Hybels: I think it's very tempting for traditional preaching styles to present Christ and the Word of God as the quick cure-all for whatever ailment is afflicting an individual today. I think that might be a little bit simplistic. If someone has been sexually molested, if someone grew up in the home of an alcoholic father, if someone had been beaten as a child, there are some deep psychological wounds that have to be carefully treated by trained Christian counselors before those wounded people can thoroughly appropriate the promises and the precepts of Scripture.

Ideally, discipleship, preaching and counseling should be integrated so all of that could work together in bringing a person toward fullness, but we have found that if people are just under preaching and are not being personally restored through Christian counseling or personal discipleship through a mentoring process, just traditional preaching is probably not enough to restore many people to wholeness.

Preaching: Tell me a little bit about your own approach to preaching -- how you go about preparing a sermon, whether it be one for weekend or midweek. What approach do you take as you move through the preparation process?

Hybels: My approach would vary dramatically if I'm preaching to our midweek believer's service or our weekend service. For our midweek service -- if we're preaching through a book of the Bible -- I would take the rather conventional expository approach of reading the text, going through the correct hermeneutical steps to make sure I'm touching all the bases and doing the commentary work. Then I try to make that passage relate and live in the hearts of the people to whom I'm preaching.

I work very hard on application. I think the instructional part is the easier part of preaching; the points of application are exceedingly difficult to be relevant with. I strive to keep it practical, to keep it applicable, to present Scripture in a way that believers walk away saying, "I know what the main emphasis was and I even have three or four ways I can put it into effect in my life tomorrow.

I find myself asking the famous two word question all throughout my sermon preparation process, which is the phrase "So what? So what? So what?" Why is this important to the guy who just spent twelve hours in the loop of Chicago banging his head in the financial markets? He raced to the commuter train, his wife picked him up at the station, and he ate a sandwich in the car on the way out to the church. Why does he need to know what I'm saying? Of what importance is this to him? I work very hard on that so that people really drive away saying, "It was good to be in the house of the Lord and to sit under the Word because I got something I could put in my life."

It's a little different for the weekend crowd because I can't take the conventional expository approach. If I say very strongly, "Thus saith the Lord" or "Thus saith the Word of God," non-churched people say, "I don't buy your premise so why should I listen to what you're saying?" So when I'm speaking to seekers, I tend to spend more time building bridges so that non-churched people see the logic in the instructions behind the Word of God.