Preface: The Way of Fire
A book by Apostle Delmar Coward Jr. and Gary Sheng
Cancers healed. Autism cured. The blind seeing. Demons cast out. The dead raised.
These are not old stories from the Book of Acts. They are happening now, in 2026, through a man in Liberty County, Texas who walks in the same authority Jesus gave His disciples two thousand years ago.
I could fill this preface with those stories. I am not going to lead with them, because the miracles are not the point, and mistaking them for the point is how people go looking for power and miss God entirely.
Here is the point. Every one of those miracles is downstream of one thing: a man who obeys God completely. The fire is not something Apostle Delmar went and got. It is what God entrusted to a life fully surrendered. This book is not about acquiring power. It is about becoming the kind of person God can trust with it. The power takes care of itself.
My Journey from Google to God​
My name is Gary Sheng, and for at least 28 years of my life I was a deep skeptic of anything spiritual.
My first job out of college was as a software engineer at Google in New York, and I spent my career in the worlds of tech, crypto, AI, and biotech. In those rooms, faith is treated as intellectual suicide. I had no interest in God or the supernatural.
So it surprised me when I began taking Christianity seriously four and a half years ago. It started with Kanye's Sunday Service videos. Something about music that points to God reaches people who would never otherwise look. My faith grew through logic too, through books like Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ and through watching God work in ordinary ways in my life. But I stayed intellectually convinced and spiritually lukewarm.
Until August 25th, 2025.
The Divine Connection​
That day my life changed through a woman named Brenda Gentry. While she was praying in tongues, my name came to her mind. She found the one person who knew us both and asked to be connected. We had lunch the next day, and she convinced me to drive to Liberty County to meet a pastor who had astonished her, and nearly everyone who met him.
To get there from Houston you cross the Trinity River into Liberty County, where Encounter Church sits in the small town of Raywood. The Trinity leading into Liberty is not lost on anyone who knows Scripture. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Corinthians 3:17, KJV). These are prophetic signposts, not just map markers.
As someone who had always oriented toward truth, the idea that a man was working miracles in my own state was staggering. I had visited plenty of churches around Austin and never heard of anything like it. I went to investigate.
The First Encounter​
That first day at Encounter Church I heard anointed worship, powerful preaching, and then watched my first altar call. Apostle Delmar was healing people, laying hands, and I watched people transformed in front of me.
I got in line. Last.
When my turn came, the power of God hit me so hard my whole body shook. I could not control it, and I did not want to. For the first time in my life I spoke in tongues and felt the Holy Spirit move through me in a way I could not explain away.
The Glasses​
I came back the next week for the Liberty city park gathering that Apostle, his wife Pastor Charlotte, and the Encounter Church crew put on. Cleaning up at the end of the night, I realized I did not have my glasses. As I searched, something settled on me: I think God wants me to stop only watching miracles and receive one.
So I went to Apostle. "I know the altar call is over, but would you pray for me?"
He looked at me directly. "Are you willing to receive it? Do you believe you will receive a miracle today?"
"Yes," I said.
He prayed, and I felt my long-range vision sharpen on the spot. Later that night his team texted that they had found my glasses right after the prayer. They offered them back. I did not take them. I wanted to show God I trusted the miracle more than the glasses. The next morning confirmed it in daylight. My vision was noticeably, undeniably better, no glasses needed to drive or get through a normal day. My first personal miracle.
Notice what came first. Not a technique. A yes. He asked whether I would receive, I obeyed with a yes and a step of trust, and God did the rest. That small pattern is the whole book.
Why Apostle Delmar​
The more time I spent with Apostle and with people healed through him, one thing became clear: the thing worth studying is not the miracles, it is the obedience God answered with them.
This is a man who has walked in deliverance against the heaviest kind of demonic bondage, who serves as chaplain of both Liberty County and the city of Liberty, who holds the keys to the city, and who is beloved across the whole county, not just his congregation. He has served one place faithfully for over forty years. He does not perform miracles and leave town. He planted deep roots and loved a region into transformation. His church's heat-signature security cameras have even captured footage of spiritual activity that is hard to explain. But the roots and the faithfulness are the testimony that moves me most, because they are the obedience the fire rests on.
This is one of the most remarkable and most humble men alive, and it is an honor beyond words to write this book with him.
Apostle does not claim everyone will operate in the same gifts, because that is not biblical. What he does say is that anyone can gain citizenship in the Nation of Fire: a worldwide movement of people living in full obedience to God, using every gift they have to serve His Kingdom. Citizenship there is not measured by how much power you carry. It is measured by how completely you obey.
What This Book Is​
This book gives you what Apostle has refined over decades: the biblical principles, the daily practices, the faith declarations, and the battle-tested prayers that keep a believer in step with God. It walks the Way of Fire that Apostle embodies and that the Generals of Faith walked before him: John G. Lake, Smith Wigglesworth, Kathryn Kuhlman, William Seymour. They were set ablaze. They could not imagine a life lived for anything but Christ.
We wrote it as a companion to your daily Scripture reading, so faith becomes your whole life instead of a couple of hours on Sunday. Read it once front to back and let it build. Then keep it close: the declarations for your mornings, the warfare chapter when you are under attack, the miracle chapter when you need one.
If you are tired of powerless Christianity, if your prayers seem to hit the ceiling, if you know there is more to following Christ than what you have tasted, this book is for you. The Way of Fire is not the easy path. It asks for complete surrender and radical obedience and a willingness to look foolish to the world. But it is the path to the life Jesus promised: "Greater works than these shall he do" (John 14:12, KJV).
The Book of Acts did not end in chapter 28. It continues through anyone willing to obey completely and let God supply the fire.
Welcome to the Way of Fire. Let the journey begin.
In Christ,
Gary Sheng
Written in partnership with Apostle Delmar Coward Jr., who keeps demonstrating that the same Jesus who healed the sick, raised the dead, and cast out demons two thousand years ago is still doing it today through vessels fully surrendered to His will.
The miracles are real, and they were never the point. Become someone who obeys completely, and let God decide what fire to trust you with.