The privelage and peril of preaching

Those of you who have listened to my sermons know I'm not one for alliteration (starting each point with the same letter), but that title just slipped out.  Preaching is certainly a privilege, being able to stand before God's people and proclaim what his Word is telling them is a rare honor.  At the same time, preaching is a path full of potential perils (yikes, 4 more "p" words, I can't stop it now!)  There are numerous errors that a preacher can make, lots of mistakes that can creep in, some mostly harmless and some downright frightening.  I recently re-read one of my college texts, D.A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies.  Carson's book explains a whole host of fallacies (errors) that can be made when interpreting Scripture, among them: word-study, grammatical, logical, presuppositional and historical.  The book is excellent, full of helpful reminders, but certainly a challenge to anyone not familiar with English grammar (as a former English teacher, I would say that would be 90% of Americans or more) and those who don't have a minimal knowledge of Greek and Hebrew.
So, what is the person in the pew to do, how can they know that their minister is "rightly diving the word of truth"? (II Timothy 2:15, the AWANA key verse)  At the heart of Carson's warnings is the notion that we need to let the Bible speak to us instead of seeking to find in the Bible that which we already think.  One of the best ways for a preacher to keep the Word speaking through him instead of the other way around is to honor and respect the context of Scripture.  Each and every message brought by a preacher of God's Word needs to be faithful to the text it was taken from, and it needs to be faithful to the message of the Bible as a whole.  We have all seen the damage that can be done when politicians take the words of their opponent out of context, far be it from us to do the same damage with God's Word by not properly representing what the original intent of the Scripture was to it's first audience.  When we understand what God's Word meant then (or at least have a reasonable inference about what it meant), we can begin to understand what God's Word means for us now.
To help keep myself from error is one of the reasons why I choose to preach through passages of Scripture rather than topically.  If I wanted to preach a message about poverty (for example), I would have huge chunks of the Bible to choose from, but isn't the act of choosing itself going to influence my eventual conclusions, won't I be tempted to ignore the passages or verses that aren't on point in favor of ones that seem to be (especially out of context)?  Instead, if I let the Scripture speak by working my way through the entire Sermon on the Mount (for example), I will have to explain everything that Jesus said and not just the things that fit the message I wanted to bring.  Along those same lines, I don't typically write my sermon introduction until I'm finished with the message for the simple reason that I usually don't know exactly what I'm going to be saying about the next passage of Scripture until I actually write it.
I know that a lot of preachers out there always preach topically, citing verse after verse to support their point that are often scattered throughout Scripture; it isn't for me.  The next time you listen to that type of message, jot down each of the references, look up the passages, and see if the verses were used properly based upon their context or not.  There are plenty of Exegetical Fallacies that a preacher can make, that's one I'd rather avoid.