Tag Archives: Bible translation

What’s the Word for ‘Thanks’?

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What’s the Word for ‘Thanks’?

“How do Canelas express thanks?” I asked my wife, “I have not found a single term that means ‘Thank you’.”
“Yeah, are Canela people never grateful?” she said. “If they are, how do they express it?”
During our early years as Bible translators in Brazil, Jo and I asked ourselves, “So, what is implied when people say, ‘Thanks’?”

I remembered standing by our car in a parking lot one cold day in Canada. I had the hood open and stood in front holding the ends of the jumper cables coming from our battery. A few moments later, a car pulled up, the driver popped his hood open, and I clipped my cables to his battery. Within seconds I had started our car. As I unhooked the cables from his battery and closed the hood on his car, I shouted. “Thank you, that worked great!” “He gave me a grin and a thumbs-up as he drove off.

As Jo and I thought about this, we made up a list of what is implied when people say “Thanks:”
1. What you gave to me was good; it was just what I needed.
2. What you gave me satisfied me and made me happy.
3. I owe you one.
4. I feel bad you had you had to put yourself out to give me what I needed.

Looking at the little list we recognized how different languages express thanks. When we gave a Canela woman a piece of soap, she said, “It’s right, it’s good,” expressing #1 on the list.
When they were very pleased with our gift they would say, “Because you gave this to me, I am happy!” expressing #2.
Other languages focus on different aspects. For instance, Brazilians say “Obrigado” meaning “I am obligated to you.” expressing #3.
Several Asian languages say, “I’m terribly sorry” which focuses on #4, the fact that you took the time and made the effort to meet their need.

Expressing Thanks is Not Natural
Every parent knows that human beings are born as the most self-centred beings on earth. It is all about our food, our comfort, and our pleasure. Parents spend a lot of time teaching their toddlers, it is not all about them. They need to learn to share toys, await their turn, and to express thanks. Parents constantly model gratitude by saying, “Thank you,” when a child does even the smallest thing in response to a request.

Selfish ingratitude started with Satan, the most impressive, beautiful and powerful angel created by God. Satan owed everything he was and all his abilities to God who created him, yet he was not thankful. He refused to acknowledge God as superior, the Great Provider, and instead launched an angelic rebellion to usurp the throne of God. God exiled Satan to earth, where he has polluted the minds and wills of people with this same ungrateful attitude. Romans 1:21-32, lists the resulting horrors, “For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him.” (NIV) Not expressing thanks to God was the first in a long list of dozens of types of evil, depraved behaviour.

Our Sin: Taking God’s Blessings for Granted
Submerged in an ungrateful culture, it is so easy to take for granted all the things we got as gifts from God—many of them through little work or effort of our own. Think of our physical life and health, our spiritual life and growth, our families and friends, our freedom and affluence, the abilities and opportunities open to us, and especially God’s Word translated into our own language.
Billions of people in developing countries would give anything to have what we take for granted.

How can we be more thankful? We could start by realizing we in North America are richer than 90 percent of the world’s people. We could continue to compare ourselves with those who are sick and without health care, those who live under oppressive regimes, who have lost their friends and families, who have never had a chance to learn to read, and who have no Bible in their language.

Unless we regularly thank and praise God for all that He provides for us and then go on to share our blessings with others, our ingratitude will lead to increasing selfishness, a hardening of our hearts, and eventually a ruined relationship with our Great Provider.

Canela Christians love to sing a hymn to Jesus with the line, “Because you came, we are very happy.” Meaning, “Thank You for coming to earth!” They are right. Jesus, the Saviour, was God’s greatest gift to humanity—how we need to thank Him for coming and then share this news with others.

