My Best Sellers: Background and History of Two Books

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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I decided to do something rather different this morning.

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I wanted to sort of talk to our regular viewers, not about so much an apologetic subject, as about my two best -selling books.

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Now, when people call you a best -selling author, I'm not really sure what that means. I'm certainly not a best -selling author.

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I mean, I write Christian, non -fiction, apologetic categories, things like textual criticism and the

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Doctrines of the Trinity. That's not going to get you real big book sales these days in most

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Christian bookstores. And so, most of my books have sold fairly small numbers in comparison to almost any type of fiction work or anything like that.

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But my best -selling book, what do you think that one would be, people who know who

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I am? It's pretty easy. It's King James' Only Controversy, and I wrote this in 1994.

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It came out in 1995. I need to do an update on it because it's been coming up on 13 years now that this book's been out.

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It still sells very regularly. It's used as a textbook all across the country. It's been very, very well received.

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And, of course, has gotten me such titles as the High Priest of the Alexandrian Cult and various sundry things like that.

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But it's definitely the best -seller because it is used as a textbook, and so it sells each and every year.

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And what I really appreciate about the book is that it reached an audience, the very audience

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I wanted to reach. It's a friendly introduction to textual criticism. Most books on textual criticism are not overly friendly.

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They're not overly exciting, things like that. So, you know, it did exactly what

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I wanted it to do, and it's reached the audience. And it helps to, honestly, I believe, increase a person's confidence in the text of Scripture because they can see how the

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Bible's been transmitted to us. So even if you've never run into a King James Only advocate, believe me, once you do, you're going to want to read the book.

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But even if you haven't, I think you would find the book a useful read just simply because it helps you to understand where we got especially the

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New Testament, why we can trust it, things like that. I wrote the book. I had started actually studying

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King James Onlyism as far back as the early and mid -1980s when

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I was taking Greek and Bible college. My parents went back to, as I recall, it was

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Nashville. And they came home from this trip, and they said there were churches splitting down south over this

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King James Only issue. And so at that time, I had started reading some of the books by David Otis Fuller, The Witch Bible Society, even had a little correspondence with him before his death.

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And so I had studied that initially, and then sort of moved on from there, didn't have a whole lot more contact with folks.

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We even had some programs on King James Onlyism on the early editions, the 1980s editions of The Dividing Line on local radio stations here in Phoenix.

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And then in 1994, a volunteer called and said, you've got to listen to one of the local Christian radio stations.

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There's this woman named Gail Riplinger on. And I remember listening to the program as I was driving home, almost drove off the road, and ended up being on the air with Gail.

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And so I really need to do a couple videos of the resultant programs we had with Gail Riplinger, because it was about the last time she ever let herself be put in a situation where she actually had to answer direct questions from people, because she just can't do it.

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And so that then led to my putting my notes together, because I had to read her book before we did the program.

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Putting my notes together, we put this little booklet together. And Christian bookstores from all across the nation were writing and asking for this.

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And that's what led to the writing of The King James Only Controversy in 1994.

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And so that's the bestseller. Now, my second bestseller, most people don't even know

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I've even written the book. And it could not be any more different of a book than The King James Only Controversy.

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The King James Only Controversy, you look in the back here, and there's all these charts with textual variants and manuscript evidence and stuff like this.

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My second bestselling book is entitled Grieving, Our Path Back to Peace.

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You couldn't have two more different books, subject -wise, level -wise, audience -wise.

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This little book came out of the fact that back in the early 1990s, this ministry almost shut down.

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On one Monday, 65 percent of the monthly funding we had, which was almost nothing to begin with, disappeared.

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And I had to get another job. And I, in a very providential way, ended up working as a hospital chaplain at a large hospital in the

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Phoenix area. And that was the toughest work I have ever done. I'm a

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Scotsman, for crying out loud. We don't just naturally walk into a hospital room of someone we've never met before in our life and start chatting about things.

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That was hard. And to be honest with you,

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I had never seen anyone die at that point in time in my life. The closest person to me who had died was my grandmother.

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And we were in Arizona, and she was in Kansas, and so I certainly hadn't been there for that.

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But being a hospital chaplain was the toughest work I ever did.

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And seeing death, going into the CCU and seeing good deaths and bad deaths, seeing

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Christians die and non -Christians die, changes you. It really does. And the toughest part of this job was on Sunday afternoons,

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I would run a lost support group. And this was not a Christian hospital, and so I would have many non -believers in this lost support group.

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And I discovered very, very quickly that the key to whether the person would be able to move on with their life and do so in a positive fashion was whether they had hope for the future.

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And, you know, we even have a little tape in the bookstore. Actually, it was a tape. I think we have it on CD now, called

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Christians Grieve Too. And, you know, some people look at what the scriptures say and say, oh,

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Christians aren't supposed to grieve. If you actually look at what Paul said, it says, we are not to grieve as those who have no hope.

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Christians grieve in hope. Anyone old enough to love something or someone will grieve the loss of that something or someone.

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And we Christians are lousy about talking about death. We should be the best people talking about death, but we're pretty lousy about it.

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And I learned a lot in the few years that I did that work in regards to grief counseling and the grief process and things like that.

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I recognize our society doesn't know anything about it. Ah, two weeks, you'll be fine. You don't even start hitting the real feelings of grief for months until months after the death.

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And so what happened was an acquaintance of mine lost his 29 -day -old granddaughter in a tragic accident.

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And I attended the funeral, and there's something just completely unnatural about attending a funeral.

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The casket is only this large. And so I got back to my office, and I just cleared everything off my desk.

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And over the next four days, I wrote down pretty much everything I knew on the subject of grieving for my friend.

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Well, it wasn't long before I realized that what I had written down was a small book, and it might be useful to other people.

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And so I submitted it to my editor at Bethany House Publishers, and he loved it.

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But the interesting thing was, before he brought it into the publishing house, he said,

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I'm taking your name off of it. I mean, think of the other books I had written, the King James Only controversy, the Roman Catholic controversy, books like this.

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He says, there's no way anyone would believe you actually wrote this. And so he took my name off it, brought it in.

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And the inside house editors loved it and said, who wrote it? And only then did he tell them that it was

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I that had written it. And like I said, it's my second bestselling book. It has been very, very well received, very, very widely used.

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In fact, to my understanding, on September 12th and 13th, there were volunteers at Ground Zero, September 12th, 13th, 2001, distributing this book to the people working at Ground Zero in New York City.

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And it's not long. It's very friendly. People who are going through grief don't want huge, long books, tomes to read.

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Very practical. It's not deep theology. It is written, you really could give it to believer or nonbeliever, because believers and nonbelievers both grieve, though obviously it does have a

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Christian perspective to it. And it has really helped a lot of folks. And you know, it's funny, both have really helped a lot of folks.

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When I write books, I don't want to write books that other people have already written. Why should I? I'm not trying to get in on some sort of audience or something like that.

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I try to write books that meet specific and special needs. And I'm very thankful that my two best -selling books have met very important needs, but very different needs as well.

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And so I thought I'd take some time to share some of the background to some of these books.

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Maybe I'll do some of the rest of the books too, if you find it interesting, and give you some idea.

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Believe it or not, this is in our bookstore. Some people who have followed the ministry for years have heard about this book and gone,

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You wrote a book on that? I've never even seen it. Yeah, well, it's there. And so if you want to take a look at it, what

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I've done is I keep a few around, because unfortunately, that particular book on grieving, you never know exactly when you're going to need it.