The following is from an interview from Preaching March/April 2003 with Dr. David Jeremiah.

Question: “In recent years, you have faced a battle with cancer two times. Has this changed your preaching?”

 Answer: “You couldn’t go through what I’ve gone through without it affecting how you preach. Someone told me that people listen to you differently when they know you’ve been through something. It’s not that you say anything different-it’s that they listen to you differently. Right after I came out of a stem cell transplant in 1998, Turning Point got a whole bunch of phone calls telling them that I was preaching with so much more passion than before I was sick. I chuckled when I heard that because, unfortunately, what they had heard were messages I had preached before I was sick. But then I realized that I wasn’t preaching differently; they were listening differently because they knew what I had experienced.”

I have also seen how people really do listen “differently” when I’m going through a crisis. It’s like the Holy Spirit has tuned their spirits to hear. I know the Sunday morning I preached several weeks after my bypass surgery, it seemed like the congregation hung onto every word.

Could it be that the Lord is trying to get a message across to you? Perhaps you need to also hear “differently.”