If we keep our eyes open when we walk through our towns and cities we will see many people from foreign countries speaking languages we don’t understand. How can we communicate with them? How can we share the gospel? Recently my wife and I invited an Iranian man for lunch. He speaks some English and German but not enough for a deeper conversation. He likes to come to church and to participate in our fellowship. He likes to be with “good people” as he once stated. When the Lord’s Supper is served he takes part, although he still is a Muslim. He did not understand the explanation during the church service that the communion is meant to be for Christians remembering the death of our Saviour and proclaiming his Lordship. So, when he was with us at home I took out my laptop computer and went with him to a great website: www.globalrecordings.net .This site is available in more than a dozen languages, not only English.
On the global recordings site you will find the Bible or portions of it as texts, mp3 files or video clips that explain the gospel. And the different resources are available altogether in over 6000 languages. I opened the website. Under ‘Listen or Download’ – ‘Find by Language’ you type in “Farsi”. I was surprised that they offer material in about 15 different regional dialects. You can choose. We went to “Farsi, Western: Kermani”. There we found over 20 links to material from various Christian organisations in that language, for example:
The Bible in Farsi – (Farsi Net) Our friend didn’t have his own Farsi Bible with him, so I could open 1 Corinthians and let him find chapter 11 (because I can’t make sense of those Arabic letters) and let him read in his mother tongue what Paul said about the Lord’s Supper, and then I tried again to explain the meaning of it.
Afterwards we watched two video clips from that website together:
Iranian Evangelistic Video Tract – Iranian – (Create International) (4 minutes, which I didn’t understand and hope it was good) and
Cabernet – Short Film in Farsi, Western – (Jesus Film Media) (7 min., in English with Farsi subtitles)
This second video gave me the opportunity to share the gospel in simple words with a good illustration that this video provided.
For users of mobile devices, you can go to http://5fish.mobi .
All this to say that next time you meet a stranger ask him which language he speaks and try out this website. Then you can share the best news of this world wherever you are, in a train, on a park bench, at a restaurant–whereaver there is wifi–with whoever you meet.
WT