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Best Books of 2023

For The King — FTK
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Best Books of 2023

January 3, 2024
For The King
For The KingFTK

This episode highlights the best books I read in 2023 along with a few other items. Thanks for listening to the podcast the past year and I look forward to the next with you!

Fiction: 1.)The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien

2.)Beowulf

3.)Ransom Trilogy C.S. Lewis

Honorable mentions:

* Crime and punishment

* The Death of Ivan Iliyich

* George Macdonald's fairy tales

* Scottish Seas by Douglas M Jones III

Nonfiction:

1.) Heretics/Orthodoxy/Winter fire by G.K. Chesterton

2.) In the house of Tom Bombadill by C.R. Wiley

3.) Monsters from the ID by E. Michael Jones

Honorable Mentions:

* Churchill Hitler and the unnecessary war/ the problem with Lincoln

* Commentary on Romans by John Murray

* God's Good Design by D. Michael Clary

* Re-enchanting time/the unseen by Josh Robinson

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Transcript

Hello, For The King listeners. I am not your host, Rocky Ramsey. My name is Will Drzymski, a brother in Christ and friend of Raku's, whom he has generously invited onto the show in order to verbally showcase my artwork to you in 50 seconds.
As an artist, I strive to accurately reflect the glory of God and everything that I paint, and through that process I hope to flood as much of the earth as possible with paintings which accurately proclaim the undeniable fact that Jesus is Lord and the creation which he made commands us to worship him. So if you would like to join with me in distributing clean, refreshing artwork showcasing the creativity of the God who made us, I would be overjoyed to have your help. I run my own website called Reflected Works, where I showcase the artwork I've done in the past, sell original paintings and prints, and take requests for unique commissions.
Once again, that's ReflectedWorks.com, all one word, and I'm looking forward to helping you further the Kingdom of God right now here on this earth by putting some of your free wall space to productive use. Thank you very much for your kind attention, and now, enjoy the show. And I'll not apologize for this God of the Bible.
Welcome, friends, to the For the King podcast. This is your host, Rocky Ramsey, and I am joined with no one. I am going solo this episode.
On the For the King podcast, we proclaim the edicts of the King, namely and chiefly, that Yahweh reigns. So this is our yearly episode of the top books that I read this year, so I hope to share with you three fiction and three nonfiction books that I would like to commend to you with some honorable mentions afterwards, and then do just some quick updates on the podcast in general and what's going on with me and what's happening in my life. First, before we get into it, I just want to thank Will for ReflectedWorks.com for the ad that you guys have heard each episode, the past probably 30 or 40 episodes.
I absolutely love what he's doing with his artwork,
and I appreciate him partnering with me in the podcast. So I just want to give a good shout out and thanks to him for all his hard work and just his partnership with me. So thanks, Will.
And for all of you guys that are listening, that have continued to stick with me over the years, we're coming up on three years doing the podcast, so I appreciate all of you that have continued to listen, and any of you newcomers pleased to have you and thankful for you. So I just wanted to give thanks, and most of all, obviously, thanks to the Lord for what he's done with the podcast, and I do hope and pray that I have helped at least a small amount in your life, in your walk with Christ, being conformed to his image. I hope I've just played a small part in God's kingdom in doing that and helping.
Great, so very grateful for the podcast and that I get to
continue to do it. So on to the top books. This is not to brag, but to show that it can be done.
So this year, I got through 108 books, okay? That's a ton of books. That's the most books I've ever read in my life in one year. I've always read periodically off and on for a long, long time, but as I've matured and grown in Christ, I have felt very jaded by the public school system that I was raised up in as a man.
I don't feel like I have been taught anything,
so I am definitely trying to play catch up. And if you do, become a very, very avid reader, which is very, very good. Christians are people of the book.
With not much knowledge,
though, does come much vexation. The more you know, the more you're responsible for. It takes a lot of work to learn a lot of different things.
So it's definitely something that can
become straining in you. And I will say this year, the lesson I learned is it's good to read and it's good to grow in your knowledge, but you need to make sure that the foundation and the epicenter of all of your learning is coming from God's word. So we need to always be people of the book, capital T, the book, God's word, the holy scriptures.
And from that
should flow all of these other books that should aid in our understanding of God's created world. So let that be a warning, but also an encouragement. You can read a lot of different books.
One thing I did fall into this year was just trying to get through books without maybe shirking some of my responsibility to read God's word. I never ever stopped reading God's word, but it definitely wasn't. I wasn't meditating on the word of God.
I was letting these books be more of my focus. So that's just a little warning. But reading is very, very important, especially for those of us in the West that the elites have propagandized us and taught us nonsense.
