Mary's Song (Luke 1:46-55)

Uh we have a guest speaker.

Jackson Compion is here with us.

He's a missionary that we support on a monthly basis.

Also a missionary that was sent out of Shoreman Calvary in Moravet.

And so we, a lot of us knew Jackson long before he had ever got sent out uh to the mission field.

And he's doing it through Talking Bibles, and he can give a much better description of his ministry and what Talking Bibles is.

So, Jackson, why don't you come up?

If you need a Bible, just raise your hand and Bryman would love to bring you one.

Cool, cool, cool.

Well, yeah, I'm super, super happy to be with you guys.

Um yeah, but like uh Chris was saying, I was sent out from Shoreline.

Uh, and also something I got to see at Shoreline maybe 16 months ago was six families from Shoreline being prayed over and sent to a Tascadero, including the Vanolis and many others.

And now I'm sitting here and there's a lot more than six families, so that's really cool.

And actually, really, we're one family.

You all we're all becoming together, one family.

So I'm really honored to be here today.

I'm really it's cool to see the growth over just a bit more than a year.

Um, so today uh most of you don't know me, maybe you've seen my face around or seen a video I've sent from India.

Uh so let me explain something about myself.

I really love Christmas.

Like Amy Maskell, I know.

And more than Christmas, actually, I like the Advent season, the whole month preceding Christmas.

I like that opportunity to kind of contemplate uh the gift of God, the gift of God and his son Jesus coming to earth, becoming native to us.

So this year, this past year, the scripture I kept coming to was uh the Magnificon, Mary's song at the beginning of Luke 1.

So if you want to open up to Luke 1, if you have a phone or a physical Bible, you can open up there.

And uh, well, we're gonna read that in a moment, but first let's state the obvious.

It's not Christmas, we're a month late or 11 months too early, depending on how you want to look at it.

Uh but I think really what I want to tell you about this Bachelor today and what Mary wants you to hear from her song, it's really relevant for all seasons and it's relevant for all of us uh throughout the year.

So, uh yeah, Luke chapter 1, we're gonna start at verse 46 here.

Luke 1 · chapter mention

Uh and yeah, if you don't have a Bible, oh Chris already mentioned, you can raise your hand, someone will get you one.

So, starting verse 46, and Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, because he has looked with favor on the humble condition of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed, because the mighty one has done great things for me, and his name is holy.

His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him.

He has done a mighty deed with his arm, he has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts, he has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.

He has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to our ancestors.

Lord God, thank you for these beautiful words, uh, this beautiful song from your servant, your exalted servant Mary.

Please let her words, her songs settle in our hearts, let them ring on our ears, let them uh find a home in our minds so that they can transform our imagination.

Pray these things in the name of your son, Jesus.

So um, we just read this song, and we're gonna read it a few more times this morning.

Um and we're gonna talk about the contents of the song, but first we should talk about the context, because we're I know you guys are going through Luke, and I'm just pushing you right into the, not the middle of Luke.

Sorry, you guys are going through Mark, and I'm pushing you right into the middle of Luke with no context.

So let's talk about where we're at right now.

Uh, you can just scan up your page and see we're we're kind of halfway through the beginning of Luke's first chapter.

Uh, but there's a few stories that precede uh this song of Mary.

So let's let's look into those.

First, Luke has his intro to Theophilus, and then there's the story of Gabriel, this angel from God, who meets this priest in the temple named Zechariah.

And Zechariah has this barren old wife named Elizabeth, and the the angel tells him, Your wife Elizabeth is gonna have a kid.

And Zechariah, even though he's a priest, even though Luke himself describes him as righteous, as a servant of God, uh, Zechariah doesn't quite believe.

And so he's struck mute by this angel.

Then that same angel goes from Zechariah to Mary.

Mary is this young girl living in this rural village, like way north of Jerusalem.

She has none of the status, none of the honor that Zechariah has.

She has far less reasons to trust the word of God, a messenger of God, than Zechariah does.

But when she's told by that angel that she's gonna have a child, even though she's not married, uh, she believes.

She trusts and believes, and she admits, she submits to this plan that God has for her.

So following this story, Mary visits Elizabeth, that wife of Zechariah, probably to care for her while she's had giving birth.

And uh when when Elizabeth sees Mary, the child in her womb, John the Baptist, who's going to become a major player, that child stirs in Elizabeth's womb.

And so Elizabeth, even though she shares this status of her husband, even though she's much older and therefore honorable than this teenager who's come to help her, she honors Mary and she exalts Mary above herself.

