Invest in the Biblical Languages

Podcast Transcript: Why Learn The Biblical Languages?

Host: Ekklesia Afrika Podcast, Studios

Joshua Lemayain:
Hello, and welcome to this podcast, brought to you by the Nairobi Institute of Reformed Theology here at Emmanuel Baptist Church. My name is Joshua Lemayain. I’ll be hosting this podcast, and today I am joined by Tim Avery, who currently teaches the biblical languages at NIRT, as well as Nduarte, who is a student at NIRT.

Let’s start with you gentlemen just telling us a bit more about yourselves. What do you do on a day-to-day basis, apart from teaching and learning at NIRT? Let’s start with you.

Nduati Murigi :
Yeah, uh, good to be here. Thank you, Lemayain. My name is Nduati Murigi —um, in full. Vocationally, I serve as a pastor at Nairobi Chapel Lavington, so that occupies most of my time in serving God’s people.
Aside from that, I have to say I am married to one lady wife, and it’s been wonderful. It’s very recent—it’s been 3 months at the time of this recording—and we are grateful to God for that. So, yeah.

Joshua:
Great! It’s good to have you.

Nduati:
Thanks, brother.

Joshua:
Tim?

Tim Avery:
Yeah, so my name is Tim Avery. I hail from the United States. I’ve been in Nairobi now for a little more than a year—really happy to be here.
Outside of teaching at NIRT—or NIRT, whatever you want to call it—I serve as Publishing Director for Ekklesia Afrika. So, yeah, just overseeing our work of trying to make Christian books and literature more widely available and accessible for the church here.

Joshua:
Great. Yeah, um, if you would like to learn more about NIRT, which you just heard about from Tim, go to ekklesiafrika.org—all the “C” sounds are “K”s, so Africa is not spelled with a “C,” but with a “K.”

Okay, uh, brothers, I’ve asked you here today to help us talk and think more about the biblical languages. Let’s start with you, Tim. Why is it important? Why would it be helpful for someone to learn the biblical languages?

Tim:
Sure. So, let me begin by saying that we have good Bible translations, and we can be very grateful for those. Many Christians—and many pastors around the world—will never have the privilege of studying the biblical languages.
So what we need to begin by saying is: you don’t need to know the biblical languages to be a faithful Christian or a faithful pastor. We have faithful Bible translations, and we should be very grateful for them.

So, why would we then want to study the biblical languages?
There are a few things I think we can talk about here, in terms of how it can help us to just listen a little bit more closely to God’s Word.
The first way in which I think it can be helpful is: when you are trying to interact with the biblical text in Hebrew or Greek, it can be—well, maybe I’d be interested to hear what Nduati’s experience has been with this so far…

I think it can help to defamiliarize the text in a way, because it just feels different to encounter it there in the Greek or the Hebrew. You’re usually having to read more slowly, and you just might notice things you wouldn’t have otherwise.

I can share one example there.
Last year, I was reading in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 10—Jesus meeting the rich young ruler. And there’s this—there’s this part there where, in one translation, it says:
“Jesus, looking at him”—the rich young ruler—”loved him, and said to him…”
You know, and then he gives this command to sell all you have and follow me. And then, tragically, the rich young ruler can’t handle that, and he walks away.

And there was—There was something about reading this in the Greek, for me, that brought out just the texture of this moment.
Because it says—just to read the English for you again— “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and then said to him…”
Right? And I think, actually, even the English itself can potentially bring this across, but the Greek—maybe a little more clearly.

There’s: Jesus looking at him, and then, in the Greek, you can see -He looks at him, and then it says: He loved him, and then He said to him.
It’s a bit—kind of a striking turn of phrase. I don’t usually talk like that:

“I loved you”—like, in that particular moment.
But here it’s this—like, this concentrated moment, instant of love, which we could either analyze as maybe a particular movement of love in the human soul of Christ, or maybe it’s a way of just describing this act of love that Jesus exercises toward this man.