Converting Psalm 136 to Speak of Your Family

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Converting Psalm 136 to Speak of Your Family
Many churches practice responsive readings of Psalm 136, where the pastor or worship leader reads the first line, and the group responds with His love endures forever. Here’s how Psalm 136 starts:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good.
      His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the God of gods.
      His love endures forever.
(After a few more lines urging thanksgiving to God, the theme swings into a line-by-line description of what God did for Israel:)
to Him who alone does great wonders,
      His love endures forever.
to Him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt
      His love endures forever.
to Him who led his people through the wilderness;
      His love endures forever.
to Him who struck down great kings,
      His love endures forever.
and gave their land as an inheritance to His people Israel
      His love endures forever.
This type of responsive reading was practiced in songs and chants for several thousand years by Jews and later by Christians as well.

After studying all 26 verses of Psalm 136, I thought of making up a responsive reading about the “great wonders” God did in our own family. Here it is. We plan to use it the next time some of our family members come together.

As you read of God’s Wonders in the Popjes Family History, I hope you will be inspired to make up something like this for your own family.

 Responsive Reading of the Popjes Family History
Give thanks to the Lord for He is good.
      His love endures forever.
To Him who preserved the Popjes Family during the 2nd World War
      His love endures forever.
And brought out the family to emigrate to Canada
      His love endures forever.
To Him who revealed Jesus to Jack as Saviour and Friend
      His love endures forever.
And led the family through three cities to settle in Red Deer
      His love endures forever.
To Him who called a girl to be Jack’s friend,
      His love endures forever.
And take Jack to an evangelical church
      His love endures forever.
And led Jack to attend a Bible College in Calgary
      His love endures forever.
To Him who brought Jack and Jo together and blessed their marriage.
      His love endures forever.
To Him who called Jack and Jo to become Bible translators
      His love endures forever.
And led them to live and work among Brazil’s Canela people
      His love endures forever.
To Him who helped Jack and Jo to translate His Word into Canela,
      His love endures forever.
To Him who made many Canela people from all the villages His children.
      His love endures forever.
Give thanks to the God of heaven,
      His love endures forever.

 

 

 

God Loves to be Asked.

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God Loves to be Asked.

Each time my wife and I returned to the Wycliffe Centre in Belem after five or six months in the Canela village, we brought an enthusiastic report. The Canela people had adopted us into their kinship system and gave us all Canela names. They willingly built a mud and palm thatch house for us and cut the bush to make an airstrip. They eagerly helped us learn to speak their language. They gladly accepted the modern medicine we brought. They earnestly urged us to develop and learn to read booklets so they could learn to read their language. Others were eager to help us translate the Bible.

We thought this was normal until we heard reports from our colleagues working with groups speaking different languages. They spoke of people without any desire to learn to read; some rejected the offered medicines and disliked helping our fellow workers learn their languages. Others found no one to help them translate the Bible. We wondered why we were so blessed.

Then, one day, we got a letter from a man in Ireland named Joe. This is what he wrote:
“Dear Brother Jack and Sister Jo,
I just heard that you have been assigned to translate God’s Word for the Canela people of Brazil, and I am delighted. When I was a young man, I was a missionary in Brazil, and one day, my companions and I stumbled upon a village we had not known existed. The people could not understand any of the languages we spoke, and we certainly couldn’t understand them. Since they were a fierce-looking group, we decided to travel on and sleep in the jungle instead of in that village.”

He told us that he learned later that this people group was called the Canela, and how God moved him to pray daily for them. He started to pray for the Canela people ten years before Jo and I were even born!
And he continued to pray for them for forty years until we arrived as thirty-year-olds.
He then prayed faithfully for another twenty-two years until the partial Bible was translated into Canela, and a church was planted.
Then, after sixty-two years of praying, the Lord took him Home, no doubt, to his exceeding great reward.

Several years after we had completed the translation work, we visited the Canela village. Many of the residents were away working in their field gardens, but we did manage to take family photos of about four hundred Canela people and recorded their names and their relationships.

I frequently told this Irishman’s story when asked to speak in churches and Wycliffe fund-raising banquets. I always ended with this offer,
“If any of you come to me at the end of the service and say, ‘Please give me a picture and the name of a Canela man, woman or child, and I will regularly pray for that person for the rest of my life,’ I will give you a name and a picture of someone for whom no one else has yet committed to pray.”
Within a few months, four hundred prayer warriors pledged to pray for an individual Canela person. Even now, decades later, I still get emails from many people saying things like this, “I’m still praying daily for the little girl in the photo. By now, she is twenty years older and very likely married with a family, so I pray for them all.”