And then that's where Mary responds with this song.

Let's read it again.

And Mary says, starting at verse 46, chapter 1 My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, because he has looked with favor on the humble condition of his servant.

Surely from now on, all generations will call me blessed.

Because the mighty one has done great things for me, and his name is holy.

His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him.

He has done a mighty deed with his arm, he has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts, he has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.

He has satisfied the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to his ancestors.

So we're gonna you're thinking we just read that, why are you reading it again?

We're gonna read Depride two more times.

This is poetry, right?

Uh the way that this is trying to communicate to us, the way that Mary is trying to communicate to us, the way that Luke, the reason that Luke put this in here as poetry, is trying to communicate to us slowly.

The same way that these songs that we sing every Sunday morning, we sing them week after week after week so that those words kind of dig into us.

That's really the way they communicate to us.

So we're gonna talk about more of the context, we're gonna talk about the actual poem, but the reason we're reading it again and again is that's the the way this type of literature really works on us.

So just please don't get bored.

So first let's let's talk about actually where Mary is from.

Uh if you scan up the page, Luke mentions that she's from Nazareth.

It's this uh tiny little town, maybe 150, 200 people in this region called Galilee.

And actually, talking about uh Galilee is a great opportunity to talk about Bihar, the state in India where I've been living for the past year.

Because they're actually really similar.

Actually, Galilee during this time of Mary was pretty sparsely populated.

Uh Bihar is not like that at all.

India has you know 1.3 billion people, uh, or or sorry, India as a whole has 1.3 billion people.

Bihar has like over a hundred million.

So it's it's not sparsely populated at all, but it is like Galilee was in the first century, very rural, very um agricultural.

Pretty much everyone would have lived in a village setting, just like people in Bihar generally live in village settings.

They're much more densely populated, but it's a rural setting.

And in a similar way, the Galilee was a little bit culturally different.

They would have spoken almost entirely Aramaic.

If you went down to Jerusalem where Zechariah and Elizabeth are from, you might hear a mix of Greek, you might even, in Zechariah's home, you might have heard uh more pure Hebrew and a bit of Aramaic as well, but where Mary is from, Nazareth, Galilee, they're speaking pure Aramaic.

That's pretty much the only the trade language, the mother tongue.

That's the language that Jesus would have spoken grown up speaking, of course, having Mary as a mother.

And uh Bihar is similar.

Most of India speaks, most of North India speaks Hindi, but you go into the rural villages in Bihar, in the state where I live, and no one really speaks Hindi.

In fact, there's three or four different sort of regional languages, Boshpuri, Matili, Magahi.

And uh, so communicating is hard, and people have certain feelings about their language.

They don't like to talk in other languages.

So that's a lot of what I'm doing with talking bibles is trying to provide Bibles, audio Bibles in these people's heart language.

You can imagine if you grow up speaking Aramaic like Mary did, and then someone comes preaching at you in Greek, you're gonna go, uh yeah, I'm kind of understanding some of what you're saying.

You know, I can buy my groceries in Greek.

But uh talking about the things of God, maybe reading some poetry from some of the Psalms in Greek, that's like a little bit difficult.

So, in the same way, Bihar has all of those challenges, and and all of India does, but especially Bihar has those linguistic challenges.

Um in a similar way, both ancient Galilee and Bihar today, because of their rural nature, because of the different languages, they have a bit of a reputation outside of their own home places.

You see this in the scriptures.

Uh, Jesus kind of gets slack from some of his uh early disciples because he's from Galilee.

They say, what good can come out of that place?

A lot of people in the first century seem to have looked down on Galilee because it was sort of thought of as a backwards, a conservative, a rural place.

So people there couldn't be maybe intelligent, couldn't produce anything good aside from food, I guess.

In the same way, Bihar is like that.

A lot of people, actually, my mother's a nurse, she works in Slow, and she has some Indian patients from other parts of India.

And when they hear that her son is working in India in Bihar, they're like, Isn't Bihar?

Is he okay there?

Is he safe to be there?

That's the reputation Bihar has.

So uh so there's some similarities here, and also more culturally, Mary is this young woman.

Most likely, she has no education at all.

Most likely there her parents saw no reason to teach her how to read, how to do any sort of arithmetic or anything.

Uh, because her life would be revolving around the house, revolving around agriculture, like most of the people in her in her family, in her village.

And that's how Bihar is as well.