But it—it really struck me in a beautiful way to see the Scripture talking not only about the love of God in this very sweeping, constant sense—of like, “God is love,” that’s kind of one end of the spectrum: God is always love, that is just who He is—

And then, at the other end of the spectrum, we can see a particular moment, a movement of love that Jesus is exercising toward this man right there in front of Him:
He looked at him,
and after looking at him,
He loved him.

That hit me in the Greek in a way that, for whatever reason, it didn’t in the English.
So the first thing I would say is: it could just defamiliarize the text for you—help you see things you wouldn’t.
I don’t know if you want to comment on that before I ramble on further or not.

Nduati:
No, yeah, sure.
I think maybe just in line with what you’re saying—
While we were doing one of our last sessions in our last Greek semester, yeah, I remember we had to translate John 11—I think it was from verse 20 to 44.

And so—so, one, I think this was encouraging, ’cause we were able to look at the Greek text. And for most of it—part of it—you needed a dictionary for some not-so-common words, but for what we had, we could manage.

But the highlight for me is, even as we were going through it in class, I remember that class being not just a class. But—reading the text in the original language, and it making more sense, in a way—so to speak.

And maybe to be more specific—and I don’t know if Tim would agree with this—but I remember reading it, and it felt…It’s the text of Lazarus being raised from the dead. And Jesus was very disturbed and stirred within Himself with what had happened.
So there’s death, there’s an atmosphere of sorrow—
I mean, there’s sorrow in the atmosphere.

And I don’t know—you’ll read it, I guess, in the English, and it’s there. But I guess when you—
I guess it’s that idea of, like, there are elements within language that don’t necessarily translate as easily into another language.
And so, you get to do a little bit more work to learn a certain language, and then even what is spoken in that language becomes more clear, or more potent, in a sense. And so, that was beautiful to be a part of.

I remember seeing also a classmate cry—
And I don’t know if it was that, or they received a message from home. But I wondered if it was—even for her—just, I guess, this landing in a different way.

And so we came to class to see whether we translated our text well—
But we came out—at least I came out—
Challenged in a different way. And encouraged. Yeah.

So it’s just that—That you’re able to hear the words in that actual language. And it does something, especially if something was lacking when translation happened.

Joshua:
Right, yeah. Thanks, Nduarte, for that.

So, Tim, would you say—in teaching Hebrew, and currently you’re doing Hebrew, and Nduarte, you’re attending that class as well, last year teaching Greek—would you say there are ways in which, as Nduarte highlighting, English is sometimes unequipped to fully convey something that the author had in mind at that point?

Of course, we believe that God oversees His Word and that His Word is never in vain. But yeah, to what degree should the average reader be aware of that, and how much should that motivate them to desire to see and understand this word, or this phrase, or this book in light of how the original author did?

Tim:
Yeah, yeah—great question.
I would say, on a basic level, the Word translates, you know, from one language to another. We’re not Muslims who think that the Word of God just can’t be translated and has to be locked up in the original language.

I think part of our basis for that is the fact that the Greek translation of the Old Testament—the Septuagint—many parts of it were picked up by the apostles and used as Scripture. This is Scripture we can talk about. So, we can talk about translations as Scripture and treat them as such with confidence.

Now, I do think there are nuances that may not come out in translation. Let me get there in a second. But before I get there, let me say—even when your translation is showing you what you might see in the original language, which, in most respects, it is—I think even there, and this is for me the second benefit of engaging with the original text in the original language:

The second benefit is being able to confirm or verify for yourself that what I’m seeing in my translation is really what’s going on in the original language.

So, to give an illustration of that—I talked on the first day of Hebrew class about Psalms 1 and 2. And many people observe that Psalms 1 and 2 really seem to go together—they’re folded together, what’s sometimes called an inclusio, right? Something at the beginning, something at the end—top and tail—that fold them together.

Psalm 1 begins, “Blessed is the man…”
Psalm 2 ends, “Blessed is the one who…”

And not all translations will make that clear to you, but many will. They’ll show you there’s this inclusio going on.
The benefit of knowing a little bit of Hebrew is that you can go have a look for yourself and say, “Oh yeah, that’s actually the same Hebrew word there at the start of Psalm 1 and the end of Psalm 2.”

