You want to meet the felt needs as well as the real needs of your audience. You want them to say, “That’s what I needed today,” or “I didn’t know anyone else felt that way.” You want to leave them with a “take-away” message—something they can take into their own lives and use for their own personal growth. You want to offer them hope and help them grow closer to the Lord.
Some years ago a woman at a writers’ conference purchased my book, Rest Stops for Single Moms. The next morning, she came to me with tears in her eyes and said, “I didn’t know anyone knew how I felt, but you do.”
The real need of people is to receive Christ, but their felt need is to be entertained. If they lay down our books and magazine articles with a bookmark stuck inside and never pick them up again, we have let down our readers—and we have let down God. It’s a sin to bore the readers with the Gospel. God deserves our very best.