JY: Welcome to GearTalk, a podcast on biblical theology. Today, Jason interviews Tom about using biblical theology to reach the nations.

JD: Welcome back, friends. Today we’ve got a different angle on our podcast. I want to interview Tom and ask him about using this discipline of biblical theology—which is really the driving force behind our GearTalk podcast—using the discipline of biblical theology to reach the nations. So Tom, I’m glad you’re here with me and looking forward to asking you some questions.

TK: Alright, I love it.

JD: OK, Tom, here we go. How would you define what a world Christian is? Everyone should be, but not everyone is a world Christian. And then follow it up with: How does that relate to the discipline of biblical theology?

TK: Maybe let’s start with that idea of biblical theology itself. We’ve talked about that as far as what it is. It’s the study of how the Scriptures progress, integrate and climax in Christ. If you want to summarize even further, it’s the story of the Bible. To make it simple, what is the story being told in the Bible? So the question is, how does being a world Christian relate to that? I think you said it. Every Christian is a world Christian because we are under a king who is over all things. Matthew 28 says that. Jesus has authority, all authority in heaven and on Earth, and he said go make disciples and the implication is everywhere of all peoples on the planet.

We should have the best view of the entire planet and what it is. It’s God’s creation. It is to be filled with his glory. Thinking of passages all over—you can think of the Psalms. Psalm 8: “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the Earth?” This should be a thought that Christians just have within them, that God’s name is great in all the earth and everywhere I go, I should be seeing his glory, evidence of his worth, his majesty, his beauty.

Going further, the thought of his glory is there, but then the promises in the Psalms, “All the ends of the Earth shall remember and turn to the Lord.” Based on Christ’s death and resurrection, there is pictured a massive change taking place in all the Earth and that all the people in the earth will hear the gospel. They will turn to the Lord and then it says in Psalm 22, “and all the families of the nations shall worship before you.” Go a little further. Psalm 24: “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.”

So I think the idea of a world Christian should be more than any people on Earth. We should be people who have a right understanding of the world and its inhabitants. That God created everything. He created it for himself, and so I should be seeing his beauty in places. But I should love all people groups, not just ones that are most like me.

JD: That’s so helpful. I remember hearing John Piper share his story of being awakened. And it started with that conviction that we glorify God most when we are most satisfied in him, when he satisfies us most and that driving commitment to spread a passion for God’s supremacy in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ. God’s deserving of worship. What it did was it gave rise to a commitment to global missions because missions exist because worship doesn’t. And I remember him sharing that story. And God even used that to awaken me. That vision of God portrayed in Scripture’s story, a story of God’s glory that culminates in Christ gives rise—what it should do is awaken. If you’ve really encountered this God, it will awaken a heart for the nations.

TK: And it starts in Genesis 1, doesn’t it? It says we are made in his image, be fruitful, multiply. And then that idea of filling the earth. It’s something of not saying salvation in my life is just about me and my little spot here. The idea of—we just talked about it in our last podcast—the increase of his government seeing no end, more territory to take for our king.

JD: Now in the process of growth, you know, we come to different levels of awareness of what God has called us to do, who he is. We grow to treasure him more through our development as a Christian. I want you to reflect for us a little bit: when did you grow to love biblical theology and here you are, the founder of a mission organization. When did you grow to love the nations and which came first and when did they begin to intersect?

TK: I would say a love for biblical theology sprang out of a love for the Lord Jesus, and it came from the Old Testament reading different passages and feeling like maybe a bell was ringing in the back of my mind like “that sounds like my Lord” or “that sounds like the faith that I’m part of.” And just having a hunger to know more about my king and realizing that Jesus and the promise of the gospel and the hope for the world was not plan B, C, D or E—it was always plan A.

And I guess I didn’t grow up that way. I grew up, met the Lord at a very young age, but I would have thought Adam and Eve were plan A and they failed. Noah would have been Plan B, let’s say, and he didn’t do it. And then Israel, they couldn’t do it. And then kind of seeing, well then Jesus came and he solved it. So having a love for seeing the Bible always was pointing to the coming of Christ, always celebrating from the very beginning. And then, once you get that realization, you start—and I think so many of us have had this—you start searching the Scriptures like the believers in the New Testament trying to find out if these things are true. Not am I misreading things or is this something here?