So, in that case, it’s not that the translation failed to show it—but knowing Hebrew lets you confirm: yes, it’s really there.
Now, to get more directly to what you just asked—yeah, there are a couple other areas where I do think there’s payoff.
One is: translations are necessarily interpretive, right? Whether that’s what we might call a more dynamic type translation, or a more formal equivalent—a more word-for-word kind of translation—there are differences on that spectrum.

But wherever you are on that spectrum, there’s still an element of interpretation that goes into translation, because no two languages are the same. And another benefit of knowing the original languages is either, uh, maybe being aware of an interpretive move made by the translators that you didn’t even know was made by them—and being able to revisit that for yourself—or maybe you’re looking at a couple different translations and you say, “Oh, these sound different… what’s going on there?”

And if you don’t have recourse to the original languages, well, maybe you just pick the translation that you think is going to preach better on Sunday. But we don’t want to do that, right? So we actually want to go back and revisit the question for ourselves.
I mean, there could be a lot of examples with that kind of thing, but to give just one example: Greek really loves participles. And you’ve been learning about that, right, with your…

Nuduarte:
Yeah… don’t remind me. In fact—actually—remind me! Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Tim:
So yeah, Greek sentences are full of a lot more participles than English sentences are. In English, we…
So for example, in Greek, oftentimes where in English we would say something like, “When he entered the room, I looked at him”—there, in English, I have that clause: “When he entered the room,” right? And then the main clause: “I looked at him.”

Often in Greek, they would prefer not to use a whole clause like “when he entered the room” with that conjunction when to set it up. They’ll just throw in a participle to express the idea of “when he entered.”

But the thing about the participle—like, so in English, we might woodenly translate that as “entering the room” or “he, entering the room, looked at him.”
In English, our participles are -ing words. But you notice, if you hear that—”he, as he was entering the room,” or “he, entering the room, looked at him”—you don’t really know what the relationship is between the entering and the looking, right?

But if I say, “When he entered the room, he looked at him,” then you know, “Oh, it’s a temporal relationship. One thing happened first, and then the next thing happened after.”

So, because Greek likes the participle more, you end up having a lot of sentences where you know there’s a connection between the participial clause—like “entering the room”—and the main clause.

But grammatically speaking, it’s not specified for you what exactly that relationship is. And when it comes time to translate that sentence, the translators want to put it in sort of good, natural-sounding English—as they should—and so they will typically interpret it for you.

They’ll say, “Well, I think here it’s pretty obviously a temporal relationship: first this, then that.” So, they’ll translate it as, “When he entered the room…” even though, really literally speaking, that’s not what the Greek says.

So an example in the Bible—2 Corinthians 8:9—speaking about Jesus, says… a translation might say something like, “Who, though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor,” right?
“Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor.”
In the Greek there, what’s being translated as “though he was rich” could be very woodenly rendered as, “being rich—he, being rich—for your sake became poor.”

So the translator has to decide: what is the relationship between him being rich and, for our sake, becoming poor? And most translations will understand it as a kind of an although, or concessive relationship.

Joshua:
Yeah. Contrasting.

Tim:
Which actually, in English, we don’t do that with participles as much. We don’t use a participle for that although idea. In Greek, it does. So it’s a legitimate possibility: him, although he was rich, became poor.

It’s perfectly plausible—at least—to consider another possibility, like, actually, because he was rich. Something about, out of the fullness of who he is, he thus was in a position to impoverish himself for our sake.

Joshua:
Right, right.

Tim:
Now, I’m not sure that’s really as likely of a reading, but I’ve heard it suggested. And you wouldn’t even think about the possibility unless you were looking at the Greek.
So that’s, I would say, the second general payoff: it allows you to revisit interpretive questions—ones you didn’t know had been made for you, or that you see are being made, but there’s disagreement and you don’t know how to think about them.