It has been thirty-four years since Jesus fulfilled His promise, “I will build my Church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” There are far more Canela believers now than when we left. A missionary from Germany has worked as a Bible teacher and has baptized scores of Canela young people over the past few decades.

God loves to hear us pray and ask Him to act, and He wants to hear us pray continually. 1 Thess. 5:17 (NIV)

God’s Word in Every Language on Earth—Doing it His Way

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God’s Word in Every Language on Earth—Doing it His Way
When my wife, Jo, and I joined Wycliffe Bible Translators in 1965, we were influenced by a book that was published six years earlier. Two Thousand Tongues to Go which was the story of the beginning of Wycliffe Bible Translators.
At that time, the Bible had already been translated into most European languages and the major languages of Asia and Africa. This book, however, focused on the need for translation into the possibly two thousand languages spoken by indigenous people groups that were not fluent in the national language of the countries in which they lived.

What nobody knew back in the mid-1960s was that there were about 7,400 languages spoken in the world, of which only a few hundred were national languages. During the next thirty-five years, Wycliffe trained linguists, discovered and researched thousands of Indigenous languages, and began working in many hundreds of them as Bible translators.

VISION 2025
In 1999, Wycliffe and SIL International set a challenging goal for the worldwide Church and for themselves; VISION 2025, a twenty-five-year sprint to start a Bible translation program in every language that needs one by the year 2025.
Those of us Wycliffe translators who, during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, had worked for decades to complete a translation considered this over-the-top goal a fantasy that could not possibly be reached.
After all, just as all Bible translators before us, we worked with pencils and slips of paper to make our dictionaries. Every word of every first draft was written out by pen and ink, and after 1950, switched to more efficient ballpoint pens. Later drafts were pecked out on manual typewriters.

God’s Plan: From Ballpoints to Computers.
It was only in the 1980s that we started using a few computers. They were slow, primitive, clunky, and, although expensive, prone to frequent breakdowns. Even so, they were faster than whacking away on a typewriter and eventually became more useful.
But God was at work improving the electronic equipment industry. God also led highly trained and strongly motivated programmers to progress in their abilities to speed up and improve the work of translation of His Word.

God at Work
During the past few decades, Wycliffe Canada programmers working with partners in Wycliffe USA developed what is now known as The Bible Translator’s Assistant (TBTA). This software analyses a target language and produces a first draft template of translation. TBTA is constantly improving in accuracy and ease of use. The result is a vast decrease in both the time and cost of translating Scriptures.

I was in my last year as president of Wycliffe Canada in 1999 when Wycliffe and SIL International cast Vision 2025. Wycliffe Canada joined with a special recruiting program called “Race to 2025.” God not only increased the Wycliffe Canada membership, but he also grew the number of translators to work with better-educated national translators. He vastly increased the number of donors and the size of their gifts. Many more prayer warriors are involved. With the growing experience in the new way of doing translation, God is receiving much praise and thanks for what He is doing.

Evidence of God’s Blessing
In 1999 when the Sprint to 2025 vision was cast, a new language Bible translation program was started every two weeks. But then God speeded up the task.
2019-’21, a new program started every five days.
In 2021-’23, a new program started every 30 hours.
This year, 2024, a new program starts every 17 hours!
Over 4,000 languages have translation programs currently in progress.

This weekend is Canadian Thanksgiving.
How appropriate to give thanks for what God is doing in world evangelization and especially in making sure that His prophetic Word will be fulfilled:
“After this, I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.” (Rev. 7:9 NIV)

 How to Write a Book and Remain Mentally Stable.

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How to Write a Book and Remain Mentally Stable.