It's one of the worst states in all of India as far as education is concerned.

And it's usually especially poor when it comes to young girls being educated.

They're usually the last people in the family to get education if they do at all.

Um, so when I was reading through this section, uh I was spending uh part of Advent in uh some of the rural villages in Bihar, and so I was thinking, man, Mary, she's just like some of these young Bihari girls that I'm meeting and getting to talk to.

Uh so that was that was really interesting.

And of course, there's a social stigma of a pregnancy out of wedlock, right?

I'm not entirely sure how it is in Galilee, but I imagine it's probably the same way it is in any rural place.

In Bihar, I've never even heard of anyone having a kid outside of marriage because it's so shameful you don't even gossip about it.

Like you don't even say, Oh, she did something, you know.

It's that shameful.

And so for Mary, it was probably similar.

And she knew that when Gabriel came to her and talked to her and said, You're gonna have a kid, even though you're not married yet.

She knew she was taking on that level of shame.

Uh, so that's that's pretty significant.

Uh, but even though Mary probably was illiterate, she probably didn't have an education, she still knows these songs.

We read through uh just a cursory glance through this song of hers, and it has tons of references to the Tanakh, the Old Testament, and maybe uh eight references references to different Psalms, four references to uh other parts of the Old Testament.

Of course, if you know Hannah's song, it's a very common, uh very popular song from uh the book of Samuel in the Old Testament.

You read that next to Mary's song, and it's like, wow, like they're in conversation with each other.

Uh Mary mentions the strong arm of God.

Of course, that's uh one of the most common phrases to talk about what God did in saving Israel as slaves out of Egypt and bringing them, making them into a nation.

So Mary's actually pretty, she's pretty smart, she knows what she's doing.

She's been, even though she's probably never been to anything that we would recognize as school, her whole life, she's been hearing these scriptures from her parents, from her rabbi, maybe from other family members, other people in the town, and she's let those scriptures kind of fill her mind and transform her imagination.

And now she's produced this song, which is just really just filled with the Old Testament scriptures.

So that's just you know, I often hear in India I deal with a lot of illiterate people, and even when I when they get an audio Bible, they still feel inadequate to the task of actually thinking about those scriptures in any intelligent way or teaching those scriptures to someone else.

And even in a lot of American churches, you know, I hear people say, Oh, that's that's the pastor up there.

He's he knows how to teach the scriptures, he knows how to preach.

But Mary is she's none of that.

She's, you know, completely uneducated, but she knows the scriptures.

She's letting them work on herself and through her song, she's letting them work on the people around her.

So just let that be an encouragement.

Like you're not lacking anything that Mary wasn't lacking, you know.

You're just as capable as she is.

Um actually, something really cool that I've seen in a lot of the Bihari churches is women will come in each week with new songs that they've written.

It's a singing culture, uh, especially the Boshpuri side of the state.

And so those women who can write, they'll have a little notebook where they've jotted down their song.

But even those women who can't write, they'll form a song in their head.

Uh maybe it's just a standard sort of praise and worship song, but oftentimes it's a song that's telling part of their testimony, telling some story of how God has transformed their life in the last week or the last month, something like that.

Uh, and that's really the exact same thing that Mary is doing here.

But uh really more remarkable than Mary is what she's trying to communicate through her song.

Let's read it again.

Uh, chapter one, starting at verse 46.

And Mary said, My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, because he has looked with favor on the humble condition of his servant.

Surely from now on, all generations will call me blessed, because the mighty one has done great things for me, and his name is holy.

His mercy is from generation to generation on those who fear him.

He has done a mighty deed with his arm, he has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts.

He has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly.

He has satisfied the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel, remembering his mercy, to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he spoke to our ancestors.

So with this song, Mary is she's really providing, well, Luke is using her song to provide a sort of prologue to his whole gospel account.

And uh she's I I mean, she didn't know her song was gonna end up in uh sort of a history of Jesus, of Jesus' life, but for her, it's almost a prophecy of what she sees is gonna happen through this promised son that she's about to have.

Uh and we talk about prologues, I just mentioned a prologue.

In a lot of modern books, a prologue is just like an introduction or like almost like a foreword.

Um think about like Elizabethan playwrights like uh Shakespeare or like the ancient Greek playwrights.

I don't know if you ever studied those, were forced to study those mass words, I think.

A prologue is generally in those more traditional uh pieces of literature, a prologue is a chance for the author to introduce all the themes that are gonna get played out in greater detail in the rest of the narrative.

