Ankerberg Show

John Ankerberg: Today on the John Ankerberg Show, we will take you to the island of Cuba, where 10 million people live. People in Cuba are currently facing a severe shortage of food, medicine, fuel, and electricity. Daily life involves long lines for basic necessities, with many relying on limited government rations.

Their infrastructure is crumbling, and the energy grid is under immense strain, resulting in prolonged, often daily, blackouts. Christians face religious persecution from the atheistic regime. Today, we will tell you how audio Bibles are allowing Cubans to hear the Gospel and grow their faith even when they are persecuted. To learn more, join us for this edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

Welcome to our program. I'm John Ankerberg, and my guest today is Morgan Jackson, the Vice President of Faith Comes by Hearing. We've got a great program for you. We're going to talk about Cuba and what's going on in Cuba, especially as far as bringing the Word of God to Cuba or what's happening to the Christians in Cuba.

Ten million people are on this island, just 70 miles off the coast of Florida, and I'm saying we're going to talk about that. I want you to show them a Proclaimer. Show them why this is a fantastic invention that you, your brother, and another engineer invented. Why is it so terrific?

Morgan Jackson: This actually came out of three days of fasting and prayer. My dad was seeing all of the technology changing. You were going from cassettes to CDs to MP3 CDs, and so there was no single thing that you could provide a village. We were having villages who got audio Bibles who wouldn't listen to scripture for six months because they couldn't afford the batteries for the cassette players. In the time they needed to hear the Bible the most, they couldn't.

We came together for three days of fasting and prayer, and an engineer on our staff called Mike Jane pulled all these parts together off the shelf and created this rough first Proclaimer. When he showed it to my dad, my dad said, "That's it." Then we had a local business group that said they would fund the first thousand Proclaimers to create the whole structure and the forms.

What's beautiful is this is made out of the same material you make a football helmet out of, so they're extremely tough. They're going into the jungles, into the high mountains and dirty areas. Anybody that's been there knows you need something rugged because it won't last otherwise. Africans just love it because they say it drinks the sun. The solar is what really does it, charges the batteries.

Most of the world does not have electricity. People around the world are living with that all the time. They've got to have something that the sun, with your panels, drinks in and charges up the battery. They don't need electricity. Still, you've got fantastic technology. You have a speaker in there that will reach a thousand people clearly. You've also put this language, the language of the Bible, into the languages of the world.

We have 2,700 languages where we have some scripture. Many of them we only have the New Testament, or some we just have Luke, but many of them we have the whole Bible too. A Proclaimer can hold the whole Bible, or it can hold up to four different languages, so you can move from one language to the other.

This tool is an end-time tool. When you provide it to a village or community, I've gone back to these communities 12 years later, and they're saying this still works perfectly. There's a need. The reason we're talking about this is we need folks to help us provide these Proclaimers because we have a billion people that still are in our world on our watch right now that have no Bible in their language.

You are getting the translators to translate those languages. When they do, you put it on the Proclaimer, but then we've got to have Proclaimers to bring it into the jungle or wherever they're at.

John Ankerberg: That's what we're talking about here. I want to switch from that, going into Cuba. Tell me a little bit about Cuba and the hardships that the Christians there are facing. You've already got some Proclaimers, but we need how many more?

Morgan Jackson: I just have a request for 35,000. There are 10 million people in Cuba. In 1998, Pope John Paul II went to Cuba. When he went to Cuba, the church had been extremely suppressed. After his visit, the government kind of let off and opened up the door for the Catholic Church, which included the Evangelical and Protestant church. They couldn't build any new churches; the existing churches were allowed, but it opened the door.

What most people don't know is Faith Comes by Hearing for 27 years has been carefully, quietly, and legally taking audio Bibles and Proclaimers into those things—micro SD cards—to the churches and to those communities. They are not able to rebuild churches. They don't have materials, so when churches get old and the roofs fall in, they're no longer used. They can't build a new church.

The Proclaimers have provided a way for people to gather together and to have church in a family, so neighbors and people can gather together. Now, 99 percent of Cuba, the people are literate, so you would think you should just be able to provide a printed Bible. But they don't have Bibles. They just have not been enough.

