What is the good?

In preaching, there are a number of goals that a preacher is trying to achieve. In this post, however, I'm focussing in not on content, but rather on communication.

What is the chief value that a communicator ought to strive for? Retention of information? Affecting the hearer? Mirroring the rhetorical method employed by the text?

I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Preaching evaluation

I'm just wondering whether my new criterion for evaluating my preaching is a good one. It's one that only the preacher can apply to his/herself. Thoughts from the floor?

In reading this post on Izaac's blog, it made me realise something of what I was mentally doing when I preached my last sermon. I let go the whole exegesis process, and found myself only evaluating the content and delivery of the sermon. My new criterion was this:

How well did that sermon match up to what I know I could have preached?

Musings/reasonings:

I'm the only one who knows what God's word did to me when I was studying it. No-one else experienced that hard work, that wrestling with the Scriptures and that particular wielding of the Word by Holy Spirit. So really, no-one else knows what it is that I could have said. Or how I could have said it. The power with which I could have genuinely spoken those words is known to none, but myself. (And our sovereign God, of course!) The results of my exegesis determine the max quality of the talk that I can give, so how close to that max did I get?