An Interview with Max Lucado: Preaching John 3:16...Continued from page 5

Preaching: What’s your favorite thing about preaching?

Lucado: Pastoring the flock with words. I love that. We always have a prayer time in the middle of our service. We take about eight or ten minutes before I preach, after we’ve sung, and invite people to come forward for prayer. That’s a tender moment to me. I don’t preach much in that, but I like to speak to the people. I tell them, “Don’t be anxious about anything. With prayer and thanksgiving let your needs be known unto God.” The people come so hungry to be prayed for; so hungry just to come up and leave their burdens somewhere. It never fails. I can just say, “We’re going to have a few moments of prayer. If you’d like to be prayed for, just come to the front.” We’ve done it so many years now that people just know that this is a wonderful chance and they come. Often at the end of that prayer time I’ll say to myself, “We could go home now. I don’t need to preach. God has done a work.” I think that’s a missing part in many services today – giving people those quiet moments to come forward for prayer. It’s not an evangelistic appeal; it’s a matter of saying, “Let’s pray about your burden.” I offer a pastoral prayer.

Gordon MacDonald wrote a whole article once on the power of a pastoral prayer. He talked about crafting those words – your intercession is so important to a church. Let them know you really care about them.

Preaching is worth it. It’s really worth the investment in putting good words together, in doing the study. People really do remember the sermons. They really are listening. Going that extra bit with the sermon is worth it.

You might just make a casual comment – you think of it as a minor point – but the Holy Spirit uses it to touch someone’s life. It’s a great privilege to think that all these people are coming and letting me talk to them for thirty minutes. They don’t let anybody else do that. I don’t think even schoolteachers get quite that opportunity, because they are told what to teach.

I think it’s important to preach like there’s a broken heart on every pew. That’s always been a phrase that stuck with me. Not everybody is having a tough time, but you can bet your buck that there’s a good tenth of your church that’s going through a hard season. There really is a broken heart on every pew.