Reach Deeper than Felt Needs

What's the difference between felt needs and real needs in preaching?

Good preaching speaks to both, but people are often talked into felt needs that bypass their real needs. Advertisers, for example, create false desires to sell their products. The distinction needs to be made when people have a felt need that isn't their real need.

C. S. Lewis wrote that our sinful lusts are really misplaced attempts to answer deeper needs. The Scriptures do not speak to superficial needs—they speak to the deep-seated ones. Those are the needs we're going after. I don't disdain preaching to a felt need, but we always want to go after the real need.

How do you reach the real need?

Our task is to come to the text, to understand at a profound level what need it's speaking to, and then help the listener get in touch with that need. Let the text determine what the real need is, and surface it in the introduction.

If you elevate a person's real need to the level of felt needs, and the passage then speaks to that need, he or she will come away genuinely impacted, reminded that the Scriptures are relevant to real life. You don't create the needs; you simply surface them.

Is it possible to deal with "needs" improperly?

It's a mistake to ask, "What are the felt needs of my audience?" and use those as my take-off point. As an expositor, I work the other way around. I come to the text and ask, "Why does God want us to know this? What is the need in our lives this passage speaks to?" That is the need to address.

C. S. Lewis wrote that our sinful lusts are really misplaced attempts to answer deeper needs.

One of my students preached a how-to sermon from Mark on casting out demons. Afterward, I asked him the point of the passage. "Mark was teaching us that Jesus had power over evil and the occult," he said. When I asked him why he turned that point into a how-to, he said, "I couldn't think how to apply the point."

The student assumed a "need" to have a how-to application—three things to do on Monday. He missed the real need expressed in this passage. "How about if we apply it this way," I said, "'Let's all get down on our knees and worship Jesus.'"

Duane Litfin is president of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.