Praise God with Us for His Blessings in 2025

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Praise God with Us for His Blessings in 2025

In the past couple of weeks, I looked over my daily diary entries from 2025 and was impressed by how many good things God had done for us. I wrote a prayer of thanksgiving to God. He prompted me to share the facts with you blog post readers, since many of you have prayed for us. Thank God with us for these many answers to prayer:

January: Jo came to church with me for the first time since her back surgery in mid-November. She no longer has lower back pain, but does have a dropped foot and needs a walker. A friend gave Jo a high-quality wheelchair so that I can push her in it when she needs to travel farther than she can with her walker. I started applying Zostrix pepper ointment to stop the jabbing pains in both of Jo’s feet. Our grandson Aidan became engaged to a lovely Christian girl from Arkansas, and they asked me to perform the wedding ceremony in May.

February: We decided that this will be our last winter on our acreage. We followed up on our mid-2024 research of potential retirement facilities and hope to be accepted by one in Stony Plain. Aidan’s fiancée, Lin, visited us in Canada, and we finalized the wedding ceremony details. When my recliner chair broke, Leanne helped me choose a new one.

March: On Sunday, Jo, holding onto her walker, was able to stand for all four hymns for the first time. We celebrated our 63rd wedding anniversary with a special dinner at the Sawmill restaurant. Jo was fitted with an Ankle Foot Orthotic brace to help stabilize her dropped foot.

April: I completed the retirement forms for Wycliffe Bible Translators, effective later this year after 60 years of service.

May: We enjoyed our few days in Arkansas, where I performed the ceremony, and we celebrated Aidan and Lin’s Wedding on May 4.

June: Jo hosted her ladies’ coffee visit for the first time since her back surgery. Jo and I enjoyed a surprise visit with a Jamaican man whom I had recruited 22 years ago and trained to be the director of Wycliffe Caribbean, and we were pleased to see he was still active in the organization. We signed the final papers for our move into a suite that will be vacated in September at the Forest Ridge Place retirement home in Stony Plain.

July:  We had a formal inspection of the suite. We completed making out our wills with a lawyer and sent email copies to our daughters. We are learning to switch from a lifetime of extreme frugality, holding onto things we might need someday, to extreme generosity, giving away vanloads of our books, clothing, furniture, tools, and household items to our daughters’ families and to the Mennonite Central Committee thrift store.

August: Our daughters helped us sort and give away large quantities of dinnerware, glasses, dishes, and kitchen equipment to the MCC thrift store.

September: We provided the banking information to pay our monthly lease and began moving items into the suite, measuring the space and buying suitable furniture, since many of our current pieces were too large for the limited space. The new furniture was assembled and finished by our daughters and their spouses. Wycliffe had an online alumni celebration, and I gave a brief report on the most personally significant part of my sixty-year-long career with Wycliffe: the Canela translation program!

October:  We moved our bed into our suite on October 11 and began our new life there. I sold the gold filling from a tooth, a few thin, broken gold chains, and a small ring for $380!

November: I had some biopsies done on a large brown area of my scalp: sun damage, but not malignant! I regularly tell a brief God-story about our translation ministry at the weekly hymn-sing meetings. Jo has already learned the names of many of the 120 residents in this complex. Pray that I catch up with her soon.

December: Jo and I praise God for the large direct personal gifts we have received, some from longtime ministry partners, and some from new friends. We are now living a totally different life and need God’s help to live it well. We are reading The Power of a Praying Grandparent and the Seasons of Marriage. Join us in thanking God for our upcoming full two-week Christmas vacation with sixteen of our family members, hosted by Kurt and Valorie Jones in San Jose, CA. Yes, we’ll take some pictures and publish them on in our blog post for January.

Note: Our longtime email address jack_popjes@wycliffe.ca will no longer work after December 31. Please use jackpopjes@gmail.com and popjesjo@gmail.com from now on.

 

Our Spirit-given Abilities to Serve God and Bless Others

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Our Spirit-given Abilities to Serve God and Bless Others

Every one of us born-again Christians has God’s Holy Spirit living within us. The Spirit gives each of us different abilities, so we all have different ways of serving God. The apostle Paul reminded Timothy that “The Spirit God gave us gives us power, love and self-discipline,” to use the ministry gifts we have received. (2 Tim 1:7).

Paul also told Timothy, “Do not neglect your gift, which was given to you through prophecy, when the body of elders laid their hands on you.” Church tradition calls for elders to confirm a pastor’s gifting by laying hands on him during his ordination.