Or uh also sometimes the opportunity to basically give a broad overview of where the story is going before actually introducing any of the main characters or plot points.

So that's kind of what what Mary's song is doing here in chapter one of Luke.

Um and you can see that's how how Luke is using it.

Uh, she's telling what the good news uh about Jesus really is before Jesus is even born.

She's explaining what is the good news.

And for Mary, the good news is that God is about to bring a series of reversals.

Reversals of power, of fortune, of attention, of honor.

Uh God is bringing through her coming Son Jesus an upside-down kingdom.

That's that's what Mary believes in.

That's what she's trying to communicate through this poem of hers, this song.

So uh let's read a few sections again.

Uh, we'll start at verse 47 just to expound on this.

My spirit rejoices in God, my Savior, because he has looked with favor on the humble condition of his servant.

She's speaking of herself.

Surely, from now on, all generations will call me blessed, because the mighty one has done great things for me.

I mean, all generations.

We're here 2,000 years later, talking about this farm girl from this little village in the middle of nowhere.

Uh, yeah, all generations.

And when she says uh her, she's speaking of herself as a servant in a humble condition, she's not talking about her attitude.

She's not saying, oh, I don't think too highly of myself.

She's saying I'm poor.

And of course, in biblical literature, poor doesn't necessarily mean uh poor in wealth, although probably that is what that means for her, but it also means poor in status and honor.

In many cultures around the world, uh compared to America, honor is much, much more important than any wealth you could have.

Uh here in America, you know, you get rich, you gain all the social status.

Uh that's, you know, what we look for in uh general American society.

In the rest of the world, probably for Mary for sure, uh poverty is poverty and richness has more to do with status, how others see you, how your community sees you.

Um let's keep reading.

Verse 51.

Uh he has done, God has done a mighty deed with his arm.

That's that part uh I love from uh quoting the Old Testament, the story of the Exodus.

God has scattered the proud because of the thoughts of their hearts, he has toppled the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly, he has satisfied the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

I mean, think about for Mary, who sits on thrones in her in her world, first century Judea, who sits on thrones?

There's one person, Caesar, that's uh the greatest empire in the world up to that point.

She's in this tiny little province on the almost on the outskirts of the empire.

That's like someone, I don't know, in like uh Puerto Rico saying the president of the US is is nothing.

He's gonna fall, and the low like me are gonna be lifted up.

It's a ridiculous thing to say, but but she's confident.

She's confident in the promise that God has given her.

And uh so so it's obvious why Luke is putting this here at the beginning of his gospel, because in Luke's gospel, the good news, every time Jesus preaches and enacts the good news, it's always especially good news for the poor, for the needy, for the orphan and the foreign and the widow, as the prophets would say it.

Um for people like my Bihari friends uh in India.

So uh let's look at what Jesus actually says, what Luke quotes him as saying.

In Luke chapter 4, Jesus delivers this uh Nazareth manifesto as it's sometimes called.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

He walks into a synagogue and he picks up the scroll of Isaiah and he reads from there, uh, starting in verse 18 if you're trying to track along.

The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, to proclaim the Lord of the year's Jubilee.

That's what Jesus thinks his mission is.

Sounds a lot like what his mother thought.

Uh, a few chapters later, in chapter six, Jesus is giving, uh in Matthew it's called the Sermon on the Mount, in Luke, it's more like a sermon in the field.

I I don't know.

But it's the same, it's the sermon where Jesus is explaining all of the values of his kingdom to his disciples and some of the crowds that have come and gathered.

And he opens that sermon by saying this Blessed are you who are poor, because the kingdom of God is yours.

Blessed are you who are hungry now, because you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now because you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, insult you, and slander your name as evil, because of the Son of God.

Man, rejoice in that day and leap for joy.

Take note, your reward is great in heaven, for this is the way their ancestors used to treat the prophets.

But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your comfort.

Woe to you who are now full, for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are now laughing, for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all people speak well of you, for this is the way their ancestors used to treat the false prophets.

This is the gospel according to Luke.

This is the gospel according to Jesus and according to Jesus' mother, Mary.

It doesn't sound like good news to us.

There might be something wrong.

We might have misunderstood somewhere back along the path what the good news is actually about.

So I my question for you today really is this are you Are you blessed?

Are you blessed like the poor, like the hungry, like the needy, like those who are hated?

Are you blessed like Mary when Jesus turns your world upside down?