I think though a love of the Lord and a love of God naturally spills into it. It can’t help but spill into a love for his people. I still remember when I used to read the Scriptures, and whichever character it was that was doing the right thing, I would identify that way. So the Israelites crossing the Jordan going into the promised land—clearly I’m on their team. That’s Jericho, they’re the bad guys and I’m part of the good guys. But coming to an awareness that wait a minute, I would have been one of the people of Jericho. Or I would have been one of the nations and recognizing that I was out, I was outside the covenant. And so the story is not telling me the story of my salvation if you just want to take it to me as an insider. I was born an outsider, a rebel.

And if you want to just take that one little story, I probably wouldn’t have been like Rahab either. I would have been one of the residents of Jericho who’s just living my own life and had zero interest in the God of Israel and his plans. So a love for the nations really comes from knowing our king and knowing he loved me. He came and found me.

I think for believers too, there’s something when we’re told to love our neighbor as ourself. And I’ve thought this quite a bit working with pastors and leaders in different places, like what would I want if I were them? A motivation hopefully being love of neighbor—what would I want if I was a pastor in his shoes? Well, I wouldn’t want you to come and take my job from me. But there are certain things—if you had access to tools or training or something that I didn’t have, I think love of neighbor compels us to say “How could I give them what I myself would say, ‘Wow, that would sure help. I would really like that.'”

So I think love of neighbor for a believer—your view should be these are my brothers and sisters or brothers and sisters yet to be. But that includes the entire planet. And the whole Scripture calls us to have a worldview of the Lord as the Lord of the nations. All the nations, all the families of the nations, shall come before you. The Lord is expecting to inherit the nations. So I think he expects his servants to work hard for that to take place.

JD: That’s really good. You started to really set the stage for one of the key curricula that we have at Hands to the Plow called our Developing Leaders curriculum. But far before God gave you a vision for using biblical theology to train leaders globally and seeing the need for this among the nations, the Ministry of Hands to the Plow is over 20 years old now. So I want you, for the sake of our listeners, to go back 22 years, more than that actually—‘98-’99. Where were you and what did God use to actually move you and your bride Sarah to start a ministry that at that time you had no idea how God was going to use it? But the impetus actually related directly to the story of Scripture, a story of the whole Bible progressing and integrating and climaxing in Jesus as gospel hope. Take our listeners back there and just briefly describe what God used to start Hands to the Plow ministry.

TK: Yeah, that’s fun to think back. So one of our partners in all this—great friends with Jason and his wife Teresa as well—Mark and Kelly Yeager. Mark is an illustrator. So my background was in advertising. And so I was a writer, my friend Mark was an illustrator. As I increasingly fell in love with the Lord, I had a desire and it just became a passion to write. I wrote a gospel tract which said, I think as best as I knew at the time, the story of the gospel. I think a lot of us have had things like that, sermons or things that we’d say, “That was the best sermon I could preach at the time.” I probably wouldn’t preach it the exact same way now.

But shortly after that wrote a little book called Nathaniel’s Journey, which was a story of this little yellow creature. Mark illustrated it, and it was a story of him and his search to get to this Kingdom Beyond the Woods. He’s going on a journey somewhat like, I suppose, Pilgrim’s Progress. Wrote this story and Mark illustrated it. Never knew what God’s intention would be, but it was called by friends—now they were friends, but not at the time—but some missionaries who got hold of this book and they said, “We’re missionaries in Vietnam, we’re wondering whether we could translate the materials and bring them over to Vietnam.”

And a church had just invited me and Mark actually to visit Vietnam. And I’d never been to Asia, never had a desire to go to Asia at all. But the Lord was really working in my heart. And I was going to be there in two weeks in Vietnam and they were going to be back from furlough at the exact same time. And they said “we’d like to meet you.” And so we met them there and what is so amazing from the Lord is that this little book we wrote called Nathaniel’s Journey has now been translated into—I don’t know how many languages. It’s just going to be printed in Nepal here in the next couple weeks, but it’s in Asian countries all over. It wasn’t a plan of ours. It was something that God just did. And so in a lot of ways we were kind of pulled into the wake of something.

So this missionary couple met us and it was clear the Lord was opening a door in Asia. So I traveled with him for a number of years, and now I travel with his son.

JD: Yeah, that’s an awesome story. And it’s with that son that during that time, that ministry that God led you to begin to envision what we call our Developing Leaders curriculum. Indeed the image we use is a series of gears, six different gears associated with six different parts of the Bible and we take this material overseas and it’s really part of—and only part, but still a major part of how we train our leaders. Why don’t you share with us in just a brief way, the vision behind the Developing Leaders curriculum, how it uses biblical theology, and then clarify specifically how you’ve used the curriculum in training majority pastors in overseas contexts.