In non-church situations, however, gifted people receive confirmation through the expressed opinions of other adults. I remember clearly when a Christian writing course teacher checked over my assignments and said, “Jack, you have the gift of using words well. Keep writing and telling stories. God will be developing this ministry to make you a blessing to many people.”  That prophecy was realized decades later in the translation of the partial Bible into the Canela language. I was also confirmed in my word-oriented gifting when I was chosen to be a speaker at hundreds of fundraising banquets, and when I won writing contests, and sales mounted for my published books. Speaking and writing were confirmed as God’s ministry gifts to me.

My brother Henry has been a gifted carpenter all his life, and he has served God by blessing many people with his excellent construction work. My sister Janny worked for many years as a nurse, gifted to show love to patients as she met their physical and medical needs. The only writing my wife, Josephine, does is shopping lists, and signing birthday cards. Her spiritual gift is building relationships with people and blessing them with her friendship. Her ability to relate even across cultures was particularly valuable during our decades of spiritual ministry among the Canela people. In Brazil, we often flew over trackless jungles for many hours in a single-engine plane under the control of a Spirit-gifted pilot. We know people who have spiritual gift of generosity, often coupled with the ability to earn substantial income.

We all have gifts of the Spirit, which Paul reminds us “to stir up, or fan into flame” (2 Tim 1:6), and to use them to serve God through the ministry He involves us in. Paul goes on to say, “In his grace, God has given us different gifts for doing certain things well. So, if God has given you the ability to prophesy, speak out with as much faith as God has given you.” (Rom 12:6).

We all need to identify the Spirit-given abilities and practice them with as much faith as God gives us to serve Him by meeting the needs of others.

 

The Christian Church’s Worldwide Focus

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The Christian Church’s Worldwide Focus

The church Jo and I have been attending for the past few years celebrated their annual Mission Emphasis Weekend with events and services. Our minds immediately recalled personal experiences with mission-minded churches and individuals, as well as stories we heard from fellow missionaries. Since Jo retired for medical reasons after forty years of service with Wycliffe Bible Translators, and I retired recently after sixty years of service, we thought this would be a good time to share some of these recollections with you.

In the past four months since my retirement, we have been surprised and very pleased with how God moved people to give to us. One long-term financial supporter gave us a year’s worth of their usual monthly support as a personal gift, even though they received no tax-deductible receipt. And another couple, who had never financially supported us, gave us one of the largest gifts we had ever received—a full three months’ support. Both were completely unexpected. Wow!

Missionary friends have told us similar stories of receiving unexpected gifts, as well as some rather negative ones that left us feeling concerned for some churches.

One couple told us their pastor said, “Thank you for serving for twenty-five years in Africa. Now that you are back in Canada and working in the mission’s office, we have decided to send our financial support to a missionary couple on the field.” And what were these home office workers supposed to live on? Jo and I had the same thing happen to us when we finished the Canela Bible translation program and spent time travelling throughout North America speaking at Wycliffe fundraising banquets to support nationals involved in Bible translation.

One pastor who invited me to preach in his church told me after the service, “We focus on supporting medical missions and seminary training. Our missionaries are doctors, nurses and seminary professors, as well as hospital and school administrators.”

It made me wonder what would happen if God gifted and called someone who grew up in that congregation to serve on the mission field as a Bible translator? Does she go across town to another church to ask them to support her?

A church we know well has a totally different focus. They are heavily involved in a building program. No, not for their own meeting place; they rent from another church. They are building a church in an impoverished area of a foreign country to help the local congregation that the church’s missionaries have planted. Now, that’s the kind of building program I get excited about!

On the other hand, another pastor told me, “We are involved in foreign missions by facilitating groups from the church to go on short-term mission trips.” I asked him, “What if a young couple who grew up in your church goes on a short-term mission trip and is called by God to spend the rest of their lives in ministry in that country? Would they need to change churches to get financial support?”

We have often visited a large church in a heavily populated area and have been impressed by its emphasis on supporting foreign missions. Along the sides and back wall of the auditorium are dozens of large, framed colour photographs of the missionary individuals, couples, and families they support financially. Under each photo is a plaque with full information on where and how they serve. Notably absent were photos of the pastoral staff or the church board. Their focus was squarely on carrying out Christ’s worldwide Great Commission.

What an encouragement to missionaries to see churches like that! May the Holy Spirit move pastors and church boards across North America to focus their congregations’ actions on serving Christ by obeying His command to Go Into All The World.

Downsizing: Reversing a Lifetime of Needing, Getting and Using Things.

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Downsizing: Reversing a Lifetime of Needing, Getting and Using Things.