There's a huge issue with eyesight. After 1989, when the wall fell down, Russia stopped supporting them. About 50,000 Cubans lost their eyesight over that short period of time of about five years. The supposition is that the food became so scarce that malnutrition set in, and so people just lost sight. When you go to Cuba, our workers say there's an inordinate number of people that are blind or they have poor eyesight.

Many of the pastors are actually blind. When we come to them, they actually feel abandoned. The blind have, just like in the time of Christ, people perceive what sin they did. What sin created this? Was it their mother, their father, or their own sin, just like the disciples asked?

In Cuba, we bring the smaller Proclaimer because the listening groups cannot be large. People can listen; 300 people can listen to a small Proclaimer because you have the technology with the little speakers in there that is fabulous. These can be heard by 300, but generally, the listening groups are 15 to 30 people gathering in a home and listening. They'll listen in three or four different homes.

The Proclaimer moves around, and again, this is dramatized, so it has the whole Spanish New and Old Testament on it. The people gather, they listen. The blind people especially say, "You have trusted us with the Word of God." One of the blind pastors was just overwhelmed. He said, "I have to prepare my sermons, but I don't have a Bible because I can't read. So this is my Bible. This is how I memorize scripture; this is how I preach the Word of God."

He said, "We go out and tell people." There's a story where Jesus in John was telling people that unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you will have no part in me. Of course, all these people went, "Whoa," and they left. Jesus turned to the disciples and said, "Will you leave also?" Peter said, "Where will we go? You have the words of eternal life."

This pastor quoted that scripture and said, "That's what we are telling people right now. People have no hope." When you're in Cuba right now, there are 10 million people. There's no electricity. They go 20 hours without electricity because now Venezuela's oil is not coming in. Most of their electricity comes from burning oil, so the buses aren't running. They had some small amount of money coming in from tourism that the Russians and others would come in. Now they can't provide electricity.

John Ankerberg: Tell me about the app if you want to get four gallons of gas.

Morgan Jackson: One of the guys says that he has a car, but he's 7,000th on the list to get five gallons of gas. There's just no way, so they're actually going back to horses and carts. There's not enough food, fuel, or electricity, and there's no hope. People are in a desperate place. Disease is rampant, even though they used to have one of the best medical systems.

People are in this hopeless state, and it's just getting worse, but the Christians in those areas who we have served for over 20 years have passed out and started 10,000 plus house groups and churches doing the audio Bible. They're right now saying to us, "We need the eternal Word of God." One of them was talking about how life is just not honored in Cuba and that women are encouraged to get rid of the "massive cells" when they're pregnant.

They use the Proclaimer to gather women who are in their early pregnancies and to listen to scripture. They say there's a power in the hearing of the Word of God. There are two stories, or a series of stories, that have the greatest power. One is the woman at the well, the Samaritan woman, because these women identify with the fact she's coming at midday. It means that she's a woman ashamed of herself; she wants to be alone. She had five husbands, and the one she's living with now is not her husband. The fact that Jesus addressed her kindly and actually declared himself to be the Messiah first to this woman and then she was used to bring others was one.

But the biggest one is the story of Mary, who is a virgin who has a child, but the child has a name and its name is Jesus. She is a woman of shame because she wasn't married, and so throughout the rest of her life, the question would always be, who was the father of Jesus? Was it Joseph or not? Did they have premarital sex, did they not? So she is in this place of shame.

But then when she goes to see Elizabeth, this baby also from the time of its birth had a name, John, and the baby leaped in its womb. This idea that they're being told this is a group of cells, it has no feeling, it has no value—they recognize in those stories that from the very instant of your inception, God knows you. You are named, you have emotion, the baby leaps in your womb.

They have women who have been told by doctors to "get rid of this trouble, get rid of this problem," but having heard scripture, they recognize that this problem is a living child named by God. One of the women named the child in her womb Kevin. Cuban leaders who have sat with these women and watched them hear and have the courage to retain when they hold Kevin, they say they touch this child's soft skin. They just say, "We thank you for sending us the Word of God."

John Ankerberg: The miracle of giving eyesight to somebody that's blind—there is nobody in the Old Testament that ever got their eyesight when they were blind. Only Jesus, the Son of God, when He came, did He deal with those that were blind and give them their eyesight back.

