Ankerberg Show

John Ankerberg: Today on the John Ankerberg Show, we will talk about the brave people in different countries of the world that are bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to their people using audio Bibles. How can these small audio Bibles be heard by over 300 people or groups of 1,000 people? How are they being used in hundreds of prisons to bring some of the toughest criminals to faith in Jesus Christ? You will hear how all of this is happening on this edition of the John Ankerberg Show.

Welcome to our program. I am John Ankerberg and we have with us the Vice President of Faith Comes By Hearing. He is working with over two million national churches overseas. Good reason for doing that; we will tell you about it in this program. But what we want to really talk about is, not too long ago, the lady that put the sound effects to the whole Bible on audiotape was his mother.

I want to talk about her, especially if you are a woman, because she did not do this when she was 20 to 30 to 40. She did this starting out at 55 to 75. She traveled the world and she did it almost 95 percent of the time alone. She went into places like what you are looking at. You do not see church people saying, "Hey, we are going to take the Gospel to that spot." But Jesus said, "Go into all the world and preach the Gospel."

Mama Annette, his mother, is what I want to talk about today. I want to hear about these 40 different places in the world that she went to make sure it was done right and the sound effects were right. She did it by herself. Tell me about Mama Annette. What is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Morgan Jackson: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind about my mom is that she loved children and she loved drama. She was a puppeteer, she was a storyteller. So, when she was listening to the Bible, Alexander Scourby, she was like, "This isn't going to relate to children. It needs to be in a drama." Of course, I told you that my dad and us were like, "No." And she said, "Oh, for kids." My dad said, "Oh, okay, for kids."

Now, Mama had a whole team to help her because Mama could not carry a B-flat in a bucket. So, whenever we were kids, whenever she was leading vacation Bible school, my brother and I had to start singing out very loud, otherwise she would be off somewhere. So, she had this team that put together the music and the sound effects. She directed the drama. She took 25 to 50 voices and did a 180-voice dramatized recording.

I could be the voice of Matthew. She did not let me because I added words and took away words, and it had to be perfect. So, I had one line and I think it was a Pharisee, and another one was Peter. But the voice of Matthew would be reading Matthew, but that voice would also be a blind man in John: "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy!" And so we would put reverb and sound effects behind it. We created this whole music score. It took six years to create the music score with all the sound effects.

When Wycliffe and the Bible societies heard that, they had been recording these single, boring, one-voice recordings, and nobody wanted to listen to them. What we discovered was that oral people, if something is important, it comes to them in a story, in a parable, in a song, in a dance, in drama. Of course, the whole New Testament is a narrative. The Bible is a drama. So, we were able to put it back in that drama.

The other thing is what we talked about before: when you have a dramatized version, there are women's voices there: Esther, and Proverbs, "Wisdom, she cries aloud." So you have a voice of a woman in Proverbs as wisdom. You have Mary, you have Martha, you have Elizabeth. So when women hear those voices—women approaching Jesus, Jesus addressing them—they realize that they have a role to play.

Around the world, the Bible societies, Wycliffe, Seed Company have translated the Bible into all these different languages. There is almost 4,000 languages now that have some translation of scripture, whether whole Bible, New Testament, or at least a portion. So, we began to get requests to go out and do these recordings. So what we did is we started training up teams. Now, these teams would come in, and Mom was the one that would train them because she was the one with the drama.

She would train them on how to act out Jesus. She would get them in the studio: "Jesus is on the cross, He is dying." And so she trained them, taught them, and then we sent them out. They all called her Mama Annette. But there were places where they could not go because they were Nigerian, they were Ghanaian, they were Canadian, they were Guatemalan. And so there were certain places they could not get a visa.

I remember I was in Ghana, and we had a couple of the teams from Ghana that were talking to me about the jungles they had been in, the dried crocodile that they had to eat, the mosquitoes, and of course there is no electricity, so it is hot. They are telling me and I am just like, "Wow, this is just crazy." And I am listening. Then all of a sudden they stop and they go—and they are probably in their late 20s, early 30s—and they go, "Where is Mama Annette?"

And I went, "Oh, Mama is in the Kalahari Desert living in a tent right now recording the bush people's language, the G|wi." And you just saw them go, "Okay." If Mama Annette can be out in these areas—and it did, it bred in these teams—we have 50 teams around the world—this toughness and this passion to get the scripture in a dramatized format in every language of the world.