TK: The curriculum and the preacher’s guides on our website, both of them were born in Bangladesh, teaching pastors there. It is the 8th largest nation population-wise in the world. So it is a massive nation. It is mostly Islamic and the pastors there and leaders are not able to go get training. So Bob and his wife Darlene and I have been traveling there working with pastors and leaders. As we were talking to the pastors there who become dear friends, just realizing as we’re sitting there, their Bibles have no study notes in them. And they don’t have any center column references that say, “Hey, look up this verse.” So all sorts of tools that we would—

JD: We just take for granted.

TK: We take for granted. I look up things on my computer. I’m looking over at my Bible right now, and in the center column is all verses that I can go to. Their Bibles were not like that and they were also a pretty hard translation. It was the William Carey translation, which would be like King James, except one generation more difficult. So you imagine you’re a pastor and you’re working with an older King James version with no study notes in a majority Islamic nation, but also given several churches to be working with.

And when I said earlier, I think a thought of what does love of neighbor look like being there. And as we’re teaching them, realizing they have no way of knowing, for instance, if Jesus is quoting the Old Testament, where he’s quoting from. What would I want if I was them? And so that led to what I’d really want is somebody to show me the big picture of what’s going on in Scripture. And there’s so many times we say it ourselves all the time, like “wow, I wish somebody had told me that at the beginning.” It started us thinking, what would I want? How would I want to work with a pastor if you could start from the beginning? And especially a pastor—one of the challenges in Bangladesh is especially in rural areas, the people in the churches are primarily illiterate. So is there a way to teach using pictures?

JD: And illiterate doesn’t mean illogical. It doesn’t mean that they’re not smart. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t able to track arguments and think really well. It simply means they’ve never been taught to read. That’s what we’re talking about. So people who have a God-built capacity to know and love and proclaim and study faithfully. And yet who were never given the gift of reading. And so all of a sudden we have to think creatively about how to give them meat.

TK: Yeah, absolutely. And beyond that, as is true in so much of the world, these people are primarily day laborers. I mean, they’re working for the food that they will eat that night. So the margins that we have for study, for instance, for being able to leave and go somewhere, just aren’t there.

On a personal note Jason, you know this well with me, but my first year and a half in university was deeply sinful. And because I was lazy, I squandered my education. I frequently wouldn’t go to class, and the Lord has just shown me being with people who’ve had zero opportunity for education, how abhorrent that is. As someone who has enough margin in life and opportunity to get education, and yet I would say I don’t want it, I don’t need it. Talking about biblical theology, it’s really thumbing your nose at the creator of the universe and saying, “I won’t be fruitful and multiply.”

JD: So you bring two spheres of biblical theology to your training. One, the preacher’s guides and second, this Developing Leaders curriculum. Just give a glimpse of each of those curricula for our listeners.

TK: So the Developing Leaders—Jason and I had these conversations about if you were going to teach the Bible to a people and start, would you arrange it as we talked about it, like Jesus’s Bible—the Law, Prophets and the Writings. And both of us said that’s what I would want if someone was going to teach me, I would want to have it that way.

JD: Because that’s how Jesus had it, because that’s how the apostles had it. And so we want to give them the Bible as it was when the New Testament was written.

TK: And it makes sense of whole books in the Bible as you arrange it this way. So the curriculum though was designed—you could have a picture for instance of, take your pick, we’ve said for each section of Scripture we kind of made rules for ourselves—25 to 30 pictures that would summarize the story being told. For instance, in the Law, the story being told in the Prophets, the story being told in the Writings, how do they work? And we did the same thing in the New Testament—the story being told in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, those history books. The story being told in the letters, the story being told in Revelation. So six gears.

But what we said was, is it possible to have 25 to 30 pictures for each of those six sections that you could use the picture and talk about it? And on the back of the picture we have written down just here’s the basics of what this picture is describing and tried to say let’s write in that 6th to 7th grade reading level, which would fit really majority world pastors, leaders, people around the earth. And it’s not because they—again, you said it—aren’t intelligent enough to have something written at a higher level. One, as these pastors are working with people who at many times are illiterate. But two, the pastors haven’t had an opportunity to get education in many places beyond eighth grade, for instance.

JD: Right.

