I like to read book reviews. Sometimes these reviews are more about the writer of the review than they are about the writer of the book being reviewed. Still, if it’s a well-written review, for me at least, it’s worth reading. But most reviews, like most books, don’t stand the test of time.

But William Tyndale and Thomas More, back in the 1500s—their words survive.

When William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English, it was a struggle. He had to invent new words to express truths for which English, at the time, did not have just the right word he was looking for. So, the translation itself was a challenge. Then, he had to figure out how to get it printed.

He journeyed around Germany--Hamburg, Wittenberg, Cologne, Worms. His goal was the whole Bible in English. But the New Testament was his first step. At last, his translation of the New Testament was completed in 1525. Sir Thomas More wrote this in his review: "not worthy to be called Christ's testament, but either Tyndale's own testament or the testament of his master Antichrist."

Eleven years later, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic, strangled and burned at the stake.

Something or someone got ahold of William Tyndale, and he determined to get the Bible into English and into the hands of English-speaking people. He persevered in his translation and publishing efforts and years after his death, his work became the basis for future English-language Bibles.

We may think of England today as a Christian or post-Christian nation, but in Tyndale’s time, it was not a welcome place for the English Bible. Though not a life-threatening project exactly, a man in College Church is persevering in his own way for his own people in a land that is less-than-welcoming to his Christian work.

Imagine a boy in a Muslim-majority country waking each morning to the Muslim call to prayer. He sits up and at the same time, hears his father singing Christian psalms in their native tongue. The boy wonders how his father learned such songs, where did they come from?

The man is not William Tyndale, but Yousaf Sadiq and the country is not England, but Pakistan. The book is not the Bible, but The Contextualized Psalms: A precious heritage of the global Punjabi Christian community.

Over time, Yousaf discovered the prayer songs his father sang were Punjabi-language psalms native to this land and passed down orally from generation to generation. He began to write them down, along with a history of how they came to be. They are a core part of every branch of Christian churches in Pujabi-language worship. Yet cultural shifts mean the preferred language for many is Urdu or English. “Punjabi is my mother-tongue,” Yousaf told me. “As I studied how these psalms came to be, I began to see who I was as both a Christian and a person.”

Now, a citizen of the U.S., Yousaf is a member of College Church and on the Board of Missions. And Yousaf’s updated history of the Punjabi psalms and his translation of these psalms are being published in Punjabi this summer. He and his wife, Ruth, are actually traveling to South Asia to meet with the publisher and make different churches and ministries aware of this new book.

Both Tyndale and Sadiq worked in the context of persecution to bring word truths to their people. Language mattered to both.

Have you ever considered the miracle of written language, what a gift from God is language. How we moved from people without language to where we are today.

Think of how little dots and lines and circles arranged in a certain way make up letters and then how those letters arranged in particular orders become words that represent both things and thoughts. We become so accustomed to language that we forget how amazing it is that we can communicate with one another using letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. Words matter more than we realize…Tyndale created new words in his work to bring to life the Bible and the psalms; Yousaf's work can bring a persecuted people together in worship like no other words or writing in his homeland.

Whether it’s Greek, Hebrew, Punjabi, English or another language, words point us toward God or away from him. We have the privilege and ability to use words this day in ways that could cause harm or in ways that God might use to bring people to Christ.

We all have words, spoken or written, that we can use to express truth and love. We are all messengers of eternal life. Let's choose our words with great care. Let's not keep the words of life to ourselves but speak them and write them as we can to those around us.

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68b-69)