And it really is incumbent on us to be well
educated and to learn more about the world so that we can know where we come from, what is our history, and where are we going, and what can we accept and adopt from the pagan unbelieving world around us, what books can we read and basically baptize those things, what things do we need to reject in the modern day world, and what things are just good that we need to walk in and understand as Christians that these things are actually things God has given us and the world is still appreciating that and tapping into that. So reading is very important, and I would commend one way to get a lot of books in that has helped me this year. Out of those 108 books that I got through, and they're all different lengths.
It's not like I read 108 1,000 page books. I mean, you know, most of them, my average book length was probably 150 to 200. If you want to get a lot of books in, you do need to start utilizing the gift of audiobooks.
You can redeem the time that would
be downtime otherwise in so many different ways. Whenever you're in the car, when you're working out, whenever you would just have a moment, a free moment, maybe on your lunch break. I've been doing that more.
On my lunch breaks, I will listen to an audiobook. And these are ways,
historically, humans have gone through and learned and heard stories was through oral tradition. People would read books out loud and tell tales and stories to one another.
And reading has always been there as well. The written word is important as well. But many stories and many genres can be read aloud and listened through audiobooks and is a great way for you to get a lot of reading in, get a lot of information in your head.
So I would commend that to you as well. Adopt audiobooks, specifically history and fiction are very, very easy to listen to. Your nonfiction should be a lot of your actual tangible reading and underlining and annotating.
That should probably be mostly nonfiction. But, you know,
fiction is obviously enjoyable to sit down with the book as well. But if you're going to audiobook, I would say history and fiction are great genres to listen in and depends on the nonfiction, but you can do that as well.
Okay, sorry about that lengthy intro, but wanted to commend some
of those things to you. So for this year, top three fiction books. Number one, I did finish the Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time.
I had watched the movies all growing up
many, many times with my dad and brother. And we really enjoyed those. But getting to read the books is amazing.
I did do the fellowship of The Ring and the Two Towers last year for my book
review. And I finished The Return of the King very early this year in continuation of what I had finished up at the end of 2022. And wow, Lord of the Rings is an amazing, amazing, amazing story.
One of my nonfiction books is actually going to be a nonfiction book based off of
some topics in Lord of the Rings. So Lord of the Rings is just so rich and there's so much to think about. There's so much good masculinity.
There's so many good archetypal portrayals of Christ
and sacrifice in masculinity, good portrayals of femininity, the glory of womanhood and what women are called to and what men are called to, the glory of honor and gravitas. Lord of the Rings is a great temptation for domination versus mastery. Saran being the representation of domination and mastery being more what Tom Bombadil resembles and even obviously Gandalf and Aragorn.
All the other heroes in the story are also exercising some mastery rather than
domination of others. There's just a lot of really good, really, really good symbols and archetypes in the book. I highly recommend reading through Lord of the Rings.
My next
hope is to actually listen through them on audiobook and hear them read to me rather than read myself. The second fiction I would like to commend to you would be Beowulf. This was written, oh man, I'm not exactly sure but maybe a thousand years ago.
It's a medieval
piece of like Scandinavian Danish folklore or or tale to be told. Very, very Christian in its nature. That very, that big time surprised me.
It is on Canon Plus if you want to read it there.
I read it through reading on Audible and boy was that epic. I'm gonna, I'll put in there the the audiobook narrator if you guys are interested in that one but it was just epic.
I was just
going through it. It was making my heart race and I was getting amped up. I mean, it was really good.
I highly recommend hearing Beowulf read aloud to you because that's how I first interacted
with it. Maybe it's really good just read normally sitting in a chair but hearing it read to you in an epic manner is pretty cool. It's an epic poem, very medieval, again good portrayals of masculinity and slaying the dragon, protecting those you care for.
But
Beowulf is also the main character, very, very wise as a man. It's a good representation of that medieval idea of idea of chivalry, being gentle around women and children but being fierce in battle when you need to in a moment. So I really love Beowulf.
I would commend it to you especially
if you like just epic stories. I mean, it's pretty dope. A lot of good fighting scenes, good feats of strength.
So I would highly commend Beowulf to you. And lastly,
my number three best fiction I read this year was The Ransom Trilogy by C.S. Lewis. It's a modern day fairy tale for men and women.
It is him playing around with science fiction but
in a medieval way. It's not modern but it's still science fiction. And just because something has, you know, the genre of science fiction is new, you might necessarily think that it's going to be modern but it's not.
