The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Windows into Advent by Dr. Tom Kinnan

Episode Date: June 27, 2026

Windows into Advent by Dr. Tom Kinnan https://www.amazon.com/Windows-into-Advent-Dr-Kinnan-ebook/dp/B0H3D13BZG https://www.drtomkinnan.com/ In this inspiring collection of Christmas devotionals, Dr. Tom Kinnan invites readers to look beyond the lights, gifts, traditions, and distractions of the season to rediscover the heart of Christmas Jesus Christ. Through personal stories, biblical insights, and thought-provoking reflections, each chapter explores themes such as patience, trust, hope, generosity, forgiveness, faith, and the miracle of God’s love revealed through the birth of Christ. From shepherds and angels to Joseph, the Magi, and the manger itself, these devotional messages bring familiar elements of the Christmas story to life in fresh and meaningful ways. Whether you are celebrating Advent, seeking spiritual encouragement during the holiday season, or looking for a daily devotional to deepen your relationship with God, this book offers practical wisdom and heartfelt inspiration for believers of all ages. Inside you’ll discover: Encouraging Christmas devotionals rooted in Scripture Personal stories and relatable life lessons Fresh perspectives on the birth of Christ and its meaning today Reflections on faith, hope, trust, patience, and God’s grace Daily inspiration to help you experience a more Christ centered Christmas Warm, uplifting, and spiritually enriching, this book is a reminder that the greatest gift of Christmas is not found beneath a tree, but in the Savior who came to transform lives and offer eternal hope. Take a journey through the Christmas season and rediscover the wonder, substance, and joy of God’s greatest gift. Jesus Christ.

You wanted the best... You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Because you're about to go on a monster education role. rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Folks of Voss here from the Chris Voss Show.com. Ladies, you know, and the early sings it. We make it official. For 16 years, nearly 3,000 episodes, we are bringing you the oldest podcast. Still alive that broadcast daily, multiple times a day, actually.

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We're talking about his book and some of his insights and all that good stuff. His book is entitled, the ESA, ESA, for those of you Googling it when you're going into Amazon, the ESA, God's Rescue Plan for Humanity by Mark Stouffer. And just in case you're searching that on Amazon as well, the God's part, G-D-S rescue plan for humanity. The EISA God's Rescue Plan for Humanity, and there'll be a link for it on the Chris Foss show. Mark Stouffer is joining us. He is a retired engineer who lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio. He was born in 1960 and grew up loving sports after college.

He was found by God. Mark has a passion for the Bible, which he has been studying and teaching for over 40 years. He's been to Israel and has great respect for the Jewish people. Welcome to the show, Mark. How are you? Oh, thank you. I'm doing great today. And we're great to have you.

Give us your dot-coms, websites, any places you want people to get to know you better. I can be found on Goodreads, but my web, website is Lovingkindness of Adani.com. And that's where I have some videos and some resources and links to my books on Amazon. So give us a, how many books have you written in total, by the way? So my third book just launched in May. And I've got one more in this. They're all in a series.

One more coming out, hopefully around Christmas time this year. And so give us a thing. 30,000 or what's inside this one? So this one, yes. Let me just say that they're all, they're a series, and the series has to do with a statement Jesus made, a very bold claim, that he was debating with some of the religious leaders of the Jews,

and he said, you guys search out your scriptures to find out the key to eternity, and then he said, they're all about me. And when I read that verse, it was so bold. And so all these books cover different elements from the Tanakh or what Christians call the Old Testament and different elements. And we look to see how strongly they do prophesy or foreshadow Jesus.

And in this one, the element is God's rescue plan for humanity to save us from our sins, save us from this broken world. And so we go through the Bible. In this one, we go through the Old Testament, and then on end of the New Testament, to see how God's plan progresses, and to see what the role of the Messiah is in his plan, and to see if Jesus, what he did fits that role. And what is the ESA, what is that term in the title of your book, refer to exactly? Yes, that's a good question. Hebrew word, and it's usually translated into English as counsel, God's counsel. But it can mean his purpose or his plan. And so I'm using it because my book is about his rescue plan.