And then, if I can continue—the third area would be, questions where… you—uh, well now I’m getting jumbled in my head here—there are cases where you…There it is: it’s just hard to communicate in translation. There are just things that are hard to bring out in translation, because no two languages are the same.

So here’s an example we could give—and this is actually not one we got to in Greek class—but at the Last Supper, Jesus is washing his disciples’ feet, right? Remember Jesus comes to Peter?

And do you remember—I don’t know what Peter says—something like, “Are you going to wash my feet?” or “Do you wash my feet?” Something like that.
Which is a perfectly fine translation.

What English just can’t bring out for you is the exact word order in the Greek. So in the Greek, if I were to really woodenly translate that verse, it would be literally:
“Do you my wash feet?”

So the word my—there, Peter talking about his feet—has actually moved way forward in the sentence from where you’d expect it to be.
You would expect it to be right after feet. In Greek, you’d expect something like:
“Do you wash feet my?” or something along those lines.

But the my is moved way forward in the sentence—right after do you.
“Do you my wash feet?”

And if you have the chance to learn a little more about the things that can influence Greek word order, you can realize, well, that word my there in Greek is in this class of little, sort of lightweight words we call clitics.

And clitics—as Nduarte can tell you—are …these little words that, in Greek, move around based on where stress is in the sentence, because they’re lightweight, as it were, in terms of how they’re said. So they respond to where the stress falls in the sentence and can attach themselves to something else that’s getting stress.

So, what that seems to indicate in that verse from John 13 is Peter is putting stress on the word you. Because he says, Do you…—and then the word right after that is my—Do you wash my feet?
So if you can see that that’s what’s going on with the word order, it helps clarify something you might pick up from the context anyway, which is that Peter’s surprise—or horror—at what’s happening isn’t primarily focused on, let’s say, his own unworthiness.

Because actually, a really crude handling of the Greek might say, “Oh look, the word my moved up, so he’s emphasizing my feet.”
But if you know enough Greek, you realize, no—he can’t be emphasizing my.
So his focus isn’t on his own unworthiness there. His focus is on Jesus—and the fact that it’s Jesus, rather than somebody else, who is washing his feet.

And so that’s a case where what’s being emphasized in a sentence can sometimes become clearer if you have a chance to engage with the original language.
Joshua:
Hey, thank you so much for those distinctions. That’s very helpful. There’s clearly a lot of payoff that comes on the other end of a lot of patient study.
So let’s talk a bit about that—and particularly the class setup within NIRT—and how that has been happening, how Tim has been teaching that.
So tell us kind of the way that you guys have been going through it is studying it as a spoken language.

Nduati:
Yes.

Joshua:
For someone who’s hearing this for the first time, what does it mean to learn a language as a spoken language?

Nduati:
Yeah. Uh, I’m not sure if the technical term is a living language—is that what you mentioned to us? Or is it…?

Tim:
Yeah, some people will say living language and some people will say communicative.

Nduati:
I see, I see.

Joshua:
No one will say spoken, but we’ll say it today. (Laughs)

Tim:
That’s a component of it.

Nduati:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think it’s been beautiful to learn it that way.
So one—this is the first language I’m learning. However, I think the reason why this is unique is that you wouldn’t necessarily hear anyone speaking this out there most of the time.

So even the— if I’m not wrong—the Greek that’s out there being spoken in Greece and in countries isn’t this. So there are a few, um, words and grammatical patterns—well, not a few, I think many—that are similar, but there’s a lot more that’s also not the same.
And so there’s that sense in which it’s not a language that “exists,” so to speak—yet we are learning it as is.

And what it means is it’s moving away from just looking at charts and learning, “This is a past tense, this is a present tense, this is a past participle, blah blah blah,” but actually going bit by bit.

And as we were learning, I thought: I guess this is how a child learns as they’re growing up. They’re picking up new vocab words day by day. And so they’re told, “This is a potato,” and they’re like, “Oh, potato!” And they store it up somewhere.

Then they learn the next day, “This is that,” and then you also learn verbs—and bit by bit you’re building up in a way that you can actually communicate through it.