Morgan Jackson: There's just something about that. He restores them, and so these blind who are getting Proclaimers are actually some of our greatest evangelists. We have stories of miracles where people hear the scripture and receive their sight. These are not common, but God is still using them for His glory. They have nothing else often they can do. They listen to the scriptures nonstop, and so they take them and invite others, family members, and others to come, and they then are the ones that are sharing the Word of God.

Like this one blind pastor said, "We're telling them Jesus is the one who has the words of eternal life." The thing in Cuba is people have a deep respect for the Bible. Even though there's this communism and there's atheism, there's still deeply embedded in them this honor and respect for the Word of God. When people are invited to hear the scriptures, God's Word when people hear it and they're in darkness—the scriptures say it's like a two-edged sword, cutting to the dividing line of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.

But I was telling you my experience is it's more like a harpoon because it's barbed. It goes inside people, and you literally find them sometimes trying to rip the words out. I remember a guy, Boko Haram, in Nigeria in a prison. He sees a guy with the Proclaimer. He knows he's a Christian; he called him the Proclaimer man. He determines, as is his faith, to kill him. He's murdered before, and he's going to murder this Christian.

But he gets too close, and he hears the scripture in Romans where it says, "As far as you're concerned, endeavor to live at peace, or as able, live at peace with all people." Boko Haram lives at war with everybody, and his goal in life was to kill Christians. Here it's saying that. I don't think of that scripture as an evangelistic scripture, but for days and nights he couldn't sleep, and you could literally feel him trying to rip these words out of him. But it had pierced him in his own language, and he could not sleep.

So he got closer to the Proclaimer man, heard more scripture, couldn't sleep, couldn't rest, and so finally after a week, he came to the Proclaimer man and said, "How do I accept Jesus Christ?" The joy is we have murderers, we have rapists, we have people that you say they are unforgivable, and yet when they hear the Word of God, they are forgiven, and they are restored new creations in Jesus Christ. They become the greatest evangelists just like Saul. Saul was a murderer, and yet he became the greatest evangelist. They're willing to suffer because they know the suffering they have created, and so they will go out and die, give their life up for others to hear the Word of God.

When I read about Cuba, I think to myself we have brothers and sisters there who are suffering big time. They have disease that is rampant, they have limited food, they have almost no electricity, they have no transportation, and work jobs pay is just not there. They're asking for 35,000 Proclaimers for their families and the communities who are now searching for God to hear God's voice. They're open. There's an openness; there's a searchingness; there's an honoring of the Word of God. Our brothers and sisters are asking us. The blind are asking. Jesus stopped when the blind said, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me." The blind in Cuba are saying, "Have mercy on us." They said, "We are amazed that you have entrusted—nobody trusts the blind, but you have entrusted us with the eternal Word of God."

John Ankerberg: It breaks your heart to hear how they're suffering in Cuba, and you can help because the Word of God brings joy, and we can get them into Cuba. But we need to provide 35,000 of these Proclaimers, and this is where you can come in and you can win people to the Lord. We'll give you a report of what is happening and what your gift has actually done.

Thanks for being with us this week, and I hope that you'll stay with us next week. We're going to talk more about how this reaches people in different parts of the world. I think we're going to take you to a spot where there's two billion people and only 34 to 40 million of those two billion are Christians, and we're going to talk to you about why women are so important in bringing the Word of God to folks that have never heard the truth in their life. I hope that you'll join us. But stay tuned; I've got a personal word for you in just a moment.

Can you imagine not having access to a Bible? Approximately 70 percent of people worldwide learn primarily through audible communication, meaning that around 5.7 billion people need to hear the Gospel to understand and accept it. Shockingly, over one billion people still do not have access to God's Word in a format that they can understand.

You can help with this. Would you help provide audio Bibles to those who need to hear God's Word in their own heart language? If so, please visit JAshow.org/audiobibles or call 1-800-805-3030 to send an audio Bible today. That's JAshow.org/audiobibles or call 1-800-805-3030. If you're in Canada, please visit JAshow.ca/audiobibles or call 1-866-746-5803.

Thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We're a listener-supported ministry, and your gifts help us continue to share the Gospel with millions of people worldwide. To learn more about our resources or to support our mission, visit JAshow.org or please call us at 1-800-805-3030. If you're in Canada, please visit JAshow.ca or call us at 1-866-746-5803. Or you can subscribe to us on YouTube. Your support makes a difference in spreading God's Word.