What Language Does God Speak?

They didn’t believe it was possible. “God doesn’t speak our language,” they said.  “He only speaks English.”

The director of Faith Comes By Hearing was visiting a Konkomba village in Ghana. His organization partners with Bible translators to produce audio recordings of Scripture, and he asked the Konkomba leaders if they’d like to listen to God’s message in their language.

He had to insist, “But God does speak Konkomba!”He joyfully turned on an audio player, and the words of Matthew 1:1 filled the air in their language: “This is a record of the ancestors of Jesus the Messiah….” 

Amazed, these leaders called for villagers to assemble. Soon 300 people were listening to God speak Konkomba. As they listened, they entered into the story. They were walking and talking with Jesus.“Jesus is now one of us,”they said. “He speaks our language!”

When people receive the Word of God in their own language, they experience the living, breathing Jesus who became human and moved into their village (John 1:14). 

…What language does God speak? He speaks all of the 7,000+ languages in the world. People can talk to Him in any language and he understands.

But millions of people can’t understand Him when he speaks. The love letter remains a closed book. 

I thank God that you and I have been blessed to have the Love Letter unlocked for us. We have had access all our lives to His rich words and rich love. 

I thank God for each individual, couple, family, and church that has come alongside me to invest in ALL people having access to God's Love Letter. You are making a difference for eternity, and God is transforming lives through your giving!



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Adapted from the story as Bob Creson tells it, here.

Closing up #30daydietofpassion

What a month! I look back at these daily posts and feel overwhelming gratitude.

Gratitude that God saved us. That God speaks to us. That His plan for redemption is through the Church. 

Gratitude that God is growing an army, equipped with His Word, and passionate about translating themselves into other cultures and His holy Word into their tongues. Gratitude and hope that one day His voice might no longer be foreign to the millions of people still waiting to hear it speak to them.

I pray you have enjoyed these real stories, that they have tucked themselves away into your heart, irrevocably. 

And as I leave them with you, I want to ask you to pray. As members of our Lord's one holy Church, He gifts and uses each of us in different ways, but this one role of prayer is for each of us.  Speak to your local church, reach out to missionaries you know, find creative ways to know what God is up to in the world, and PRAY fiercely for this work! And if you're interested in knowing more on a regular basis, or on receiving a specific Bibleless People Group to pray for, please go to www.bibleless.org to further connect!

"..It's like finding a whole new Jesus"

We've been talking a lot about the Big Picture this month---About how one translator, traveling for one lifetime, to live among a people group and to help bring them the Word of God in their language is really just a tiny part of the story. This story that God is writing, is an intricate one, where WE get to be a part of mobilizing many parts of the Body to use many varied giftings and talents to bring Jesus and God's Kingdom to manypeople. 

Before we close this 30-day blog series tomorrow, I wanted to share one more poignant story about the vastness of God's translation-tapestry story! Jenny's story below, and the story of the Yazai people, gives a good glimpse at the prayer, human resources, food resources, community commitment, and fierce "irrational" faith that are needed for Bible translations to be completed in the almost 1,900 languages that are still left without it. I pray that we will catch these qualities from those that have gone before us, and that God would be glorified by our hungry, exuberant responses, as He invites us into this work.

In the 1930s, Jenny and her husband were planting a church among the Yazai* people of Southeast Asia. Understanding the need for Scripture in the mother tongue, they devised an alphabet and translated a catechism and the Gospel of Mark. But just three years into their ministry, her husband died of typhus, and Jenny was driven away by political unrest, never to return. Her prayers, however, did not cease. 

Jenny was 37 years old when she left the Yazai village. She was 93 years old and still praying for the Yazai and other language groups every morning from breakfast to lunch, when an SIL translator named Mark visited her. By then the church she faithfully watered with her prayers had grown to 10,000 believers...but they still did not have the Word in their mother tongue. Mark had the joy of telling her that he was working towards starting a translation project. He was studying the language with three Yazai speakers he’d met far from their homeland, and praying for an opportunity to meet church members interested in launching a translation project. 

The next year, 1997, Mark met two brothers who were Yazai church leaders. They told him they’d been praying for four years for someone to come help the Yazai do a Bible translation. “Four years?” said Mark. “I’ve been studying the language for four years and praying for a translation team related to the church!” The Yazai joyfully formed a translation committee and Mark became the translation advisor who checked the material! 