He is interacting with modern day ideals and things he was
probably hearing in Oxford in the hallways and with his colleagues. Very prophetic in terms of what he's dealing with in modernity but there's so many good rich medieval understandings that still ring true even in a modern setting. So it kind of gets back to the conversation I've been having on this podcast from time to time and many others like Josh Robinson, Aaron Ren have been starting to discuss Jonathan Peugeot, the idea of reenchanting the modern world.
That reenchantment is not at odds with having a cell phone or doing good scientific
discovery. They actually run alongside one another and are two different avenues by which we achieve an understanding of the world. So the Ransom trilogy is so good at that.
The first two,
the first book is exploring kind of more of those things I'm talking about there like reenchanting the modern world. What are the heavens like? What is space like? What would the end result of humanity have been in a sense? Because the planet he gets to is one that's basically it has never fallen. None of these creatures he encounters are sinful and wrong.
There's some really good dialogue there about what that means and some lessons for us. The second book is him dealing with what if humanity would have resisted the temptation in the garden and he does it in a very unique way. Explores some more really, really good topics, especially the temptation of evil.
He explores a lot with temptation. That was very, very
interesting and I think you guys would love it. A Paralangia was my favorite.
That's the second
book and it was my favorite because it was so unique in its exploration of the temptation, like I said, of evil and how to resist temptation and what would the unfallen state of humanity been like and how would they have interacted with Satan in the proper way. It's really, really good and the last installation is called that hideous strength and that is the longest of the three. They progressively get longer.
That one is very,
very long but very, very good. There are multiple different story arcs that are being followed. You pick up with the same main character but then there's also these two new characters introduced that have a pretty big role to play in the story and these two story arcs run parallel to one another but they also coincide more towards the end of the story and it's just very well done and that is the most prophetic of the three.
The other two are exploring ancient, ancient ideas.
This third one is more prophetic based on ancient ideals. Of course, he's not getting rid of that part of his story but it's very prophetic with what we see nowadays.
There's a lot of talk of propaganda through the government and twisting stories and causing cognitive dissonance with the public. Very, very well done story. I really appreciate it.
Really appreciated C.S. Lewis' work there. It's amazing. I highly recommend it.
You got to get
that. You got to get these three under your belt. Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, Beowulf.
Those are three you got to get under your belt. Others I would commend. Some honorable
mentions for this year would be Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
That's more
exploring guilt, being made in the image of God and the guilt that humans have when they do something evil and they obviously have nowhere to take their guilt. Another Russian author, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is by Leo Tolstoy, that is literally just exploring death. It's very gruesome to get through.
These Russian authors are insane. What they can explore and make you
really feel, it's really powerful. I don't know.
Maybe it's just because they went through communism
and all of that hardship in the 19th century and all of these Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and all these Russian authors that are exploring all these kind of like nihilism, I guess. Leo Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are Christian, so they're going to definitely not be fatalistic in their view of the world. But Crime and Punishment and The Death of Ivan Ilyich are very sobering stories.
I read a bunch of George McDonald fairy tales, so just go through those.
I guess maybe the main highlight would just be The Princess of the Goblin and The Princess and Kurtie. Those are really, really good.
My wife and I read through those. Go through
some George McDonald fairy tales. They're great.
Lastly, Scottish Seas by Douglas M. Jones III
gave me some good. It was like a Presbyterian tale. I think they may have been just like reformed Huguenots or something or I guess reformed Scottish covenanters.
I'm really not
sure all the theology around the time period that this is like taking place in, but they're a reformed family and they go through some hardship. There's some really good thoughts in there for fathers and mothers about if you do fall into reformed theology, how do you apply the principles in reformed theology to your family and your life. There's some really good thoughts in Scottish Seas and I highly recommend that as well.
Moving on to non-fiction.
I would commend these three books to you heavily. First, the number one non-fiction for this year, most amazing non-fiction I read was I put all three of these together because they're all Chesterton, but specifically Heretics and Orthodoxy.
Those Heretics is like the prequel
to Orthodoxy. It's kind of what warrants his topics in Orthodoxy. Heretics is dealing with his contemporaries and dealing with people as Heretics and not as just I guess free thinkers.
