One of our translation projects that began years ago, in early 2019, is coming to fruition now in late 2022. The Lord helped through many setbacks and challenges over these years, and enabled us to now bring to print in recent months the first modern translation into Arabic of the classic Charles Spurgeon devotional “Morning & Evening.” This is a major milestone for our translation efforts, and we thank the Lord it is finally here!

We partnered with a local pastor who had experience translating shorter Spurgeon works in the past (All of Grace, for example) and his small church-based team of translators, to eventually produce the final 764-page manuscript in Arabic of this timeless Christian devotional.

Why did we pursue this particular project? Our overarching mission is not only to help feed the hungry and oversee development projects, but to educate people in God’s truth as well. This devotional book provides a profound, wide-ranging instruction in Biblical truth in short, daily bite-sized portions. It seemed the perfect place to focus translation efforts over the years with funds dedicated for this type of educational work. We thank the Lord it is complete except for some small corrections we’re still ironing out.

We are currently working out the next steps for finding a quality printer in our host country to work with for a large scale hard-copy print of these devotionals. Our goal is around 3,000 copies to start, depending on cost and available funding, then to reprint more if demand from regional churches is sufficient to warrant it. While we wait on the printer details, we’re focusing efforts on getting this Spurgeon devotional digitized and available to any Arabic speaker with an internet connection. The digital version of the devotional is likely going to be the primary way this material blesses the Arabic-speaking world, though we still find a need for distributing physical copies locally as well.

Do you know someone who speaks Arabic who might want to view and utilize the digital version? It is live now on this website, please do share and link back to it for the benefit of others: https://www.sabahwamassa.com/

The devotional website is still a little bare-bones, but more features and content will be added to it later this year. For now, it works by giving users the morning and evening devotion for that day, loaded up on the main page, and compatible with mobile phone use. Eventually, we hope to produce an Android and iOS app of similar functionality to the website, so that Arabic speakers can have it loaded directly on their phone to use even when offline.

If you happen to want a physical copy of the Arabic Morning & Evening book for yourself (if you are bilingual in Arabic!) or a friend, you can order one directly if you’re in the USA, free of charge, from our friends at Chapel Library who graciously agreed to help with print-on-demand requests for these books: https://www.chapellibrary.org/book/maevar/morning-and-evening-spurgeoncharlesh

How You Can Pray For The Translation Ministry

This is a lesser known branch of our general relief, development and ministry efforts at TGI, but not a less essential one. Pray for the ongoing labors! We’ve been periodically funding and overseeing Arabic translation of useful, Biblical content since 2015. This given us access to Arabic material from high-quality source content that was just not otherwise available. It has also allowed us to bless various native pastors and educated locals to be able to be paid for the translation and copy editing work.

Our hope in coming years is to expand efforts in this area to produce even more content to reach the Arabic speaking world with material that both instructs the existing Church and plants seed for the growth of the future Church. Pray for wisdom on what materials are most needful and most helpful for the Arabic-speaking world.

Thank you again for your prayers and support. This is a work bigger than any of us, but not bigger then God or His church! If you wish to be involved in any way, you can support TGI via our site, sign up for our relief updates e-mail newsletter to better know how to pray, or contact us if you are interested in knowing more about how to be personally involved.