Voice of Thunder

Episode 1 - Christian Living & Theology - Books 4 2024

• Lance

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This is the first podcast in a series on Books 4 2024 to change your life! I have read over 30 books last year and am discussing the best ones!

Are you interested in learning more about the power of the Holy Spirit, the history of Pentecostalism, the evidence for miracles today, and the reasons to believe in God and Christianity? If so, this podcast is for you. In each episode, I will explore a different aspect of these topics, based on the books Practicing the Power by Sam Storms, 50 Pentecostal and Charismatic Leaders Every Christian Should Know by Dean Merrill, Miracles Today by Craig Keener, and I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler. I will also share some tips and tricks on how to read books effectively and enjoyably. Join me as I dive into the amazing world of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, and discover the rational and evidential basis for the Christian faith. This podcast is for anyone who wants to grow in their faith, experience God's power, and witness His miracles. Subscribe now and get ready to be inspired and challenged.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Voice of Thunder, where we declare the earth-shattering truths of God's word about culture, family and church. I'm your host, lance McKenzie. Books can change your life. Books can change your life. This last year I've read about 37 books and I have found it to be immensely helpful for me over this last year and I wanted to share with you some of these books that have just been really life changing. I've read 37 books, cover to cover. Now I've started and stopped probably about as many as that. Sometimes you get into a book and you're like man, this isn't as good as I thought it was going to be, but, cover to cover, 37 books on a variety of subjects over the last year. Now I want to give you some of the best books and we're going to cover three areas. We're going to cover the Christian walk, number one. Number two, we're going to cover the preaching and improving your preaching skills, and then, number three, we're going to cover books on self-improvement. So those three areas we're going to look at together. We're going to do three different podcasts. It's going to be coming out weekly, three different podcasts over three weeks and I hope it's helpful for you.

Speaker 1:

You step into the new year January 2024, that you have some books to help you. There's nothing like a book to change your life, and I can firmly attest to the fact that books do change your life and they have changed my life. So we're going to talk first about some books about the Christian walk to help you in your Christian walk. One of the first books that I really enjoyed was called practicing the power by Sam Storms. Now a little background about Sam Storms. Sam Storms was a graduate from Dallas Theological Seminary and he was a cessationist. He was taught in seminary and believed his whole life that the gifts of the spirit are not relevant for today, that God doesn't do any works by the Holy Ghost anymore, until he had an encounter where he experienced the gifts of the spirit and the power of the Holy Ghost, and it changed his theology and changed his life. Today he's pastoring a church in Oklahoma City and he writes and speaks frequently on the gifts of the spirit and the Bible. So I really love this, because not only does he talk about the gifts of the spirit, he also gets arguments for why we should believe that God can still do mighty wonders today and, through the church, how God can do mighty wonders. So I really love that about the book.

Speaker 1:

I'm just going to read you a little bit of the back cover of the book so that way you can get an idea of what the book is about. It says the Bible teaches us that we are to be filled with God's spirit and that God's presence and grace is manifested among us people as they serve love and minister to one another. I love that. Yet some of the gifts that God offers to his people aren't commonly seen in many churches today. The gifts of prophecy, healing tongues and other supernatural gifts of God seem to be absent, and many Christians are unsure how to cultivate an atmosphere where God's spirit can work while retaining and committed to the foundational truth of God's word In the power. Pastor and author Sam Sorms offers practical steps to understand and exercise the gifts of the spirit in a way that remains grounded in the word and centered in the gospel. So I really like that.

Speaker 1:

I want to give you some quotes now from the book that I wrote down To me. We're super helpful, I think. Three different quotes. Here is what I got. So can I give you a little bit of a foretaste, a little bit of a sampling.

Speaker 1:

It says here Jesus is not telling us that when doubts start to creep in, you should put your hand over your ears, close your eyes and say those doubts over and over again. I can't hear you. That's not faith. Let's make believe that spiritual pretending. On the other hand, we are responsible to take steps of faith in our heart where you can do things, by God's grace, which will expand our confidence in God's goodness and His greatness and help diminish, if not drive out, our doubts, and so I love that perspective on faith. Sometimes I see the way faith has talked about today. It's almost, it's almost talked about like a more, more, more, more like witchcraft and less like biblical faith in God, more like faith in ourselves and less than faith in God. So I really like his perspective on that.

Speaker 1:

Another quote from the book a church must be theologically literate and sufficiently familiar with the Bible so that they can effectively judge and evaluate both the sources and meanings of dreams, visions, prophecies and other subjective impressions, and I love that. I think that is a very true statement that if you are going to be led of the spirit, you're going to have to have time in God's word whereby you understand whether or not this is God Right. So I really like that. And the last quote from him when people are told to not biblically analyze or evaluate a phenomenon, but simply receive it on the supposition that the mind is the enemy or obstacle to intimacy with God, they are being manipulated. I love that. When people are told to not biblically analyze a phenomenon or an impression to biblically evaluate, they are being manipulated. I love that and so I really like his perspective.