Now, tell us more about this rescue plan. Yes. That's really the framework of the Bible. It starts off in the beginning after one chapter he creates everything, the universe and earth. And in chapter two, he creates man and man's in paradise with God as their father, Adam. And he creates, and this is very important to me. He creates, the next thing he creates is a woman and a marriage. If I digress for just a moment here, he doesn't create a government, right? he creates a family and he creates specifically a married couple and it's such a precious gift from God so that just means more to me as I get older and appreciate my wife who's a blessing to me

but and then in chapter three it all falls apart everybody knows the story with the snake and and the apple and they rebelled they had one rule and they broke it so and when they broke They covered themselves with fig leaves, and so much of the Bible is in our vernacular today, isn't it? This term comes from Genesis chapter 3. And God said, where are you? And they said, oh, we're naked, so we thought we'd be in the woods. And he's, who told you you were naked? Then they had a whole conversation.

And right there in the beginning, he introduces the beginning, the beginning seeds, of a plan that he already has worked out to one day restore them back into his presence, into full acceptance and being acceptable to be in his presence. But it's a very long-term plan. And the whole, it progresses throughout the Bible. The world descended into sin and chaos and he started over with Noah. And then at some point thereafter, he started with one man, Abraham. And Abraham was very old.

He was 100 when he had his child. His wife was 90. Sarah. It was a miracle. And God had promised him for 25 years that you're going to have a child. And one day they will be a nation. These are the Jews. And these were his people that he was working through in the Old Testament.

And he gave them the law. And that's very important. and I explain how that's part of his plan, they were to follow it, and he was going to bless them, and he was going to protect them. He was going to bless all the work of their hands, their crops, their animals, and they were going to live in a just society

with a strong legal system, and they were going to worship him and not some pagan deities with debauched, abominable worship practices, and he was going to bless them. And the whole world would be able to be able look at them and see God because they knew the real God and other people worship false guys. But then the Jews didn't do so well. They didn't follow him very well. And a lot of things

happened. And then it's a pivot point in history. Jesus came and I think everybody knows what he did. He died to pay the price for our sins. And then he sent out his followers. And he sent and he worked with them for three years and he slept with them and he ate with them and he traveled with them and they helped him and then he sent them out in pairs on a couple occasions and then he resurrected and he and he stayed with them for seven more weeks and then he ascended and then they and all of his followers thereafter were sent out to the ends of the earth with the message of salvation and then so that's his plan and then there's some prophecy about the very end when things like in the days of are going to spiral out of control morally in war and death and destruction.

And he's going to return to work with the Jews for the final seven years. And then at the very end, he's going to come back and he's going to sit everything right. So that's a very long answer, but that's his plan. And that's what you outline in the book and talk about some of the deets there, right? Yeah. And what was the impetus that made you want to write this book? What made you, you had that moment of epiphany where you're like, Dernhard, I'm going to write about this. Yeah, I did. And I wrote my first book. And that was like six years ago when I started writing.

And even from the beginning, within a month, I had the outline for all four books. And my first element from the Old Testament was a sacrificial system. There's a rich sacrificial atonement system in the Jewish law. And I look at that in detail. And then we look at Jesus' crucifixion. And we look to see, do these things line up? Was it foreshadowing Jesus 2,000 years earlier? No, it really doesn't match. So the reader can make their own determination.

But we go through the passages. I also cover a number of men, Old Testament heroes. that had striking events or character qualities that were strikingly similar to Jesus. And that's just very interesting. And again, you can look at the passages from the Old Testament. You can look at what Jesus did. And then the reader can decide, that's interesting or no, that's more than that. And then the second book, we go through Messianic Prophecy.