TK: So trying to write things at a level that people could say, “I get it, I understand it.”

JD: I remember someone telling me that even in an elementary grade textbook, if you could understand actually all that is taught in an elementary level textbook, you would have an amazing, amazing amount of knowledge. All we’re doing is taking the deepest truths about the most supreme and amazing God and packaging them in a way that even a junior high student should be able to understand.

TK: Right. And there’s different parts of the world that learn in different ways. And it’s one of the beauties of—if you’ve not gone on a short term mission trip, for instance, if you’ve never visited another culture—it is fun to see how different people approach the world and see things.

One of the things though we noticed with people we work with was a lot of times their answers came from just—if, for instance, we said, “Hey, look at Psalm 110 verse whatever, what does it say about the high priest?” And then they would just read the verse. And part of that was—training in certain parts of the world is not trained to think in terms of big picture or what’s going on here or to go beyond it. So they might just read an answer based on a verse.

And part of using pictures in our training was to try to get people to think in terms of categories and ideas. And that would allow you to flow beyond merely just quoting a Scripture, for instance. So something that we really have emphasized with the pastors we work with, pastors and leaders, is—ask us every question you can and working with them so that they’re using the pictures and actually talking about them, not just reading a verse. Everything is Scripture based but really getting it where the story has almost been absorbed into us. And we know it and because of that, it kind of spills out when we talk.

JD: That’s right. That’s right. And so you’ve got this curriculum that—just for—I encourage if you’ve never checked out our Developing Leaders curriculum, go to handstotheplow.org, the Teaching Resources tab and you’ll see that we have multiple languages there represented—almost ten of them. Go down to the English if you’re an English listener, if that’s your heart language, and just go to English Developing Leaders and you’ll see our introduction plus 6 main manuals. And what you’ll find is that there’s these 30 pictures are divided by text and it’s designed to be printed out such that you could hold the picture up and there’s a commentary that can guide your teaching of that particular element in the overall story. And as you walk through the curriculum you’re going to be walking through from Genesis all the way to Revelation, the entire story of God and it’s loaded with…

TK: Right.

JD: Showing how that entire story is progressing and integrating and climaxing in Christ, there’s all kinds of cross references. Christ is exalted at every stage and we show how there’s foreshadowing of the ultimate substance, who is Jesus. And so this curriculum is designed to really give a big picture of the Bible’s message that has Jesus right at the center.

TK: Absolutely. And we’ve tried to put in here so much of what you say “Well, I wish I knew that when I first met the Lord.” And so using that curriculum to give the big picture, then the preacher’s guides—I remember I was talking to this group of pastors and I was just looking at their Bibles and realizing they had no resources. And so I was asking “Do any of you have a study Bible?” One of them finally raised their hand and says “I have one” and he went back to his room and came back later in the day and he said, “here’s my study Bible.” It was his notebook that he’s been using to study the Bible. Using the study, the Bible.

And so that just led to a thought—would it be possible to have a section of Scripture where the notes were unlike, say, a study Bible that had technical details about who the Pharisees were or who the Sadducees were, would be more focused on that same big picture idea of what’s happening in this passage? What is Jesus doing? What is Mark emphasizing in the feeding of the 5000? Where in the Old Testament would I go that is emphasizing this same thing?

So I remember being in my room in Bangladesh as we’re just envisioning a preacher’s guide like something you’d hand to a preacher that would be like a pastor sitting next to you saying, “Hey, here’s what I would do if I was in Mark chapter one.” And then emailing back and forth with Mark Yeager and one of his co-workers, Laurie Chequest, and getting a first little chunk of Mark right there.

But what we’ve tried to do right now is we have one preacher’s guide for every one of the six sections in the Bible, 6 gears, so that you can see an example. For instance, if you said, “OK, I’ve got an idea of how the prophets work from the Developing Leaders, what the big picture is. What does it look like in an individual book?” Well, then, we’ve got a preacher’s guide, Hosea, which has all the text of Hosea. But then it has notes as if a pastor was sitting next to you, a leader, and saying, “hey, do you see what Hosea just did here? he referred to the Exodus event here. Here’s how he’s doing it. This is what Hosea is pointing to.” So that’s what the preacher’s guides are. And it has been a delight to work on those. I’ve written six of them. Jason’s commentary on Zephaniah is being finished that way and we’re looking for more being done this way just because we believe for the people, for majority world pastors and leaders, to get God’s Word in their hand and a guide to preaching is so important.