Speaker 1:

Some takeaways from me that I really enjoyed about the book has a great guide on how to integrate the gifts of the Spirit into the normal everyday church service, how to do it to where you still keep an order of service right. You're not. You're not just running willy-nilly, not just everybody, anybody, because you, let's be honest, you have some weirdos that show up and and they want to give you a prophecy or a sign or whatever, and and you want to be very careful that you only allow people to practice the gifts who are approved in the church, and so he has some different ways on how to integrate that. He's extremely biblical. That was also something I liked, being a Dallas Theological graduate. He just was extremely biblically based. Every single definition for a gift of the Spirit. He was very careful and very lengthy to explain and understand it entirely biblically, how he defines it and explains it, and so I just really like that, and I liked that he was a former cessationist who has now become continuous. He believes in the gifts of the Spirit, and so I love that. So that's some of the things I really enjoy. Some negatives are he is not a classical Pentecostal, and so that's something that for me is important. So as you're reading the book, keep that in mind. He's not a typical classical Pentecostal but he still has wonderful things to say. I love the fact that it is biblically based.

Speaker 1:

Another book I really enjoyed was called Miracles Today by Craig Keener. All right, here's the back cover of the book. It says leading New Testament scholar Craig Keener addresses common questions about miracles and provides compelling reasons to believe in them today, including many accounts that offer evidence of verifiable miracles. And I have got a lot of stories for sermons from this. So if you're a preacher and you want the stories, you can get for that, but if you're just a Christian in the pew too, man, these are so encouraging. I there are many times before I go to church. I will listen to these before I go to church because it's just so encouraging. It builds my faith and I show up with greater expectancy and greater encouragement, believing that God might do something.

Speaker 1:

And he's got all kinds of incredible stories in there and these are all verified too. They're not just like, hey, my great uncle told me the story, but like he has gone and talked to the eyewitnesses who saw it themselves. So these are verified stories. They're not something made up, they're verified. So some of these different stories in there first of all, he gets some stories on doctor reports. So he gives stories on doctors reports. He also gives stories about video recordings. So again, these are verified, the doctors have verified it, video recordings have verified it. He talks about blind men seeing talks, about laymen walking talks, about the dead being raised.

Speaker 1:

He gives examples of atheists who have witnessed miracles and verified them. And he even tells a story about a man I'll give you this quick story A man who had is in another country. He was a pagan, a heathen, and he was brought to a church. He was angry at the church because they were converting many of his friends and neighbors. Halfway through the preaching, this paralyzed man screams out that the God of these Christians is garbage and his God's a garbage because he's been praying for years to be healed of his paralysis and he says you know now you want me to pray the name of Jesus. That's who he says the name of Jesus. His hand shot straight up in the air. According to the eye witness report, his hand shot straight up in the air as man in his 70s, pagan heathen, his whole life, not a Christian and it shocked him. His entire body immediately received strength, he stood up, he could walk around and he ran up on the platform and grabbed the microphone from the preacher and began to shout to everybody around look what Jesus just did. For me incredible. And what's even better is it's an eye witness story and then that multiple eye witnesses reported, and so I love stuff like that. That's verified. But also that is just awesome stories of God healing people. It builds my faith. So that's something you can listen to or you find online. You can find an audiobook format or you can go find it in a book format.

Speaker 1:

Another book I really enjoyed was 50 Pentecostal pioneers and, like I said, it's 50 of them, so you got a large assortment for many different backgrounds. For me reading them, it was very encouraging. So many awesome miracle stories and many of them are eye witnesses that the author talked to the writer, the book Talk to these People, and so I really love that. It's also historical because you kind of get you get the history of how the Pentecostal movement started back in the early late 1800s, early 1900s, and then they talk about most of the big named Pentecostal pioneers. What I did not like about the book is they included people in there that I wouldn't include. So that's you know. For me I would include Roman Catholics in there, but they included Roman Catholics. They included a wide assortment of people. So that's the negative I I did not like in the book. But one thing I did like about it is they included the warts and all they told the good, bad and ugly about everybody, and I like that. They were honest. I felt they were honest. At least they weren't gonna cover over or ignore controversial areas of people's lives. So I really enjoyed that and the Pentecostal pioneers.

Speaker 1:

Another book I really enjoyed was I Don't have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turrick, and to me this was an awesome book. It's one of those books that you just want to give to your kids, to your grandkids, to your brothers or your sisters or just everybody. Because it's so good and it's to me it's well written too. It's not so intellectual and so high up there that it's written away that practically anybody can read it and receive from it. And I want to read here the back cover of the book so you can kind of get an idea of what the book is about.