Or are you maybe more like uh Zechariah, someone who has status, who has honor in your society, maybe financial wealth in your life.

But you need to be humbled a bit.

That's what Jesus has for you in this season.

I don't know.

I unfortunately most of you are strangers to me.

So you have to ask yourself that question.

Let me explain, I'll give just a super brief example of how this happened in my life recently.

Like I said, I spent uh the week leading up to Christmas in Bihar in some pretty rural villages.

Um and usually in India, Indian churches, they spend that whole week just doing Christmas events, uh, having little meetings and uh singing songs together, and someone will come and preach the gospel, talk about uh Christmas.

And uh as a foreigner and uh as a white guy, strangely enough, uh as someone in India doing sort of Christian work, uh I get probably far more, definitely far more uh sort of honor and status in India, especially amongst the Indian church, than I rightly deserve.

People, uh even though I I'm not really, I'm here before you today, but I'm not really a preacher or a teacher of the scriptures.

Uh that's not what what I do that often.

But when I'm in these Indian churches, I almost always get invited uh to teach.

They think, oh, here's this guy, he must know the Bible, he's a foreigner.

I I don't know why they have that assumption.

But I get invited almost any church I go to, I will get invited uh to teach a message, to talk about the scriptures.

Um, and so that's what I'm used to.

Uh and so I went into this Christmas season uh with a few messages prepared, knowing that I would probably get asked to do this.

Um, but this Christmas was different.

The pastor I was traveling with most of the time, he kinda just told me, uh, sit down.

Just uh don't worry about it, I'll teach.

Uh you shouldn't you can just greet the people real quick, explain why a weird white guy is in this church.

Uh and then just sit down and I'll teach.

And uh, you know that that was different for me.

That was a moment where normally I'm given a lot of honor and status, I'm given all these opportunities to teach.

And instead, at that moment, what I was told is let these guys, let these guys, and and I had the opportunity by sitting down and not saying anything myself, I got the opportunity to actually hear the scriptures from many people I wouldn't have otherwise, because they would have been the ones sitting down.

And so that's the way in my life most recently, Mary's song has really come to life, come, become a reality.

And so, in your life, let me just ask you to go home and read this song a few more times and let it work on you the way that poetry does.

Let it seep into your heart and consider how is God reversing situations in your life?

How is he turning your life upside down?

So, uh, let me pray.

Lord Jesus, uh, we love you and we worship you, and I thank you so much for your scriptures.

I thank you for Luke passing your mother's song along to us, and I thank you for the spirit that your spirit that you uh so clearly filled your own mother with, so that she could uh minister to us all these years later, so that we could talk about her as blessed and as exalted all these years later.

And Lord, I pray that you would be stirring in our hearts, that you would be transforming our hearts, so that we would see ourselves as those who need to be humbled where we are proud, that those who need to be emptied, where we are a fool, that those who are need to become poor where we are rich.

Uh for not just for our sake, Lord, but for the sake of your kingdom, for the sake of the community that you've placed us in.

Please use us, Lord.

That's that's what I'm asking.

Please use us.

And we give you all honor and glory and praise forever and ever.

Amen.

Amen.

Jackson sent us a video uh a couple months ago that we watched, but there's a lot of new people here that didn't get to see that.

Can you tell us just a little more detail about what your day-to-day ministry looks like?

Uh, a little more details about talking bibles and that ministry.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, so uh Talking Bible, I'm sorry I don't have one with me.

You can go to talkingbibles.org if you're really curious, but it's a little plastic audio player, yay big.

It has a solar panel on the back.

Um, and it's basically an MP3 player with a speaker on it.

So people can listen to the Bible.

In India, maybe roughly a third of people don't have a really good education.

Uh, in the village settings like uh where I live in Bihar, even less people have a good education.

Um and there's also tons and tons of languages in India, like over a thousand languages.

So we have Bibles in some of the major trade languages like Hindi or Telugu, some of these languages you you might have heard of from India.

But all of the smaller languages that people actually speak in their homes, uh, we don't have Bibles for those.

So what one of the things I'm currently working on is trying to record the Old Testament in Boshpuri, which is a language spoken by maybe 50 million people in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

Um and uh the New Testament is finished, people can listen to the New Testament.

We've distributed these audio Bibles in the Boshpuri New Testament for years, uh, but the Old Testament hasn't been available.

And uh that's just one language of the hundreds and hundreds that need to be recorded.

Many of them haven't even been translated yet, which is not our work, but the work of other organizations.