JD: So talk with me. You’re offering these church leaders something that they had never had before. You’re showing them through an example like Hosea, how Hosea is connected to Moses and how Hosea is connected to Jesus and Paul. How have you seen this approach to Scripture—really believing that all of Scripture comes from one ultimate divine author and that he is speaking purposefully for the glory of Christ—approaching Scripture this way, how have you seen it change people? Can you think of any examples right off the top of your head that allow you to just give our listeners a taste for how biblical theology has ministered to the majority world pastors that you’re serving?

TK: Oh, it’s—I think what’s happened with them is the same thing that’s happened with us, Jason. That your eyes are open to something that was always there. And that you actually knew it was always there, but you just hadn’t seen it or somebody didn’t just sit down with you and say “can I show you this?” And once you see it, it’s like you’ve been set in motion to run and do what God wired you to do.

And so what’s been fun—I can think of a couple directions. One is what we’ve planned with people is when we go, trying to be with a people group 6 different times so that we can go through all the gears. But seeing as we return on subsequent trips that the knowledge, the story they’ve learned, has grown. So they are taking what they learned from the Law and they’re able to apply that to the Prophets and pull in the books of Moses, for instance, into what they’re seeing in this new section of Scripture. So it’s not like a self-contained thing like, “hey, last time we were here, do you remember we talked about this? Now we’re talking about this.” What we’ve seen is a grasp of the Scriptures, it’s pulling it together.

The logo we have for Developing Leaders looks like—and it’s actually the logo for GearTalk—looks like gears in a transmission, showing all the Bible integrating, spinning together, working together, doing the same thing. Well, we’ve been able to see it in our conversations, in the questions we’re getting from the pastors and leaders as they talk to us. The questions have a depth to them that is actually quite shocking. I would say they are seeing it. And I can just track my same story. It’s being with brothers and sisters who have a grounding in the story being told.

And now that we’re in Bangladesh, for instance, being in the New Testament, being able to see—wow, they have a grasp of the Old Testament story and we are not struggling for answers here, but they are supplying them even before we get there. But something we’ve done is encourage the pastors and leaders to take the training they have and go back and train more leaders. That’s why it’s called Developing Leaders, seeing that the need in the world—so much of it really in the Christian community is developing. Because the leaders will be developing their people. And so how do we raise up leaders? Well, the leaders go back and we just have delighted to see them leave a seminar with stacks of books for them to go teach their people and the stories we get from them in teaching their own people.

Two people, two men had gone out to one side of the country and they were taking it to their people, so I’m envisioning they’re going to be teaching the church. They actually set up outside a Buddhist temple and started using the curriculum for the first gear to just teach the biblical theology from the first five books in the Bible. And the number of people who started coming to just hear them expound was over 400 people. And so when I came back, they were planning this next trip. We didn’t know any of this. There’s a baptism planned for over 60 converts as they’ve been studying Moses. But what’s amazing for us is they’re taking Moses, the books of Moses, this first gear, the Law, and they’re applying it to Christ, and people’s hearts are being awakened who’ve been in darkness all these years.

And for me it was hearing the story was convicting and stunning because it just showed how small my vision can be, thinking they’re going to go train their people in their church. And these people taking the story that’s been kind of pressed into them and saying “we know what we’re going to do. We’re going to set up outside this temple and we’re going to proclaim God’s Word.” And even seeing just getting a part—that first gear was enough for them to have something to run with. So that was a joy.

JD: I love it. It makes me think of 2 Timothy 3, where Paul reflects on this young pastor’s own growth in the faith. And earlier in the book, in chapter 1 verse 5, we learned that his mother and grandmother, Lois and Eunice, were the ones who equipped him. And in Acts 16 we learned that they were Jews. So when Paul in 2 Timothy 3 says “from childhood you’ve been acquainted with the sacred writings,” he’s talking about Timothy’s awareness of the Old Testament text. And then Paul says these sacred writings are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.

With the knowledge that these Bengali pastors had of Moses’s law, when united with faith in Christ, that is able to make people wise for salvation. And we’ve seen it operative already in the ministry that you’ve been doing. It also made me think of Paul in 2 Timothy 2:2 where he says “all that you’ve learned from me, Timothy, pass on to faithful men who are able to train others also.”