If we're concerned about Orthodoxy, then that means we're also concerned about Heretics. So Heretics is him, the flip side of Orthodoxy. All of these different unbelieving worldview systems are just basically heretical in nature and he deals with a lot of his contemporaries and has some really interesting thoughts there.
That book is where we get Chesterton's Fence.
You get the tail of the monk that sees these people, these modern people trying to tear down a lamp post and the monk comes up and says, friends before we tear down the light post, first let's contemplate and meditate on what is light and why is light useful. Some questions like that and then the modernist has his thing that he says in rebuttal and all these other different unbelieving worldview systems like the communist has something to say and the socialist has something to say and the idealist and the romantic and all these different unbelieving world systems has a response to the monk and their reason why they want to tear it down.
Some don't want to tear it down because the lamp was
too bright and some want to tear it down because they're an environmentalist and I think it's bad for the environment. Everybody has their reasons that are heretical and the monk is the only one that's really asking the real questions. So that is kind of the idea of Chesterton's Fence and it's introduced there.
Orthodoxy is his, basically it's called the romance of the faith.
That's like the subtitle. So what he's trying to do in this book is show you the beauty of the paradox of Christianity that at face value it may appear unbelievable but the deeper you go into the orthodox principles in Christianity you realize this is the only way the world coheres and works.
It's very presuppositional. It's very good. He deals with so many different paradoxes
and the beauty of something like the idea of original sin.
I've had many atheists tell me
it's wicked to tell people that they're inherently evil, that there is such a thing as original sin and humanity. That's a bad thought. That's mean to tell people that, right? But if you don't tell people that there's much worse consequences than telling people that and Chesterton walks through such an idea as original sin and why that's actually vital to human life to not trust yourself.
Those that trust themselves fall but those that don't trust themselves and are wary
of themselves, those are the ones that are humble and repent and are able actually to do good works. So that's one example but he goes through so much. I'm not going to go through all of it.
It's really, really good. And I guess the third thing is actually a more recent book but it's not exactly by G.K. Chesterton but it's about G.K. Chesterton. It's called Winter Fire, A Christmas with G.K. Chesterton by Ryan Whitaker-Smith.
And it's an advent reading of a bunch of
different things that G.K. Chesterton said about Christmas and about the world. So it's really, really good. I highly recommend next advent season going through that advent.
It's definitely the
goal of it is to re-enchant the world. He talks about that a lot. So we definitely need to start thinking more about re-enchantment and if you want to enter into that conversation, Winter Fire, Christmas with G.K. Chesterton is really, really good.
They also have recipes and games and
traditions and short stories and there's all sorts of fun stuff on the back of the book I really love. Second best non-fiction I'd like to commend to you is In the House of Tom Bombadil by C.R. Wiley. That's the book I was alluding to earlier.
That's a non-fiction based
on Lord of the Rings. There's so many good non-fiction books talking about the principles in Lord of the Rings. This one is specifically looking at the character of Tom Bombadil and why he's in the book.
He seems kind of random and off the wall and doesn't really fit in the story
but C.R. Wiley does a great job I think and I'm very compelled with what he's saying in the book about why that character fits in. Why is Tom Bombadil in the book? What does he represent? And really, he's the antithesis of Saran. It's really not Gandalf or Aragorn or Frodo.
Bombadil is really the character that's juxtaposed against Saran in the book. So very very interesting. I loved it.
It really helped me understand the idea of domination versus
mastery. How a man ought to operate in his household. It was very devotional and pastoral for me as a man because he takes those principles and distills them out and looks at Tom Bombadil's marriage with the River Lady.
I forget her name. My bad. Marigold.
I forget her name but the River
Lady. Tom Bombadil is married to his wife. She is so blessed and helped by Tom Bombadil.
But Tom Bombadil is master. Frodo asks, whatever her name is, the River Lady is Tom Bombadil's wife. Is Tom Bombadil the leader of the forest or does he own the forest? And she says no.
Everybody is owned by themselves. Everybody has their own responsibility and she's like, oh so Tom Bombadil isn't the master or whatever. She's like, oh no, Tom Bombadil is the master.
He just doesn't own the forest. So he kind of orientated his masculinity in such a way that these things, each tree, each lily, and even his wife, each of them realize they still have a duty in and of themselves of what they need to do. But Tom Bombadil as the master, as the patriarch, is there to orient all things in his garden, per se, to the greatest good.
So he's cultivating
things. He's not dominating them. Seron, on the other hand, he presses his thumb down on people and dominates people.
And those are really the topics talked about in the House of Tom Bombadil.
