Yemeni producer Souheil has many contacts with listeners to our evening service to Yemen. One of the most wonderful must surely be the story of Mohammed, which he tells below.
“It was very clear from Mohammed’s text messages that he knew about Christ. He used to send me Bible verses and one day I decided to call him.
“I asked him how he got to know Jesus. He answered that he knew Christ from the radio and that he had many Yemeni friends who had become Christians and they meet together regularly to read the Bible. I asked him if one of our friends there visited him, but he had never met a Christian who taught him about Christ – all he knew he had learned from our broadcasts. I asked him how I could help him. He said that he needed a Bible. I was surprised because he used to send Bible verses to my mobile phone. I asked him how he did this, when he didn’t have a Bible.
Twenty years – recording the Bible!
“Evidently Mohammed had been following our Arabic programmes for 20 years, long before the special Yemeni service started. He said that he had recorded all the Bible readings he had listened to day-after-day. He also wrote the Bible readings in a notebook. Now he had a big notebook with Bible verses from the Old and New Testaments. He couldn’t put them in order because he didn’t know where to start! I promised to help him and to send him a Bible.”
Teaching others
Souheil adds: “I was so encouraged by how God is working in a miraculous way and is using the radio to reach people.” Recently another listener called him and said that they were eight families who are meeting together with their wives and children and they would like to be baptised. “These are ‘little churches’ that can be the start of many others,” he says. “Many listeners consider our radio as their church. Some want to learn the Bible to be able to teach others rather than rely on any personal contact with other Christians which may not always be possible. This has encouraged us to start producing discipleship programmes and programmes to train people in evangelism.”