Morgan Jackson recounts a testimony of healing which he heard at one of many Faith Comes By Hearing listening groups started by a single extraordinary ‘Bible Woman’

Indian woman healed

INDIA — I was in India, sitting by a hut outside a village. A piece of cloth over a stick created shade and about 35 women were sitting on mats, and there were about 11 kids sitting there. This listening group had been going for a year and a half, and so I asked, “What’s happened?”

There was a Muslim lady in green standing at the back – everyone else was sitting. Person after person gave their testimony and she remained standing. Finally, it was her turn.

“I am – or was – a Muslim,” she said. “I’m a worker: I unload the logs off the wagons and put them onto railroad cars. I was very proud because I worked hard and made enough money to pay for my own food.”

She and her husband live in a slum. They don’t have much but her husband also worked and together they were surviving. They didn’t need anybody. Well, one day when she was loading the logs she was standing on them and she slipped. The logs rolled over her, breaking her legs and her hips.

All day she lay pinned under these logs, crying out for someone to help. But nobody heard until the end of the day, when they came looking for her and found her. They took her to a local clinic but they couldn’t do anything for her and just said she would never walk again, that she would be crawling up on the ground – in India you see that: people just pulling themselves along.

And so, lying on her mat with this pain, and realising she would never walk again, she began to think.

“My husband’s going to leave me. I’ve no way to provide for my own food or for my care. My parents and family are 350 kilometres away. There’s nobody here to care for me. What shall I do?” And she began to decide she would simply commit suicide.

Well, during this time the Woman of Peace found her. A Woman of Peace is what we call a woman who is not yet a Christian but is interested in learning about Jesus Christ. In this case, the Woman of Peace had allowed the Bible Woman to come to her hut and play the Scripture cassettes two or three times a week. And these Women of Peace know everything that’s going on around them, so she invited the crippled woman to the listening. They carried her there on her mat.

Began to have faith

And as she began to listen, she began to have faith. And as she listened to one of the stories of when Jesus was healing, she called out to him to heal her. And the reason she was standing was because she wanted me to see that she had been healed. Jesus Christ had healed her! And she wanted me to know that her landlord knew that it was a miracle. He said, “There’s no way you would walk again. This is a miracle. Only Jesus Christ could have healed you.”And her husband had come to Christ.

And she had given up a day’s wages to come to testify what Jesus Christ had done for her. This is what is happening in India.

I turned to the Bible Woman and said, “How many groups like this do you have?”

“Thirty four,” she told me. I looked at her. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t believe it.”

When I said that, she and her husband, who was there with her, began to discuss back and forth in Telegu. Finally the Woman of Peace came forward.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “My husband and I have come to Christ through the Listening Group and so we had pleaded with the Bible Woman. We wanted one tape – just Matthew or just Mark – and we would start our own Listening Groups. So we have five Listening Groups that we take care of and there are others who do the same.”

So each week, they come together: one of them has Matthew, one has Mark, one of them Luke, one of them John, and then each will play that single tape in five Listening Groups, meeting three or four days a week in each one. They all come back together and they swap the tapes and so they have 34 Listening Groups.

Now I did the maths: that’s almost a thousand Hindus and Muslims that are listening to the Scriptures with one set of New Testament cassettes in Telegu each week!

And I sat there for an hour and a half listening as they shared story after story: 13 women stood up to tell me how Jesus Christ had changed them and how they’d come to Christ. And others were waiting to share.

One set of cassettes provided to a group of illiterate people and God is changing and transforming them! The people don’t sit in darkness because they want to. They sit in darkness because no one has brought them the Word of God.