Day 3 of 6 — Glow in the Dark. About 3 minutes.
So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
Romans 10:17
When the first missionaries came to these islands, Hawaiian was spoken everywhere and written nowhere. There was no alphabet, no spelling, no page anyone could hand you. So before anything else could happen, somebody had to sit down and listen, decide which sounds the language actually used, and settle on letters for them. They landed on twelve. Five vowels and seven consonants for the whole language. Then came the slow part. The New Testament was printed in Hawaiian in 1832 and the Old Testament followed in 1839, the first complete Bible ever printed in these islands. Think about how ordinary that sounds now and how impossible it looked then. A man sat with a language he did not speak and worked until a person on this beach could read the words of God in the words of his own mother.
Paul explains why anyone would spend a life that way. Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Those are two separate statements and the second one carries the weight. Faith does not come by hearing anything. It comes by hearing the word of God, and the word of God has to arrive in a form a person can actually take in.
That is why the gospel has always travelled with paper and with voices. God could have written His promises across the sky in every language at once and spared everybody the trouble. He did not. He chose instead to put His word in the mouths and the hands of people, which means the message moves at the speed of somebody carrying it. Nothing about that is accidental. It is how He decided to do it.
You own several copies of a book that people once gave their lives to put into a language. That is not a small thing and familiarity is the only reason it ever feels like one. Open one of them today, and before you close it, say something true out of it to one actual person. A text to someone who is struggling. A verse read out loud at the table with your kids. A sentence to the man at work who asked how your weekend was. Faith comes by hearing, and the people around you cannot hear what nobody says.
Growth principle: Faith comes by hearing, which means somebody has to put the words where the ears are.
Take it with you: Say one true thing about Christ out loud to one real person today, out of the Bible you already own.
Pause and pray: Lord, thank You for the people who worked so that I could read Your word in my own language. Keep me from treating it as ordinary, and loosen my tongue to say it to somebody else. Amen.
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