Individuals and whole communities threw themselves enthusiastically into the project. The lead translator was so committed that when he married, he and his bride spent their honeymoon at a training event! The future chairman of the translation committee, a paralyzed man, read in the Gospels that Jesus healed paralytics, so in faith he stood up and walked...and then went to work leading the committee! Villages formed their own support committees. Though poor, villagers agreed to drop a handful of rice into a bag every day. As the bags filled up, they sewed them shut and sent them to the translation team. 

The translation committee prepared books, songbooks, audio materials, and the "JESUS Film", so that everyone, readers or not, could have access to the Word. The church held literacy workshops, eventually training 100 people to serve as volunteer teachers. Each time a Scripture portion was completed, the church published it, and people carried copies around in their shoulder bags, snatching moments to read them in the fields. 

Even non-Christians became interested. Fifteen animists attended one literacy workshop; during the week every one of them found Christ and was baptized. Entire villages of non-Christians asked for someone to come read the Scripture portions to them so they could understand who this God was. With breathtaking speed the church grew from 10,000 to between 30,000 and 40,000 believers—a quarter of the entire population. 

In 2009 the New Testament was printed and, in spite of opposition, imported and dedicated. One well educated woman, having read the national language Bible for many years, said, “Reading the Scriptures in Yazai is like finding a whole new Jesus. The national language went to my head; the Yazai goes into my heart.” 

Now the Yazai have their eyes set on the Old Testament. “The New Testament is like a shirt, but we need pants!” said one man. “The Old Testament is those pants. Please help us get a complete outfit so we can be fully dressed!” The main translator is now studying theology so he can translate the Yazai Old Testament and serve as consultant for other translations. 

Jenny passed away in 2003 just a few days short of her 100th birthday, her part in the Yazai story complete. I know that by faith she celebrated the completion of the New Testament and the rapid expansion of the Yazai church, but I wish she could have heard what one old man said: “Now the light of God has come to the Yazai people. Now the Yazai people will grow and be blessed.” 

Language by language, the light of God is coming to people He loves all over the world. Sooner rather than later, the last one will be blessed. Thank you for the role you play! 

*Name changed to protect work in a sensitive area 

From ConnectUS, August 2010, Bob Creson

It's the Mother Tongue that Plants the Word in Our Hearts

The Bible says, “...the word of God is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two-edged sword, cutting between soul and spirit, between joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and desires.” (Hebrews 4:12, NLT)

This truth is most deeply experienced when a person is able to read the Scriptures in his or her own heart language. Here is another real-life example of what the difference looks like! :

In a minority language group where people are not well acquainted with Jesus, a woman was hired to translate one of the gospels. Although she was fluent in Russian (the language from which she was translating), she discovered that the words in her own language were “so beautiful—brighter, more touching, deeper than Russian.” No matter how often she read the book, it still spoke to her: “I start crying when I read about Jesus being lonely and praying during the night before His crucifixion. When I read those words in my language I can’t stop crying. The words are so alive, they pierce my soul.” When she read it to others, they also wept.
 

In another language group in the area, a mother tongue translator needed to find out if a new translation of Mark’s Gospel communicated clearly, so she read it to a group of teachers. Because she was concentrating very hard, she did not look up until she heard a noise that sounded like laughter. Was something wrong with the text? Did her listeners think it inappropriate to read in the local language when they were all educated in Russian?

Then she realized that it was not laughter but crying! She looked up to see a school principal with his head bowed and a pool of tears on the desk in front of him. The story in Mark 12 about the poor widow giving her offering had touched him deeply. When he heard it in his own language, he realized that Jesus' words carried a challenge—it is not enough just to hear the words; we must live accordingly.

If these people speak and teach in the language of wider communication, why do they still respond in this way to their mother tongue? A translator in West Asia put it this way: “We can understand the Bible with our mind in the national language, but it’s the mother tongue that plants the Word in our hearts.” After giving 18 years of his life to translating the New Testament into his own language, this man turned his attention to the Old Testament (completed in his language now and dedicated in 2012).

Some—maybe most—of the people in these language groups are proficient in a language of wider communication. But the translation in that language doesn’t always resonate at the deepest level of their beings—the place where hurts are healed, decisions are made, and lives are changed.

Edited from a ConnectUS newsletter, November 2011, Bob Creson