Although the main purpose that Mom had was for children, she loved hearing that children in schools and elsewhere were gathering every week, every day, to hear the word of God. And to hear how children who had been delinquents were now hearing the word of God, had changed, had given up their bad practices.

John Ankerberg: Yeah, because she felt that they were a person that had their whole life to give to Christ if we could reach them when they were young. So, she wanted to win those kids. She was right. Many of those kids took those stories and they became Christians, strong Christians, added to the knowledge with the very audio Bibles that she was translating.

This Proclaimer was created after three days of fasting and prayer. My dad just said, "We need something that doesn't require money because we're sending cassette tapes out. People have players, but six months of the year, they're not hearing the Bible because they can't afford to buy batteries because they don't have a harvest." I am very glad that you are showing this because people do not know what a Proclaimer is and why it is so important and so valuable. It is a unique machine that you are not going to find anywhere else.

Morgan Jackson: The speaker quality has to be high because it is dramatized. Your brother and another engineer found the latest technology and it is unbelievable. So, Mike Jaine was an engineer, and he and my brother—my brother is an engineer—when we were in that three days of prayer, Mike Jaine came up with a whole collage of stuff and he put together this rough outline of what it needed to be.

When we listened, my dad said, "That's what we need." And he is the one that called it a Proclaimer because it proclaims the word of God. Jesus is now here. It has a hand crank if you do not see sun—crank it for 10 minutes, it will recharge. The solar recharges batteries, and the batteries today are such that they recharge 3,000 times. That means you can hear the whole New Testament over a thousand times. This one, as you know, is loud enough for a thousand people to hear. I will just play a little bit of it.

Audio Proclaimer (Guest Voice): For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Morgan Jackson: Amen.

John Ankerberg: I love it. I just love listening to it. For people that have never had a Bible in their own language—and there is still a billion people in the world that have no Bible in their language—the translators are working on that billion people. When they get the language translated, they cannot put it in print because the people they would give it to in print cannot read their own language.

So they come to you and they say, "Please record this, put the sound effects with it, and then let us find some people that will take it out to these spots." Well, that is where you are working with the nationals, because Europeans cannot take this out; you get killed. This little black box does not cause any animosity or trouble when you go into a tribe. It is just a black box and they are curious what it is.

When they press the button and they start to listen, and then they hear that God loves them, they hear about Jesus dying on the cross for them, He can forgive their sins, He can empower them, and their life changes. There is power like you will not believe in the word of God.

Morgan Jackson: John, you and I have talked about it. It is hard to explain. We know it mentally that the word of God is the most powerful thing on the earth, that when it says it is sharper than a two-edged sword, we hear that preached. But I see it over and over and over again. When people hear scripture for the first time, they weep, they sob, they laugh because they thought God had forgotten them.

They thought that they had to learn English or French or Spanish or Chinese. They look at a printed Bible. They are in their 40s or 50s, their eyesight is bad, they have no time, they have no money, there is no school next to them, and they are being told that in order to know God or Jesus, you have to be able to read. We have experienced the greatest revival in the history of the world over the last 100-plus years.

Most Americans are not aware. In Africa, it was five percent Christian 100 years ago; today it is 50 percent of sub-Saharan Africa is Christian. When you look at South Asia, you see this massive revival that is going on. When you look at East Asia, when you look at Latin America, we are not aware. But what has happened is we have brought the Gospel, people have come to faith in Christ.

But if we have given them a Bible, oftentimes it has been a King James Bible, 10-point type, 50 percent of them cannot read without glasses and they do not have glasses, and they cannot read it. So they carry it. We are working with church planters in southern Africa, and we are saying, "Don't you have money in your budget for Bibles?" And they say, "Yeah, 40 percent of our budget is Bibles."

And we say, "What does that mean?" And they say that means one Portuguese Bible for every three church planters, and they cut the Bible in three pieces and give it to each other. But half of them are blind—their eyes are so bad, they cannot read it. It is not in the mother tongue. And so they are saying to us, "Why can't we have each one of them at least have one Proclaimer?"

John Ankerberg: Yeah. I knew Chuck Colson when he started Prison Fellowship when he got out of prison himself. He started in the United States and got Bibles into the prisons, and it changed lives. Toward the end of his life before he died, he started thinking about the prisons overseas. He put out the idea of Prison Fellowship in Africa, in South America, in the Orient.