I highly recommend getting that book or listening to Alan Cannon Plus. And the last book, the third best is Monsters from the End by E. Michael Jones.
I alluded to this in one of my recent podcast episodes, Spooky Plus Christianity, where we were talking about Halloween. But this book is looking at the rise of the genre of horror in modernity in the West. It's fascinating.
It is really fascinating. He traces the monster,
the idea of the monster, the horror genre, as it travels throughout the West. It starts with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein in the Enlightenment in France.
Then it moves to Germany during the
Weimar Republic with the book Dracula with the vampire. And there's some really interesting stuff with the vampire and Frankenstein and what those monsters represent in the societies in the Enlightenment. And then lastly, the monster travels to actually Bloomington, Indiana, out of all places.
Indiana University with Alfred Kinsey, with the radical sexual revolution that
birthes. Basically, if you've noticed, the horror genre always has weird sexual licentiousness in it. And that is also present.
And even the Alien series is the one that he hones in on.
Because the, as a little teaser, the alien is basically a modern-day commentary on abortion, that this alien comes in and plants eggs at humans and then outbursts this alien, right? And that's really how the unbeliever views children, their parasites and their aliens, until they exit the birth canal and then they're humans. But before that, they're basically this foreign substance that's sapping life and destroying humanity.
And that's what the aliens
series is exploring. So that's just a little teaser on some of the ideas presented in the book. It's really stinkin' good.
I mean, it's one of the most fun non-fiction. I mean, G.K. Chesterton
and this Monsters from the Id is some of the most fun, or in the House of Tom Bombadil, some of the most fun non-fiction I've ever read. Just enjoyable to read, just fun.
So I hope you enjoy it. Honorable mentions. These are some good historical books that really helped alter my view of history.
So the first one is Churchill Hitler and the Unnecessary War
by Pat Buchanan. And that kind of helps us understand what's going on in World War II. And basically, it's Christendom fighting itself.
It was really, really bad and demonic.
And the second book is The Problem with Lincoln by Thomas de Lorenzo, looking at how Abraham Lincoln may have paid lip service to Christianity, but he really wasn't pagan and he hated Christianity. And he in the North was way more racist than you would think.
And basically, the North had a bad and
faulty view of the Constitution and was impressing that upon the South, among other things. So that book's very, very good. I loved it and definitely made me anti-Lincoln and not very wishing that the Civil War had had a different outcome.
So I guess I'll leave it at that. There's more to
be said there. So if you're really offended by that, I'd be happy to talk about it more or do a podcast episode on it.
But obviously, I guess I'll just say this to make things clear.
Slavery is a wicked and evil institution and shadow slavery is wrong. So I'm not condoning that or defending that at all.
But there's more nuance than you would think with The Civil War.
Second book, our second honorable mention, The Commentary on Romans by John Murray. Just really, really good biblical exegesis on Romans.
If you want to be helped to understand the book of Romans,
John Murray. Really, really solid, reformed thinker from the 20th century. God's Good Design is my third honorable mention by D. Michael Clary.
I actually interviewed him
on the podcast. You can listen to the interview with D. Michael Clary on his book, God's Good Design. I also interviewed this next author, Josh Robinson on Re-enchanting Time and the Unseen.
That is my fourth honorable mention in nonfiction. Those are going to really help you understand that time is enchanted and the unseen realm is more enchanted than you think and there is an unseen realm. And Josh Robinson does some really great book, great work in there.
And I highly recommend you guys do all the stuff I said in his interview, subscribe to his podcast. Josh Robinson's stuff is one of my favorites. He's great.
And then a few housekeeping
stuff at the end here to wrap up this podcast and start this new year. So some details about the podcast. I guess kind of where I'm at now.
First of all, you can see what I am reading this year
with my public Google Doc document. You can go to my Substeck at ForTheKing.substeck.com and you can click on the tab that says reading list. And when you click on that, it's going to take you to a public Word document with all the books.
And I keep that updated. As I finish books,
I put it in there so you can see what I'm reading and what I've read this year. And if you're just interested on why I think the way I do or why I say the things I say, obviously books are where I'm getting a lot of my information from.
So you can kind of
see what I'm reading and you can follow me on Goodreads as well if you want to check that out. I also started a Substeck this year and I'm continuing to do that. And I hope to continue to put out some blogs and some content there.
So the website has migrated from ForTheKingPodcast.com
to ForTheKing.substeck.com just because I like Substeck more and I like that there's like this nice blog function built in to connect it with the podcast. So if you want to see what I'm up to and what I'm doing, then go to that Substeck. You can see my blog so you can see what I'm reading.