This book, we go through God's plan. Final book that's coming out in the fall or the winter, I'm going to do a literary analysis of the Old Testament. Oh, wow. And we're going to look at how it ends. And I think how it ends is striking, and it can't be the end of a book. No one would end a book this way. It ends in the book of Malachi with God saying that he's going to rub vomit on the priest's faces because they were so misrepresenting him so poorly. as the spiritual leaders.

So by that point, he's worked with the Jews for 1,500 years, and then he says that, and then it ends. And we're going to go through that. We're going to go through all the plotlines that are open in the beginning of the Old Testament. None of them are resolved by the end of the Old Testament. And it just said, yeah, and it ends in a disaster. And so then we're going to go to the New Testament.

We're going to look at its message, and we're going to, again, present to the reader. Does this resolve the open plot lines from the Old Testament? So that's an overview of all the books. And how many books in total do you have written? Maybe there are some additional ones, maybe? How many total have you written? No, no, just this series three and then one coming out.

Oh, one coming out. And what's the anticipated release date of that? Hopefully late November. Ah. What made you so interesting? It seems like a lot of this stuff comes from the Jewish Kabbal maybe a little bit with a mix of the Bible. Is that a correct interpretation or am I?

Yeah, you're right. I've read a number of Jewish books written by their theologians, and I simply wanted to understand their beliefs. But mainly from, I've just, as Christians, God gives each of us a passion and each of us a gifting, a special ability. And I've had a passion to study the Bible, which I've been doing for over 40 years. And so I'm an imperfect person. and but for sure and it sucks to be you man i'm perfect no we all are you're the we all are but

i'm in touch with my imperfect more than anybody else and that's because you have a wife who remind you all the time wow i'm i'm so lucky she is so forgiving that's true that's so wonderful but but what i'm trying to say is god is so gracious that at a point in time he's now mark you've been studying this and he's been with me as I studied it and answered prayers to what does that mean and sometimes right away I could see and sometimes it was years later when I'd learn but at a point in time he's let's do something with this and that's when I started writing these books I so you've got an accountability partner to say hey let's write that book I think I might have misspoke I might have said cabal instead of cabala earlier so if I did misspeak you don't write me folks

Kabbal. I have a lot of respect for the Jewish faith and people. The thing I wanted to bring up with you, too, is, now we talked about the title of your book has the word God, but it's G-D in how you utilize it throughout the book and on the title. Tell us why that is and what that means. Yes, so that's the most asked question I get. And it's just how, not every Jewish theologian, but a number of them write the word God. They have so much respect that they don't even want to spell GOD. So they put a hyphenate.

And I just do that out of respect for them. It would be like if you go in a synagogue and you put on a yarmaca, you're just being respectful. That's really my tone in the book to Jewish people is I'm presenting an argument, but with respect. Now, have you had, how has it been received by the Jewish people? Because there's a lot of variations of the Jewish thing. There's people who are ultra-Orthodox, and then there's some that just believe in the religion and stuff. I think the ultra-Orodox, they wear those big black hats and usually have the big beards and wear black all the time, I think. And so, you know, you've got new variances of maybe people that are extreme in their belief systems or narrow or just mild, maybe.

How has the books been received by that community, or the Jewish community as a whole, maybe? To be honest, I don't know. Okay. Well, I'll find you and tell you, just give it time. I haven't gotten feedback, yeah. It's the internet, the trolls are everywhere. It puts something on YouTube and you'll hear about it for sure. Yeah. So let's see here.