So there's uh a lot of work that still needs to be done in India as far as making the scriptures available uh for people who need to hear them, need to read them.

So that's the work that I do in India.

Um is that absolutely and not to put you on the spot, but I don't want to put you on the spot.

Okay.

This is the craziest thing that you've seen God do in the last year.

Um should have warned you.

Yeah, should have warned me.

Or just a sweet testimony of how you've seen Talking Bibles work.

Yeah, well, uh, yeah, so I was this past Christmas when I was uh I was in this village called uh Buxer.

Actually, Buxer is like a medium-sized town.

And I was just there, I was with a pastor who has distributed Talking Bibles in the past, but I wasn't there on Talking Bibles business.

I was just spending Christmas with him and some of the churches that he looks after.

And we were walking through this neighborhood going to visit a family uh just to sit with them and pray with them and have tea.

And uh we heard this sound coming out of some uh building and it was a talking Bible.

It was and you know, I see a lot of these talking bibles go out uh into the villages.

I talk to people who listen to them, but I never really know are they being used, are they actually are do they have any impact at all?

And so to walk by and completely unannounced, this other neighbor was listening to one of these.

It was a neighbor we weren't going to visit.

They didn't know that we walked past, they had no idea we were there, but they were listening to the scriptures, um, and that was really cool.

Yeah.

And then you're currently uh doing the Old Testament translation.

Not translation, the audio recording of the Old Testament.

Um and last I heard I think you were like a third of the way through.

Yeah, we we've done Genesis through Ruth, which is almost exactly a third of the Old Testament.

Uh we are stalled right now because the uh the translation actually isn't completely ready for us.

The people who translated that Old Testament, uh, there's a lot of typos and such.

Um basically Boshpuri is not a literary language, it's not written.

The pastors that I have helping me record it, they've they grew up speaking Bhoshpuri.

That's all they speak at home.

They preach in Bhoshpuri.

They've never actually read Boshpuri.

The first time they read Boshpuri was coming to my house and sitting in front of the microphone and reading this translation.

So uh there's a lot of struggles as far as the translation goes, getting all of the text ready to record without too many um too much stopping and halting and fixing things.

Uh so that's what we're waiting for right now is for the translators to finish up uh all the edits.

Uh so you can be praying for that, please.

Uh as soon as I get my visa, I'm going back to India, hopefully like mid-February.

And I'd like to be able to start recording again, but it's all dependent on the translators.

So yeah, I need your prayers for that for sure.

And Jackson sends out a prayer newsletter every month.

And uh there was a picture of him.

He's got this little recording sound booth in his apartment uh where they're doing all these recordings, and it looks like the pastor's kind of back into that thing and covering it in the microphone.

Yeah, it's pretty small.

Um but I encourage you if you would like to start receiving the updates from Jackson to get on uh his email list.

Yeah, you can just come up to me, give me your email address, I'll write it down, and you'll be on the list.

Yeah, so uh you got a question, Bill?

I am a question, yeah.

Are you having a problem getting to any of those?

I mean any problems there with your visas or anything like that.

Yeah, it's just the visa, waiting for the visa.

Uh last time I tried to get a visa, it took me 10 months, but that was at the beginning of the COVID uh pandemic.

So hopefully this time it'll go much quicker because you know we're a couple years into this thing like these people.

Yeah, no, and that's that's something to pray about too, because this time he's uh applying for a 10-year visa.

Yeah.

Last time he just got the one year.

Um definitely need to keep that in prayer.

But uh, if you don't mind, Jackson, maybe just stay at the info booth afterwards.

Sure, sure.

And then anybody can go up and give your email to him, get on.

The updates are great, very informative of what's going on and lets us know specifically how to pray.

But speaking of that, let's pray for him right now.

So Lord, I thank you so much for Jackson and the work that you're doing in and through him, Lord, with recording this audio uh for people to listen to scripture in a language that they've never heard scripture before.

Uh Lord, so I we pray that the editing would go quickly and it would get back into his hands.

We pray for this 10-year visa, that it would just fly through and that you would make that happen.

Uh, that he'd be able to get back and continue on this project.

Lord, I thank you for all the other things that you're doing in and through him, through Talking Bibles, um, and through this amazing ministry that's dedicated to bringing your word to the lost, bringing your word to the unreached people uh in Bihar, India.

So, Lord, we pray that your favor would be upon him and that you would do wonderful and amazing things in and through him and in and through the ministry of Talking Bibles.

We pray these things in Jesus' name.