Speaker 1:

To some, the concept of having faith in a higher power or a set of religious beliefs is nonsensical. Indeed, many view religion in general and Christianity in particular, as unfounded and unreasonable. Norman Geisler and Frank Turrick argue, however, that Christianity is not only more reasonable than other religious beliefs, but indeed more rational than unbelief itself. And so they do it. That's what the book is about. I really love what they did.

Speaker 1:

I really enjoyed was they started from back, like all the like outside the Bible, and they worked the way down to the Bible. So they didn't start with scripture, they started out. They showed how creation proves the existence of God. How could we find God? How do we, how, how could you seek to discover who God is? And they worked their way to the Bible. So I really liked that about them.

Speaker 1:

Here are a couple of quotes to kind of wet your whistle. It says if all space, time and matter were created out of nothing, then there must be a cause that is eternal, that exists outside of time, space and matter. And here's another quote Jesus. Jesus had 43 witnesses to his life. However, tiberius only had 10 witnesses to his life. We are a more sure of Christ's resurrection than Tiberius was emperor of Rome. I love that.

Speaker 1:

Really easy to read, really lots of good facts and information. I would definitely recommend and recommend you buy some copies to give other people. So those are some books that can help you in your Christian walk for the next year. For me, those are some of the most impactful to build my faith, to encourage me, to encourage me to step out and the gifts of spirit to have a strong faith in what I believe in. I just really enjoyed all these books. I hope they're helpful. I also want to give a few at the end of this podcast.

Speaker 1:

I want to give a few different reasons for why books and some tips on reading books and how to read more. That's always the hard part how do I find time to read? So let's start with first. Why do we read books and that's kind of a for a lot of people that like well, I can just go listen to a podcast, I can go watch a YouTube video. Why should I read a book? Well, one reason is that they are reliable. Books are reliable podcasts According to what I have read, podcasts legally are very, they're very new and they're not very well regulated. Right, books have been around forever and if you plagiarize, if you take someone else's work and claim it as your own, if you say something falsely, if you fall, you know you give a false report or whatever and you put it in a written form, there's more opportunity for legal action against you. So that means that books are more reliable. You're more sure that what you're reading in that book is true information. This is accurate information, right. So that's one reason why and we'll do this at the end of every podcast in this series on why, why, why? Why books right? So I want to give you a reason and I'm going to give you now a tip on how to read books better.

Speaker 1:

So one thing that I would do if I was you is go get you an audiobook service. I could not listen and read the books I read without audiobooks. Most of these I have read as an audiobook format. So I would encourage you, go, go, get your audiobook service. You can get audible. I don't do audible personally. I know other people who do, but I prefer something called ever, and they recently changed their name. I don't know if you've subscribed, but they've. They've now changed the name of it to ever and E-V-E-R-A-N-D. Ever and.

Speaker 1:

And for me, without the audiobooks I could never got through it. I can do it while I'm driving. Being an evangelist, I'm on the road a lot and so having the ability you know I'm driving two hours to pull up a phone and pull up an audiobook and listen to it for two hours, I mean that's awesome. You know, something else I do for audiobooks is I never listen to them at their normal speed never, because if I did that, I could never get through it. If you go listen to an audiobook, they're eight hours long normally. That's a typical what I have found. Most of the time they're eight hours long. There's no way I can listen to 37 books in a year, eight hours long, and I lose. Oftentimes. I lose attention. I can't stay concentrated on it, and so what I do is I will listen to it on 1.5 speed ever and you can change their speech rate, how fast they're speaking. And if it's something that's redundant they've already talked about this or something I already know I'll put it on 2x speed, like it's like speeding through it. You know so, and for me you might think of that.

Speaker 1:

Well, lance, you know you're not getting all the information if you do that or whatever, but here's the truth. Many times authors put in their repetition. They put in there the same information over and over again for two reasons. One, they try and cement it in your brain. But number two, sometimes just to reach the page count that they want to reach for the book. No joke, there are a lot of authors that they try to reach a certain number of pages and so they will give redundant information or give redundant illustrations or examples. They'll have one thought and they'll give you I'm no joke, I've read books where it's one thought and then five different examples of this topic. It's like why, well, I don't need five examples, I got it. You gave me one illustration. I'm good. I hope that has been helpful.

Speaker 1:

Like I said, we're gonna do three of these total, so I'm gonna do two more. The next one will be on preaching books and these preaching books, man, they have changed where I preach fundamentally. They have been so incredibly helpful. Doing a 180, I have found my preaching has so greatly improved, so I encourage you to do that one. And the last one will be on self-improvement books, again so incredibly helpful and helpful in having a direction and purpose, to clarify my direction and purpose of life, to find ways to be more efficient and achieving that goal. Doing things like a weekly review and other things, finding ways to connect with people better, finding ways to resolve conflict easier and better. So several different books I have read that were just so helpful to me and they work. I've practiced them and they work and so we're gonna be talking about those in the next couple of podcasts. We'll be releasing these weekly. I hope you enjoyed it, god bless.