You can also see the businesses, the parallel Christian economy that I'm partnering with. I've had a few really good encounters with brothers and the Indianapolis area and online as well. For instance, like I said at the beginning, big shout out and thanks to Will at ReflectedWorks.com. You can purchase art from him and you can get a pro, use the promo code ForTheKingAllCaps to get 10% off.
So that's a brother doing work for the kingdom
that you can support and support a parallel Christian economy. If you're going to get art and you want to get somebody a gift that is art, then why not purchase from Will then get it from an unbeliever. So something like that.
I've also become an ambassador for Every Life,
which is a baby products company and you can use my promo code Rocky10 or you can see in the show notes that as well or go to the website and see and you can use promo code. But there's I know a general contractor that's a Christian guy. So I know a CPA, an attorney.
So if you want
some legal work done or a Will made or some tax work done, I mean, I know people and I want to bless those brothers and their hard work. I want to build up the kingdom and their expertise. So yeah, feel free to go to the website and see what's going on on the sub stack.
Let me know if you have any topics that you would like me to do or people that you want me to interview. I'm always looking for new things to do on the podcast. So please shoot your suggestions my way.
Last thing, I guess about me and something that's altered this year,
started this podcast as a reform Baptist and I haven't talked about it explicitly yet because I'm still kind of sitting on it, but I'm pretty comfortable in it now. Still got some more thinking though, still got some more reading, but the more I've learned, the more I am convinced of the Presbyterian covenant theology and Presbyterian church government. So that's a big, that's just a big update on me.
I am now a Presbyterian. So as you listen to this podcast,
you'll get some of those perspectives and you're welcome to look at the books I've read for that. John Calvin was immensely helpful on the topic.
He's one of the, one of the best that helped me.
But if you want more, just go to that, that reading list and you can see what I've read on covenant theology. That's really helped me.
But that's a big update with me. So just,
just be cognizant of that. But like I had in my last podcast, I mean, we ought to be, as I become a Presbyterian, I just opened my arms so much more to those that may disagree with non-secondary issues.
It was a very humbling experience to be rebuked on my
covenant theology that I thought was so right for so long and very strong willed. I could be very arrogant at times in the way I would portray theology. So it was a very humbling experience for me.
And I'm very thankful to be where I'm at in my understanding of God's word.
I think God's been very gracious to me in that way and helping me understand. And so I'm thankful for that.
That's an update. And lastly, just as we go into this, this new year,
it is an election year. There's going to be probably some riffs and some waves and some things that are going to happen this year.
Every year is tumultuous. You know, we're not
doomsdayists on this podcast. I don't advocate for a doomsdayism where you should just throw your hands up and say, oh, the world's going to crap.
And nothing will change. I'm a post millennial
in my eschatology, and I'm very optimistic that the gospel will be successful. So continue to preach the gospel where you're at.
I would exhort you to focus on the things you can
personally influence and control rather than tunnel visioning on this election or the world at large. The Lord is the one that controls those things. He's the one that has the King in his hands and can turn him whichever way he wants.
He's the one that rises nations up
and descends them down. He's the one that establishes kings and removes them. He's the one that does all those things.
What you can do as a father or as a wife
or as a young person that may be single and I'm just an active member in your church, what you can do is focus on the things you can control. Those are the things God has given you responsibility over. So focus and tunnel vision on those things and be faithful in those things and do not this year let yourself be taken over or bogged down by maybe the hardships that will come this year.
So remain faithful this year. I highly, highly recommend these books to you.
They would edify you and help in your understanding of God's world.
I hope this has been interesting
and encouraging. Thanks so much guys for sticking with me these last few years and I'm going to just continue to plug away and do the podcast. I really enjoy it.
I hope you guys enjoyed as well
and I'm always looking for new people to come on and have a discussion. So if you're very interested in a topic that you I've never touched on and you would love to, you've never heard anybody else on a podcast talk about it, I would love to have a conversation with you. So just reach out to me and we'll have a conversation about something new.
So I think that's all I
got for you guys. May the Lord bless you this year and establish you and establish us as His people. May we be faithful, may we put to death our sin and be conformed to His image rather than the image of darkness and Satan, but be conformed to the image of Christ and have our minds renewed this year.
Very optimistic about this year. Let's keep building. Let's keep doing what we're doing
and not worry about what the unbelieving world has to say, right? What's not fear man, let's fear God alone.
Okay, keep of the ages, mortal, invisible, holy God,
be honored and glory forever and ever. Amen. Amen.

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