What are some other aspects of the book that we can tease out to people to entice them to pick it up, talking about some of the details that you outline in it? Okay. So I go over in the, near the, the beginning, Jewish history, which I, ancient Jewish history, which I get from the Bible, first and second kings, first and second chronicles. God is not covering for any of their mistakes. Their warts are in plain view in the Bible, David's sin with Bathsheba and so on, and all their kings, and they're good moments too. So that's one thing that actually separates the Bible from other books.

it's not you're not reading these otherworldly depictions of their great leaders no that truth is presented and when you read it you know it so i get my history about how the jews did from the bible and then in the first hundred years of christianity is recorded in the new testament actually the first 70 65 to 70 it goes up to 100 AD and Jesus died and in early 30s AD. But then after that, we have a lot of historical writing. So I cover the Catholic Church. I don't cover the Orthodox Church just because I'm not writing an encyclopedia. I'm just writing a book. And I'm an American. So mainly we have the Catholicism here, not the Russian Orthodox Church. Yes, there's some Greek Orthodox, but mainly Catholicism. I cover that. And I cover that between

100 AD, when the Bible leaves off, and 1800. And then I cover modern Christianity from 1800 to today. But I find that it's long chapter on the Catholic history very interesting. I was able to, that's just such a great time to live, able to go on the internet, access archives from the Vatican, and read hundreds of pages of encyclicals and bowls written by the popes. And some of that was boring, but some of it was very interesting. Huh. And yeah, and so we go through the history. I also read a number of historians, and most of them were Catholics, but some of them

were not. And so I find that very interesting, and a reader may find that very interesting as well. That should be pretty darn awesome, where people can get engaged in that. Now, tell us about your history. You're not Jewish, are you? Or what interested in the Jews and the Jewish religion? And then how long have you been involved in religion? Did you grow up in religion or find it in your later years?

That's a great question. Yeah, I grew up in a mainline Protestant denomination, but it was very liturgical, ritualistic, and I didn't connect with it. And then after college, God miraculously reached out to me. in my heart. And I say that very confidently because he's done this with many people, not just me. And I opened the door of my heart just a little bit. And I said, who are you, God? And how do you go to heaven? And he answered that prayer. He brought someone in my life. And so anyway, I became a Christian. And like I said earlier, I loved studying the Bible. And I've been in a great church.

It's a mega church, you could call it, evangelical, where we focus. on the Bible, and I've had many great people in my life that have built into me and many opportunities to do ministry and serve. And so that's my story. Pretty amazing stuff there in what you got going on. And leading people down this journey, do you get interested in any other religious tomes? Or is, do you feel that maybe the Kabbalah and and some of the Jewish religions are probably, I don't know, maybe some of the most truest religions between the two of Christianity and that? Or, I don't know.

It's interesting. So the Muslims believe in the Quran, but they believe in the Old Testament and the New Testament as well. But they believe, and this is common knowledge, that they've been corrupted. Anywhere it disagrees with the Quran, they're like, oh, they corrupted it. And so they have a pretty different. understanding of the Old Testament than the Jews. But interestingly, the Jews and Christians pretty much agree on the meaning of the Old Testament. Only in passages where we go back and we say, that's a prediction of Jesus. Then they're like, no, no, maybe it's a prediction of Israel or

maybe Hezekiah or something like that. But pretty much most of it, we agree on. And so, that's interesting. But being a Christian, without a doubt, the Jews are God's people, and I respect them. And in the New Testament, Paul says that too. The promises of God are irrevocable. He's coming back to the Jews, but he was taking a break. And that's a big subject. I won't go into that, but which he clearly has, the diaspora. Jews know that. But they're back in their land today, and I believe that's the hand of God. But not only that, but also the Jewish people I know have been beautiful people. I have great respect for them. So that's where my love for them comes from. I have a lot of good friends that are Jewish. And in fact, so much so that I say, Oe Vé all the time, instead of swearing, which is good because part of my family is Mormon and they don't like swear words. If I can use Oe V around them, it works better.

That's good. Yeah. I'm not allowed to swear. My wife doesn't like it. And see, if you can say a oyvei, like no one knows it's a swear word. My brother had to take me aside and be like, what does the OIV mean? Because if you taught my kids to say something that's really disgusting, I'm going to, it's not going to be good. And I'm like, no, it's a Jewish.