In my ministry in Ethiopia, I often take my students from the US with me to help train these Ethiopian pastors, and one of the most exciting things for me was after having walked through the entire curriculum that we were teaching one time over a three-year period, some of those Ethiopian students from the first round got to serve as co-teachers the second round. So now I’m bringing my students from the West with me, who are now partnering with my former Ethiopian students and together now I’m serving as facilitator and they’re training the next generation of church leaders.

It really is the vision that we have for training leaders, seeing multiplying. And it’s the Word of God that changes people, right? We are born again through the living and abiding Word of God. We are saved progressively from sin through the Word of God. And so we want to give that to people. And I think of Paul in Acts chapter 20 where he says this to the Ephesian elders: “Elders, I am innocent of the blood of all of you because I did not shrink from proclaiming the whole counsel of God”—the purposes of God from Genesis to Revelation, from creation to consummation, whole Bible theology. And we want to be a ministry that is never held accountable by God for failing to proclaim the whole counsel.

TK: That’s right.

JD: And I love this curriculum. And here you are, you’re on the cusp—as we close out this podcast—on the cusp of your next trip this next month. You’re going to head back to South Asia. Just give us a little bit of a taste of what you’re going to be doing and how our listeners can pray for you and Christ’s work through Hands to the Plow.

TK: Well, I would thank you for your prayers and thanks for asking. I will be returning to Bangladesh at the end of February and we are going through the 5th gear with this group of pastors and leaders and…

JD: The 5th gear is focused on what?

TK: The Epistles. And what I love though is it’s the same group that has worked through all the gears before it.

JD: OK.

TK: And so again you just imagine how they’ve been teaching this themselves. So from the time we left our last time, which was September, they’ve been training their people in the Gospels and the Book of Acts.

JD: So they’ve studied the Law, they’ve studied the Prophets, they’ve studied the Writings, they’ve studied the Gospels and Acts. And that’s what you taught in September and they’ve been reproducing themselves, they’ve been sharing what you shared with them, right? And now they’re bringing all of that back with new testimonies of God’s work among the nations.

TK: Right. And what’s really fun is—just like I think with any believer who has walked with the Lord for a while, you put them down on a passage and they think “I think I know what I’m looking for” and “I may not be acquainted with Amos, for instance, or something, but I know what other prophets do. Give me a second and let me orient myself. But I think I know what I’d do with this book.” What’s fun is as you start going through the pictures, they are going to start just interacting and it’s like we’re doing it together.

So we’re going to be going through the Epistles. They will have a preacher’s guide—1 Peter in Bengali—and it’s just an example. OK, here’s an example of how an epistle works. We will spend most of our time going through the Developing Leaders curriculum, just the big picture. We will then spend a little bit of time going through the Epistle, just maybe a chapter or something like that—chapter 1 of 1 Peter—saying “Alright, are you seeing this? Are you seeing how this—we already talked about this? Peter’s doing this. Are you seeing this here? Are you seeing this here?” And being able to then spend time with them, hear their stories, hear what they’re doing, but really watch them then go to work with their people.

So like I said earlier, I think love of neighbor is—for believers in any part of the world would be—what would I want if I was there? And what they don’t want is for us to take their work from them or to belittle them or act like they’re not full members of the body of Christ, or they’re less. What they’d want though is, “hey, what tools do you have? If you know something, let us know.” Almost like Apollos being pulled aside and something being presented, but then Apollos is running with it. It’s a joy to see the believers running.

JD: I love it. I love it. So listeners, please join with us in prayer for Tom and his team. Pray for the church leaders who will be more equipped. Pray that light would overcome night in South Asia, that the dawn of Christ’s resurrection would increasingly be pointed to—the noonday—for these people, when all shadows will be passed away and darkness will be no more.

We thank you for joining us, not only at this podcast, but in the Ministry of Hands to the Plow. I encourage you to go check out our website. Your support is helping us take the word for the fame of Christ’s name among all the nations, and we are a small part of what God is doing, and it wouldn’t be possible without you. So thank you for your partnership. May God bless you in the days to come.

TK: Amen. And just one final note, if you were listening and you are working in a country or have expertise in a certain language and desire to see these works translated into that language, feel free to get a hold of us. You can go to our website and send us a message. It is just our desire to see the Lord help his people.

JD: Amen. Amen. Thanks Tom. Thanks for sharing today.

TK: My pleasure. Blessings, Jason.

JY: Thanks for joining us for GearTalk. If you have questions about biblical theology you’d like us to address on future episodes, email us at [email protected]. Also check out handstotheplow.org for resources designed to help you understand the Bible and its teachings.