Now, we did a couple programs, and I remember the first program that you did with me on prisons. It was talking about the horrible conditions. We had 100 prisons in Africa, and you were talking about the terrible conditions that prisoners had to live in, and you were bringing audio Bibles in there. We played that program on Thanksgiving all across the world.

I thought, "Oh great, Scott Ankerberg, how in the world did you put prisons on Thanksgiving?" That was one of the biggest returns that we ever had was on that Thanksgiving Sunday. I thought two things. One: must be a lot of prisoners that got out that were saying, "This reminds me of prison." Or two: people realized these people were desperate. You would never reach them unless you gave them an audio Proclaimer.

I am saying this is a wonderful tool. Now we are using it in prisons and that is just one area. But you know, I look at a spot like this or I look at the places like in Peru and the Amazon basin throughout South America where there are 400 tribes that have never even been touched by civilization. If you look at where they are living, you would not go there either. And if you get there, they will probably chop your head off. The natives, though, they go to these people that have been reached, and they will use that because you have got their language on it.

Morgan Jackson: In the prisons, the bigger Proclaimer is the one that they want because they will play it for 300 or sometimes a thousand people will gather to hear the word of God. It has four languages, which is important because in the prisons, you will have multiple languages. Before, when Prison Fellowship International came to work with us, they were saying we only had English or French, and we were missing on 95 percent of the people because they did not speak those languages.

The prison population is the most illiterate population of the world. What is interesting is the prisoners oftentimes ask for a Proclaimer when they leave because they then are going back to the most ugly, dangerous, violent-ridden place where they used to live. They are illiterate and they are saying, "If you give me a Proclaimer, I will bring the word of God to that area where nobody else can go because that is where I came from."

They are murderers, but one of the things we do not realize is Saul was a murderer. Saul, who became the Apostle Paul, is one of the greatest examples. The disciples—many of them told me, "I have the right to have a Proclaimer to go and preach the word of God because the disciples were almost all of them ex-cons. They were all on death row." And I never thought about the fact that that was true.

But we are living in this amazing situation where we have the greatest revival. A couple hundred years ago, there was only 70 Bibles translated in languages. Today we have 4,000 languages that have some scripture. We have scripture available for 96 percent of the world's population. Illumination and others are working with us to finish the last 2,000 languages, which we think will be done by 2033.

So we could see the fulfillment of the Great Commission by 2033. But we have a billion Christians that do not have the word of God, and mostly because they are illiterate, they are poor, they are in restricted access countries. Now, I get overwhelmed by the number of people, but I have to remember that every time you provide a Proclaimer, you are providing a village, 90 people, with the opportunity to be discipled by listening through the whole New Testament or Bible.

John Ankerberg: Yeah, and I want you folks to listen to the next couple minutes here because Morgan is going to tell you something. Some of you have never won your neighbor to the Lord. You have never won one person to the Lord. You have heard about it all your life in church. You know you should do it. Here is an opportunity for you. You can give an audio Proclaimer.

If you give it, this audio Proclaimer will be listened to by at least 90 people. Of those 90 people that listen to it, 45 will approximately become Christians in listening to it. That is just the first year. If it lasts for 10 years, this is going to continue to happen. So the command is to go out and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I have commanded.

We have preached the Gospel in many places, but we have never discipled by teaching them all. Here you are teaching them all. They are hearing from Matthew 1 to Revelation 22 every year. That means 135 people on average will be new believers. 135 will be discipled. Those people will take the word of God. As we have been talking about, the women and men will take it out to other villages, and then the demand grows.

Folks, we have given you different countries, from the two billion in South Asia, to Africa, to South America, and we could go on and on. I am simply saying you can give a gift and you will have people that will come to know Christ because you gave. I am asking you to pray about you giving a gift, thinking about the people that you will reach. Thanks, Morgan, for all that you have said today. Folks, if you will stick with me, I have got a special announcement 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. Now, 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 is JAshow.org/audiobibles or call 1-800-805-3030. If you are in Canada, please visit JAshow.ca/audiobibles or call 1-866-746-5803.

Thank you for listening to the John Ankerberg Show. We are 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 call us at 1-800-805-3030. If you are 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.