God’s Word – a transforming thing now available to the Awadhi people of India.

India (MNN) — God’s Word is a transforming thing, and now for the first time the Awadhi people of India will be able to read the Bible in their own heart language.

Gary Bishop of the World Bible Translation Center says that after 13 years of work, they were thrilled to see this project come to fruition. “We introduced this text to them and were able to distribute 10,000 Bibles at one time. And so it was for us, a very historic day, for God a very glorifying day, for His Word to be put in the language for people who have never had a Bible before.”

With Christians numbering less than one percent of the population in the region of Agra, where most of the Awadhi speakers live, Bishop is excited to see what God will do now that the people have His Word in their heart language.

“It’s a great privilege to deliver to them the hope that the rest of the world has. And if your listeners could think about it just for a moment, we now have a whole group of people, many for the first time, who will have heard the story, or will have the chance to hear, the story that we’re celebrating around the world this time of year, which is the birth of Jesus Christ, and many of them will have heard or seen in their own language that story for the very first time this year.”

Bishop hopes to see these Bibles used to share Jesus Christ and His saving grace with the more than 20-million Awadhi people. “And so our hope is that, in this particular part of India because of the introduction of this Bible, that there will be more and more maturing, developing Christians, and that we will have a series of church leaders, rising up to take the leadership of churches in these areas, and begin to build churches that will obviously within their communities, serve to present Jesus Christ and his saving grace to people within their communities.”

Pray that the believers in that people group and region will be faithful ministers of the Gospel and grow in their faith. Pray that God’s Word will spread like wildfire among the Awadhi people.