They’re Listening More Than You Think, Preacher

Preaching can feel a lot like talking into the wind. You spend hours preparing a sermon, praying over every word, pouring your heart out from the pulpit… and then you look out at the congregation and see someone checking their watch, another person yawning, and a teenager glued to their phone. In that moment, it’s easy to wonder, Is anybody even listening?

That’s just part of ministry, isn’t it? You preach, you teach, you counsel, and sometimes it feels like you’re just throwing seeds into the air, hoping something lands on good soil. But every now and then, God gives you a reminder that those seeds did take root—even if it took years for you to find out.

I had one of those moments recently at a church conference. A man I didn’t recognize came up to me, shook my hand, and with a big smile said, “I’ll never forget your sermon, ‘How to Get the Bread.’ I heard you preach it at a rally years ago, and I still remember it like it was yesterday.”

Oh yeah, I remembered as a smile spread across my face, that sermon. The one I used to preach back when I could still jump around like a maniac and act things out. I’d dramatically portray the “importunate friend” from scripture, knocking on an imaginary door, begging for bread in the middle of the night. I’d make a scene of persistence, pushing the point that sometimes you have to keep knocking, keep asking, keep believing, even when it feels like heaven is silent.

Apparently, this man had never forgotten it. He told me that sermon stuck with him for over a decade, probably longer. It shaped the way he approached his prayer life. It kept him pushing forward in his walk with God, even in the face of adversity. And here he was, all these years later, telling me about it.

I can’t even describe what that did for me in that moment. Because, let’s be real—there are a lot of sermons I’ve preached that I’ve walked away from thinking of the books I could author: “How to preach a verbal train wreck”, or “Sermons to crawl under a rock by.”

But this reminded me of 1 Corinthians 15:58, where Paul encourages us:

“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord.”

That’s it. That’s the whole point. Even when it feels like nothing is happening, even when it looks like nobody is listening, even when you walk away from a sermon wondering if you should’ve just dismissed early and sent everybody to lunch—your labor is not in vain.

That’s how it is for pastors. We keep showing up, we keep preaching, we keep praying with people, and sometimes we don’t know if it’s sinking in. Sometimes we walk away thinking, That might have changed somebody’s life today! And other times, it’s more like, Well, at least I didn’t fall off the platform. But every once in a while, God will send someone—a person we don’t even remember meeting—to remind us that our labor isn’t in vain.

It makes me think of that old Ray Boltz song, “Thank You for Giving to the Lord.” You know the one—the one that gets played at every church appreciation service, the one that makes even the toughest men wipe their eyes real fast like they got something in them. That song captures something powerful: the idea that our work doesn’t end with us. It stretches beyond what we can see. One day, in eternity, we’ll meet people who were touched by something we said, something we did, something we may not even remember.

So if you’re a pastor feeling like nobody’s listening, just keep up the good work, keep sowing the seed, keep preaching even when you think you’re the only one listening! Because, let me remind you—somebody is. And who knows… years from now… you just might run into them at a church conference.