I wish I could tell you how to remain mentally stable when writing a book, but I can’t. My wife can attest to my failure to stay mentally stable. She is my writing partner. I depend on her to critique everything I write—every word—and she is faithful to do so, spending hours going through hundreds of pages of printed words, chapter after chapter, draft after draft. She shows her love by going through all this in step with me. But during the latter stages of writing, she is also a long-suffering wife who can vouch for the high degree of my mental instability. She endured my despair, being out of sorts, preoccupation, and forgetfulness.

This week I completed the last edits, signed all the legal affidavits, filled in multiple forms and uploaded the book we have been writing the last couple of years to the publisher. I suddenly felt a huge sense of relief, not just a sense of quiet satisfaction that followed the successful publishing of my other books.

Of my earlier books, the first three were published by Wycliffe, five were self-published, and this ninth book, From Adventure to Spiritual Warfare, will be professionally published. It covers the decades our family lived in Brazil where we focused on translating a large part of the Bible into the Canela language.

This week, I felt a kinship with what Winston Churchill said about writing a book:
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

It’s true, especially in the last months of writing, editing, and refining, that the drive to “get it done” was so strong that I could no longer fall asleep for my after-lunch nap. When I woke up during the night, even after only five hours of sleep, my mind was instantly filled with concerns and plans for what to do next in the book.

These concerns were not new ideas. I had already clearly planned them out, written up the plans and made a chart to keep track of progress. It was just crazy, mentally unstable worries about this project.

I didn’t just count sheep; I talked to my Shepherd, asking Him to give me, His beloved, the sleep I desperately needed. Sometimes, I slept again, but mostly, I staggered out of bed and started writing again.

This memoir covers some of the most stressful years of our lives. Reading my daily diaries of those days, months and years of unending tension and pressure and then writing about them triggered the same negative emotional response.

So, to answer the “How to” question in the title, I suggest you write about pleasant things, lovely surroundings, and deeply satisfying relationships. Avoid traumatic situations, stressful conflicts with others, and ongoing difficulties. Of course, the outcome will be a boring book no one wants to read.
Not at all like the exciting book Jo and I wrote, one with a victorious ending, deep-down personal satisfaction, and the approval of Heaven.

Bible Translation—A Waste of Time?

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Just Get Them Saved, Never Mind Translating the Bible.
A Brazilian pastor shook his head in bewilderment when I mentioned that my wife and I were engaged in a Bible translation ministry with an indigenous group.
“Your ministry will take fifteen to twenty years?” he said. “I have led many people to accept God’s offer of salvation through faith in Jesus. I quote a few key Bible passages and then lead them in a prayer of salvation. So why are you spending decades to translating the New Testament and more, when you could evangelize Canela people with just a few key passages?”
He was called away at that point, so I had no chance to answer this well-meaning brother. My explanation would have stretched his thoughts into new areas of understanding.

Huge Cultural Differences
He did not realize how different his situation was from ours. For many generations, Brazilian people have lived in towns and cities where evangelical churches are well known.
Moreover, Brazilians have had a Bible in their language for nearly four hundred years. Canela people, on the other hand, have no Christian history, no churches in their villages, no pastors to teach them, and no Bible in their language.
We could indeed evangelize with just a few passages and a prepared prayer. But then what? When Satan attacked these young believers, how could they defend themselves? Without a Bible in their language, how could they respond to his temptations?

How Jesus Met Temptation
Matthew tells the story of Jesus who was hungry after fasting out in the wilderness. That’s when Satan came three times to tempt Him to prove he was the Son of God.
“If you are the Son of God,” the Devil said, “tell these stones to become bread.”
Jesus replied, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ”
At the second temptation, Jesus replied, “It is written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”
At the third, Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! It is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’ ”
As Jesus quoted the written Word of God, it became a Sword to attack Satan, and finally drive him away.

Paul’s Powerful Metaphors
Years later, the apostle Paul advised believers, “Take the helmet of salvation and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.” (Eph. 6:17). And in Hebrews 4:12, the Word of God is described as “alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints, and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Our Effective Action
Canela believers, even wearing the helmet of salvation, could not defend themselves against Satan and drive him away without the Sword of the Spirit.
Jo and I were giving them the Word of God—in their hands, in their hearts, and in their mouths.