Why Read?
I used to be an avid reader before I entered full-time ministry. I also used to have a lot more time before I was in full-time ministry, because I worked only one job (e.g., 40 hours a week). But for my first 5 years of full time ministry, I had two full-time jobs - the secular one that was roughly 40 hours a week and the ministry one that usually exceeded 40 hours a week. Two full-time jobs created a lot of demands on my time. As a result, I began to think I could not afford to take the time to read. Reading became a luxury that I gave up due to my busy schedule.
However, I would sometimes run into situations I did not know how to handle. I would spend a lot of time and energy handling it - time praying for guidance plus time pondering the situation and trying to figure out what to do about it. I remember one time I had spent close to 80 hours resolving a particular problem. Later, a friend told me about a book that described that type of problem, identified what the key factors were and gave some strategies on how to handle it in a godly way. I remember complaining to God that I wish He'd brought that book along for me before that problem, because it would have saved me maybe 70 of those 80 hours.
The book would have taken me maybe seven or eight hours to read. If I had the principles in that book under my belt, I could have handled my 80-hour "problem" in about 10 hours. In other words, it would have cost me eight hours to read the book and 10 hours to handle the situation, for a total of 18 hours. That means I would have saved 62 hours had I read the book before I encountered the problem.
It doesn't take a genius to add up the hours and figure out that learning from another person's expertise can save you time over having to learn things as you go. And in some cases, it is much less painful to learn from hearing someone else's experiences than it is to go through the painful situations yourself.
I used to think I did not have time to read and learn from others who were more experienced in various aspects of ministry. But I learned (the hard way) that the exact opposite is true. I don't have the time to learn it on my own and figure it out myself when God has already brought the teaching along in a nice compact book.
Does that make sense to you? It can actually save you time and pain to learn from those who have gained expertise in an area God wants to teach you about.
We all want to have a teachable spirit, don't we? Proverbs 14:6 puts it this way: "A scoffer seeks Wisdom in vain [for his very attitude blinds and deafens him to it], but knowledge is easy to him who [being teachable] understands" (AMP). In my opinion, part of being teachable is to read books by quality authors and prayerfully process them.
I don't recommend reading books by just anyone. When studying the propehtic, stick to those with godly character and proven track records in the area of the prophetic. There are a lot of quality ministers out there who have written good books. Elvi has already reviewed books by Mike Bickle, Jack Deere, Bill Hamon, Rick Joyner and Steve Thompson. These are some quality people and you might want to read some of their other books. In addition, several of the prophetic-school leadership core members have written books. These are the people who contribute to the teachings and who act as advisers to this online school and who people from our school go to when they need godly counsel about prophetic matters. Authors from our leadership core include Keith Gerner, Jim Paul, Jim Wies, Steve Witt and myself. In addition, there are some very respected and trustworthy prophetic ministers who have written books. This is not an exhaustive list, but here are a few names that come to my mind: Paul Cain, Jim Goll, Cindy Jacobs and Larry Randolph.
These books/authors should all be available at the local Christian bookstore. You can also order them online, usually at a noticeable discount, through www.amazon.com or the publisher's website.
Treasure Hunts
There are a couple of ways you can approach learning from the "experts'" books. One way is to go on a treasure hunt. Did you know there are often good tidbits and valuable information in the prefix and introduction? Let me share an example. The Lord affected me very powerfully through Rick Joyner's book, "The Final Quest." The book is a very powerful vision Joyner shares with the church. But the part that affected me the most was in the introduction.
At the time I read the book, I was struggling with a spiritual experience I had, where I was sort of caught up into the heavenlies and received some revelation and a commissioning from the Lord. The reason it was troubling was because portions of this experience were at a lower level of intensity than others. I could see and experience the "vision," but at the same time, I could also see and experience my physical surroundings. It was almost like a double image. At times the vision would swallow up my surroundings, but at other times, it was milder and I could also see my natural surroundings. I was struggling over whether this was a valid spiritual experience or if portions of it were my imagination running wild. I was afraid to tell anyone about it for fear they would think I had "fallen off of the deep end."
Then I got hold of "The Final Quest." I read the introduction first, because it was at the beginning of the book. Joyner explained how he received his vision in the introduction and went into a short teaching on the types of revelation. He talked about what he calls trances (which I call open visions). He shared a couple sentences that validated my experiences. He explained that they "can range from those that are rather mild, so that you are still conscious of your physical surroundings, and can even still interact with them, to those where you feel like you are literally in the place of your vision" (Page 11). He also said, "But the overwhelming majority was received in some level of trance. Most of it came on the level where I was still conscious of my surroundings, and could even interact with them, such as answering the phone. When they were interrupted, or when things got so intense that I would have to get up and walk around, when I sat back down I would immediately be right where I had left off."
His short teaching described what I had experienced, and it validated the experience for me. That allowed me to open up to God and receive more from Him on it. That little buried treasure in the introduction affected me more deeply than the entire rest of the book, though the book was very impacting on its own merit.
Don't discount the forwards, prefixes and introductions. They often contain very helpful information.
Gleaning From Books
There is another technique you can use, called skimming. You probably did this back in your college days, when you had to read so many textbooks in such a short time. But it's been a long time since some of us had to study that way, so some may have forgotten this technique.
The technique is to read portions of the material to find the stuff you are interested in, and then read the interesting stuff in detail. Most paragraphs contain the key info either in the beginning or the end of the paragraph. When you read a paragraph with 12 sentences in it, you read each word in each sentence and you read all 12 sentences. But when you skim, you read the first and last sentence in the paragraph and glance at a few words here and there for the remaining sentences. If the paragraph deals with something you are interested in, you go back and read it in detail. If not, you move on.
That way you can quickly identify points of interest in a book and read those points in detail.
A variation of the skimming technique is the "mark-and-return" method. This is like skimming, except that you use a highlighter to underline the parts of interest. You don't spend any time on them, other than the time it takes to underline or highlight them. Then after you have gone through the entire book and marked it up, you go back over it and read the portions you have highlighted. That way you have gleaned portions of interest to read at your leisure.
If you are really pressed for time, or if an author's writing style does not work for you, then you might want to consider using the skimming or gleaning techniques.
Wrap Up
The prophetic is a very involved and complex area. There is a lot about the prophetic and most of us don't understand/know everything there is to know about it. Fortunately, there are resources we can use to enhance our understanding, research questions, etc. The free online teaching on the GodSpeak web pages, http://www.godspeak.org/goto_classes.html, is one good source. Sitting in on conferences and seminars featuring traveling prophetic ministers is another way. And, of course, books are an excellent resource. We hope you will begin to take advantage of some of the prophetic resources that are available, and that they will enrich your walk with the Lord.
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