South East Asian People Group Have Access To Their Own Bible.
Bible-translation organisation Wycliffe Associates has announced that it has helped a group of people living in Southeast Asia to read the Bible in their native language for the first time ever, having waited for 182 years to do so.
In a statement on their website, Wycliffe Associates’ president and CEO, Bruce Smith, said: “They’ve endured persecution. They’ve struggled to teach the Scriptures to their young people in other languages. They’ve been told for generations they have to keep waiting until Westerners can translate the Bible for them.”
The translators are hoping that they will be able to translate the entire Bible by the end of 2016, using a process where they draft verses in the mornings, and use a five-step process to check the verses in the afternoons and evenings.
Wycliffe Associates says that there are 14 people groups, or close to 17 million people, who are yet to read the Bible in their own language.
“Christian churches, planted by missionaries in the 1800s, have survived – and they will drive the translation of God’s Word into their own languages,” Smith added. “There is no denying God has wrought the miraculous in Southeast Asia.”
Wycliffe Associates suffered a terror attack on one of its offices in the Middle East earlier this year, where four workers were killed. Despite the tragedy, the Bible translation group vowed to continue its work, and said in April that it will be scheduling a training session for translators working in the most dangerous places on the planet.
“There is no place on Earth where God’s Word is more urgently needed,” Smith said regarding the Middle East.
“This is a place of terror, oppression, violence, death, and heartache. To be a Christian is to be a target. Yet the few Christians living there are pleading for Bibles to share secretly with the many, many people around them who are hungry for the truth.”
- Give thanks for the work of Wycliffe Associates, and for their continues dedication to Bible translation even in areas where it is dangerous.
- Give thanks for this latest translation in the native language of a south East Asian people group. Pray that, as they read God’s Word, they will come to a deeper understanding of His love and grace for them, their families and communities.
- Pray for the translators working in the Middle East, for protection over them and their work, and that many more believers will hear the call to train to translate God’s Word in this needy area of the world.
- Pray for all who are seeking to know the truth, that they will have access to Bibles in their own languages, and that many will come to faith in Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 4 vs 12: “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”
Source: http://www.christianpost.com/news, http://www.persecution.org/2016