An Early Start
As a little boy growing up in Nazi occupied Holland, I learned to keep my eyes open for things like an edible nut to take home and put in the pantry, or a tree branch to lay by the heater. I saw Mama stoop down and pick up a rusty nail from the gutter, then carry it home to put in Papa’s toolbox. Things lost or discarded by others were trophies I could bring home for my parents to use. All the stores in our area had been looted by German soldiers and their contents shipped to Germany. Then, to end the war, Canadian soldiers brought peace and food, as well as fuel, and met our basic human needs; yet, I continued my scavenging habit.

When I was twelve years old, we emigrated to Canada and lived at the bottom of the economic scale. I picked up beer and pop bottles from the ditches and returned them to the depot for two cents each. We kept every item of clothing, even when it was outgrown, since it would be used to patch other clothing.
This training and experience set me on a path of working hard to earn money and acquire the physical things I needed. I also learned to practice extreme frugality, always seeking the most affordable option. “Wear it out, make it do, and do without,” was my motto. I also became increasingly acquisitive, wanting to get and hold onto anything that might be useful.

Good Missionary Training
In the 1960s, this experience provided valuable training for becoming a missionary to Brazil. The biblically sound motivation to become Bible translators for some language group that didn’t have any Scripture in their language drove my wife and me to pray and to save every penny to pay for training, equipment and travel. Looking back over the sixty years since that preparation time, I can see that we did not let up on living a frugal lifestyle, and our drive to keep as many things as God provided for us.

First Experience in Downsizing
It was, therefore, very difficult for us to leave Brazil after nearly twenty-five years and leave behind a fully furnished house on the missionary centre, all our dishes and kitchenware, and hundreds of English-language books that our family had read during those decades. We arrived in Canada with just a few suitcases of possessions. That was the start of learning to give away what we had accumulated and to keep praying for God to supply our current needs.

Our Final Downsizing
Now, more than thirty years later, we are moving to a new home: the independent living section of an elderly care facility in Stony Plain. Yeah, our 25th home is an “Old Folks’ home.” We will have a small two-room and bath suite, less than half the size of our 1,000-square-foot prefab house on an acreage. We plan to move in this Saturday, October 11. (Pictures next time.)

We are now practicing the next part of the lesson on giving things away. We look at everything we own and for each item we ask, “Do we need this?” If we do, we keep it. Everything else we are giving away.

The first good part of this life is the relief of no longer needing to hang onto things “in case we need them in the future.” We are in the second half of our eighties and may not have that much earthly future left. The second positive aspect is that we’re able to give away a wide range of useful items to our three daughters and eight grandkids.

And beyond the giveaway to family and friends, we enjoy the third benefit our downsizing brings. We are giving away dozens of large bags of clothing and bedding, and cardboard boxes of books, dishes, tools, and other items to our favourite charity, the Mennonite Central Committee thrift store. We take comfort in knowing that the money they receive from selling what we donate is used to show love and compassion to people in forty-five countries worldwide by providing for their basic human needs.
Now in old age, that little Dutch boy is giving away his stuff to help others in need.

 

 

A Little More on Translating into the Culture, not just the Language

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A Little More on Translating into the Culture, not just the Language.

Two weeks ago, I published an article on the need to translate the Bible not only into the Language of a people group, but also into their Culture. Most of the responses were very much in favour of the concept I was describing, but there were some readers who wondered about Moses’ warning in Deuteronomy 4:20.
“Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it but keep the commands of the Lord your God that I give you.”
Bible translators through the ages have had to struggle not only with the language forms but also with how the readers will interpret the words used.

When the main Wycliffe translation consultant reviewed our translation of Acts, we encountered two issues in the story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. I read the story aloud to an illiterate Canela man who had never heard the story before. The consultant said, “Ask him to retell the story.” Our helper retold the story, dramatizing every action, even falling off his chair. The consultant said, “Wow, he is an excellent storyteller; it’s easy to see he got it. Now ask him why Saul went blind.”

I did, and our helper said, “Oh, he fell to the ground and banged his head on a rock, which blinded him.” I interpreted this for the consultant and added, “But I don’t have a rock in my translation.” When I asked him about the rock, he said, “Oh, the same thing happened to my brother. He tripped over a log and hit his head on a rock, and it blinded him for several days.”
So, I had to add “God blinded him.” Readers will tend to interpret what is unclear in the light of their own experiences and cultural background.
When the consultant and I checked out the section on how Saul regained his sight, the Canela helper’s answer did not surprise me: “He fasted for three days and regained his sight.” That is because it is exactly what the Canela people do when they are hurt or sick. They stop eating for several days, and usually the problem clears up. So I had to add the real reason why he fasted: “He felt so sorry for persecuting Jesus’ followers, he punished himself by going hungry for three days.”

