? There . . . I asked. Now it’s over to you. The answer that matters is not one you give me, but what you give them on Sunday. (Thinking about it, perhaps I should ask me that question too . . . )
Biblical Preaching 
Peter, I very much agree with what you are saying in this post and am just thinking through these issues right now for tomorrow’s message.
To preach with integrity means that it has to be, or is being applied in your own life first as the preacher and that the people seeing and hearing evidence of this in the way you live.
But the complete goal of preaching in my mind is to glorify Jesus first and to transform both preacher and hearers together into his likeness.
I have found from experience that there appears to be no “killer preaches” i.e. a preach that does the job once and for all, but rather the steady “seeping in” of the Holy Spirit’s application of messages over a long period of time – particularly as the preacher makes relevant applications of each message and then encourages the hearers to respond.