It's just kind of a Jewish, like, oops, sort of thing. I don't know the exact. I looked it up one time years ago, and I'm like, okay, this is fine. But yeah, OeVe is a great way to fill expletives. And then you still got that. punch where you kind of feel it and get out of your system like you would the F word. But you can say, oy ve, and then you're free. Are you addicted to that? You say it all the time?

I do say it way too much. I do say it way too much, especially if I get around Jewish people and they say it. It triggers me and I'll start saying it. You know, when you're around people, like if I get around Canadians, I'll always say oi and, or not oi. I always say A and a boot. and what's the other one that's a favorite, Aboot? Anyway, so yeah, anyway. I like to trigger the, or tap into the Canadians when they come on the show. A lot of them,

if they're doing the proper, they don't, they don't do the A's or the Aboots. But if you start cueing them, they'll start doing it. It's kind of funny. It's funny. But no, wonderful people. We love Canadians too.

Canadians are awesome. Nice. people in the world. And Australians, too. What more haven't we touched on in your book should we talk about? Should we tease out before we go? I'll just say, let me just go to one of the guys in the first book that had something similar happened to Jesus. My favorite book in the Bible is the book of Daniel, and there's just tremendous prophecy in there. But there's also some narrative passages. And one of them is the famous story where he gets thrown in a lion's den. And I think where we see that in America today are perhaps in children's books with cute little Fisher Price Lions or maybe on wallpaper for the baby's room and things like that.

But actually, he was thrown in a lion's den. And, you know, that's very interesting. And he was thrown in because he was elevated to a very high position in the Persian Empire by the king who loved him. He was a godly man. And the king appreciated him. and he was an honest man, and other governors and the empire were jealous of him, and they pulled the ruse, and they got him thrown into this lion's dead for praying to his God, which he would not stop.

And they had a bogus law passed for a month that you could only pray to the king, and the king fell for their trick. So anyway, sure enough, Daniel was caught praying and thrown in the lion's den. And they put a seal over the, they rolled a big rock over the opening of the cave. They put a seal over it from the government. And the next morning, the king loved Daniel, and he ran down, and sure enough, Daniel came out alive. And as I read that, I thought, you know what, that is a prophecy. It's a narrative.

But it's not a prophecy. It's a foreshadowing of Jesus's resurrection. All these details line up. The next day, Jesus was dead, and his body was placed in a tomb, and they rolled a big boulder in front of the opening of the tomb, and they put a seal from the governor over it. And not the next day, but three days later, his closest friends, Mary and Peter and John, ran down there just to see what was happening. and the border was rolled away and the body was gone. And so anyway, we see when you read this story in Daniel how it lines up, line for line with what happened to Jesus when he got resurrected.

And so that's just an example of how much foreshadowing there is in the Old Testament. Yeah. Jesus went full zombie. He escaped the thing. These jokes, people don't write me. Yeah, I think people on this audience and know me after 16 years. So, a wonderful story, wonderful insights. People can check out your other books and all that good stuff. As we go out, give people a final pitch out to pick up your book.coms, wherever they can find you, etc.

Yeah, my books are on Amazon. My name is Mark Stouffer. The news book that just came out is the ESA, ESA. And my website is Lovingkindness of Adonai.com. All right. Sounds good. Then thank you very much, Mark, for coming the show. we really appreciate it.

Thank you, Chris. I appreciate it. Thank you. And you can find the link for his book on the Chris Vos show. It is entitled The ESA, God's Rescue Plan for Humanity, the Loving Kindness of God. And God is spelled G-D-S, if you're Googling that on the interwebs or on Amazon. So make sure you watch for that. And Issa spelled ESA, for those you've got there.

And, of course, it's easy just to go to Chris Vos show and click on the link. See how that works? Anyway, thanks for tuning in. Go to goodrease.com, Forteousus Christchristch, Christfoss, LinkedIn.com, Fortressass, Christfoss, 1 on the TikTokany, and why am I singing the end of noise? Thanks for tuning in, be good at each other.

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