Sometimes translators must add, and sometimes they must subtract or substitute. The entire last blog post was about why Mark, Luke, and John substituted “kingdom of heaven” with “kingdom of God” and why Matthew continued to use the term “kingdom of heaven”.
When we translated Matt. 24:41, Jesus’ prediction of his return, “Two women will be grinding with a hand mill; one will be taken and the other left,” we could picture one woman turning the circular stone and the other dropping the grain to be ground into the center of the top stone, but to the Canela people, it would mean nothing.

Canela women have never ground corn or other grains with a millstone, but they do use

Little girls learning to pound rice.

a mortar and pestle system. They use a hollowed-out hardwood tree stump as the mortar to hold the hulled rice. Two women take turns, each using a hardwood pestle to pound the hulled rice rhythmically, removing the hulls. In the harvest season, the constant Thunk! Thonk! Thunk! Thonk! resounds from many houses throughout the village.

Yes, we subtracted what Jesus actually said two thousand years ago to women in Palestine, but we added or substituted words so that  now He is speaking to Canela women in Brazil, and this time even the audio illustrates his point; Thunk!  Thonk!  Thunk!  Thonk!  Thunk! . . . . Thunk, . . . .  Hey, where did she go?

C.S. Lewis advises authors to close the gates and eliminate distractions in their writing. He illustrates this with a shepherd leading a flock of sheep along a path. The shepherd needs to shut every open gate along the sides of the path, since some sheep will tend to go through the open gate and stray from the flock. In our translation into Canela, each word we subtracted and explanation we added was a gate closer.

Translate the Bible into both the Language and the Culture of the readers.

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Translate the Bible into both the Language and the Culture of the readers.

I was asked to speak to the leadership of a Christian group committed to using only the King James Version of the Bible in their ministry throughout the English-speaking world. I asked them, “What are the  names of the first people to translate parts of the New Testament?” They confessed themselves stumped.

“You know their names very well. They are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The language spoken in Israel was Aramaic, a Semitic language similar to Hebrew and Arabic. Jesus spoke Aramaic and all the stories about His life circulated in Aramaic. All four Gospel writers translated the Aramaic into Greek, a language unrelated to Aramaic.”

I went on to explain that translators need to focus not only on the meaning of the words in the source text, but also on the culture of the readers for whom they were translating. Matthew wrote his account of Jesus for the Greek-speaking Jewish people who lived in the Middle East. Luke, Mark, and John, however, wrote their gospels for the Greek-speaking, non-Jewish, Gentile people in that area.

Jesus often spoke about the Kingdom of Heaven. Matthew, translating for Jews, used the term “Kingdom of Heaven” thirty-five times. Whereas Mark, Luke, and John never used that term. Instead, they used the term “Kingdom of God” seventy times.

Here’s why there was such a huge difference. When Jesus, speaking to the Jews in Palestine, said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.” (Matt 19:14) Matthew was the only translator who faithfully used the Greek term for “Kingdom of Heaven.”

Mark, Luke and John, however, did not use the Greek term for Kingdom of Heaven, but changed what Jesus actually said into Kingdom of God.” Why did they not faithfully translate the exact words their Master Jesus said?


They had an excellent reason. They knew that if they used the term Kingdom of Heaven, their readers, being steeped in Greek culture, would instantly interpret the term Kingdom of Heaven as the pantheon of Greek gods, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Apollo and Hermes, etc. That was not at all what Jesus was talking about! That is why the Apostle Paul, who evangelized in Greek and wrote his letters to the Gentile churches in Greek, also never used the term ‘Kingdom of Heaven.’

This example, from the first translators of Jesus’ words and the stories about Jesus, is a powerful lesson for all Bible translators. Translators must not only know how to translate the source text, but they must also know how the readers of the translated words will understand those words, in the context of their own culture.

I then summarized my explanation, “In the light of the importance of the receiving culture, the King James Authorized version was intended to speak clearly to English-speaking people in England living in the culture of the early 1600s. It did so very well, and God used it in a tremendous way.
But it is now over four hundred years later, and many varieties of English are spoken worldwide. It is easy to see how both the English language and the cultures of readers have changed enormously.
The English language, as it was spoken four centuries ago, is now a hindrance to understanding the gospel, rather than a help, for people living in a totally different culture.”

The Amsterdam Declaration, formulated during Billy Graham’s Amsterdam 2000 convention, states this clearly: “We pledge ourselves to remove all known language and cultural barriers to a clear understanding of the gospel on the part of our hearers.”

I later heard that the Christian group, whose leaders I was talking to, eventually switched to using the New King James Version, as well as the English Standard Version and the New International Version.