An Interview with Max Lucado: Preaching John 3:16...Continued from page 4

Preaching: Do you write a manuscript?

Lucado: I do. All my sermons are pretty much written out word-for-word. I don’t really read the manuscript, but I have it up on the pulpit with me.

Preaching: Bob Russell also prepares a manuscript, and he says he preaches the message through about five times before he preaches it for a congregation. Do you have any kind of similar approach to preparation?

Lucado: I don’t do it five times! I always thought Bob was a good preacher; that’s why! Since I put it in manuscript form, I wrote the whole sermon out by hand, then I give it to my assistant. She enters it in the computer, then prints it out and I go over it with a pen. She enters all the corrections, then I go back over it again. So usually by the time I’m going to preach it I’m pretty familiar with it. But I will, two or three hours prior to the service, go over it audibly in a low voice, but I don’t do it as many times as that.

We have five services right now. We’re going to go to four; our Saturday services, we really don’t need two. So by the time I get to the fifth one I know it pretty well!

Preaching: As preachers look at your books, one of the things they love is the illustrative material – the stories you share. Where do those come from? To what extent do you develop those stories yourself, as opposed to finding them from other places?

Lucado: I think stories are so essential in a good message because they give the audience a chance to kind of relax their thinking slightly. You never lose people when you say the phrase, “Let me tell you a story.” People remember the story. They’ll see you in four or five days and they won’t remember the main point but they’ll say, “That was a funny story you told,” and hopefully that story conveys a truth.

I would say about 50 percent of my stories come out of personal experience – just trying to observe life. I’m in a series on heaven, and this Sunday I start off the lesson off by telling about the day our dog died. It was a sad moment, a poignant moment, and I tell about when we went into the vet – they’re about to put our dog to sleep – how we walked in, he heard us and his tail started wagging. All of his legs are paralyzed; he was about 15 years old.

And I said to myself, “You know, death is just part of life.” And then I said, “No, it’s not. It never was. That’s why it hurts so much.” So there’s a picture of something, and the whole purpose of the sermon is to talk about victory over death. So about 50 percent of my illustrations come out of personal experiences, but I own a lot of sermon illustration books, and I love a good story I read somewhere.