Preaching: When you're getting ready for next Sunday in your home church, are there what would be the day to day activities for you getting ready to preach?

Jakes: I'm a night stalker. I get up during the night when I am really excited about something — while everybody else is asleep — and I get on my computer and I'll just wail it out. I used to carry around a suitcase full of books. Now thank God we got a PC you can put all of those books and with one click of a button you can reach anything you are trying to reach. Then I study those things that I think are very, very important to me; I may spend the day thinking about those things.

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My days are rapid pace: often traveling here, there, and everywhere, board meetings, dealing with issues. I'm not only pastor but I run a couple of companies besides. I can find myself in a business meeting that takes me way away from theology all together. But in the back of my mind that message is still turning that I had during the night and it builds, it develops. It's almost like you take a piece of meat and you marinate it for a couple of days before you cook it. I like to marinate a message — sometimes a few days and sometimes a few weeks. I've got messages in my head that have been in the back of my head for months. One of them has been in the back of my head for a year. I haven't preached it yet. I just haven't found that right time or that feeling of readiness and I don't like to preach it until I've got the right message for the right setting.

Preaching: We recently did a survey of readers of PreachingNow (our email newsletter), asking who were the preachers that have really influenced them significantly. Billy Graham and Chuck Swindoll topped the list, but you were one of the top five preachers that was identified as influencing the lives of these current pastors and preachers. Who are the preachers who influenced you?

Jakes: It's really funny because I would like very much to be able to present some distinguished list of renowned names — and there are certainly some great ones — but I grew up in the hills of West Virginia. I had a very rural background where very few famous people ever come. The people that impacted me the most about Christ were people that nobody would ever know. I had a Sunday school teacher names Inez Strickland who live to be 103 years old who taught me as a little boy about Jesus Christ. She was never famous. I don't think she was ever on TV or written up anywhere. She taught me to love the Lord. Sitting on the front porch drinking ice tea with Ms. Strickland left an indelible impression on my life.

There were old country preachers in the hills of West Virginia who didn't even preach with microphones because their congregations grew to the flowing mass crowd of 50 people, but they knew God in a phenomenal way. I often tell people that everybody that's famous is not great and everybody that's great is not famous. The people who meant the most to me were just real people, simple in their delivery, concise in their ideology and passionate about their conviction. I have tried to maintain that perspective as life has carried me into situations beyond my wildest dreams.