So by the end of week one, probably, I’m able to say, “I threw you a potato.” And then by the end of week two, I’m able to say, “I threw a potato to the farmer.” By the end of week three I can say: “Desiring to inflict pain, I threw a potato to a farmer.” So it’s progressive in that sense.

And so you’re just building up your vocabulary, your grammar, your patterns—so to speak—and yeah.
And so it’s been wonderful. It felt very immersive and, at the same time, non-threatening. It was like, “Okay, I can make it. Today I’ve learned—this week I’ve learned—10 new words.”

And you get to use them as you go over your classes, your practice, your readings, and then it just continues to come alive.
So it was very beautiful that slowly and progressively you’re learning how to not only see it and recognize it, but you actually are able to construct, at will, sentences and actually communicate in the language.

Joshua:
So good. Yeah. You guys got names—Greek names. The students who didn’t know each other’s names, actual names, only knew each other by their…(Greek names) Is that part of the immersive culture—part of that technique of just having people think in a certain way? What are other tools you employed in class?

Tim:
Yeah, yeah. I’d say, like, yeah—taking Greek or Hebrew names is just a small additional way to fill their ears with a little bit more Greek or Hebrew, and just tune their ears to the sound patterns of the language and make them more familiar.

Yeah. Um, so—other tools—well, maybe let me step back and say, first kind of more broadly or theoretically here, you know, when it comes to teaching ancient languages, there’s a spectrum of approaches, right?

And we could talk about these two ends of a spectrum. We’ve just introduced this idea of living language or communicative—that could be one end. The other end of the spectrum is something that’s sometimes referred to as grammar-translation.

Joshua:
Mhm.

Tim:
In which case, there, you’re not necessarily using the language in class the way you would if you were learning, say, French or German or some modern language. You’re just more kind of learning certain grammatical rules and patterns. And then you’re given example sentences where you try to apply those rules to example sentences to see if you can translate them accurately into whatever native language you speak.

Now, my own conviction is: it’s not that one end of the spectrum or the other end is the perfect approach. I think in most contexts, the ideal approach is something of a blend of the two. So I want to add that nuance up front.

I think I see advantages to both approaches. And the question isn’t so much which one, but rather, what combination makes the most sense for these particular students and the amount of time they’re going to have to be able to spend in the language.

So the advantages I see on the grammar-translation side—which is the more common approach in seminaries—is that it’s, in some respects, more efficient.
Because what you’re doing is you’re abstracting out all of these patterns that are in the language, and you’re saying, “Hey look, notice that whenever you add this ending to this verb, it’s indicating first-person singular.”

And instead of trying to memorize every first-person singular form of every verb out there—trying to memorize them as totally discrete, separate items—you notice the pattern. You recognize the pattern.
And whenever you see that ending, you know: “That’s what that means.”

Now, that is actually a little bit different from the way children learn. I think children, when they learn a native language, they pick up on those patterns—but not self-consciously or explicitly. They’re subconsciously pulling those patterns together in their heads, and eventually they’ve got a framework, but it’s not as self-conscious.

But I think actually, as adult learners, we have a disadvantage—our brains are less spongy compared to children’s—but we have an advantage in that we have analytical thinking capabilities that children don’t have.
And we should take advantage of that when learning a language.

So I think it’s appropriate to, on some level, be abstracting out those patterns—making those visible to students. You know, you show them a verb chart, show them a noun chart, show them the way it goes, and let them see the patterns.
Those can be helpful shortcuts, in a sense.

And in a similar vein, the meaning that is expressed by a particular verb form—like, we could talk about the aorist tense form in Greek, right?
If you want to try to get a student to understand: what is the meaning that this form expresses?

I mean, one approach—if you’re very pure communicative, living-language—you construct all these different sentences and example stories where you’re kind of modeling for them the aorist in action, and letting them just intuit it. Eventually—over lots and lots of repetitions—they get a sense of, “Oh, it kind of has this flavor of meaning, because it’s always used in those ways.”

Right? It’s like the difference between deductive and inductive. The grammar-translation method is deductive—it says, “Okay, here’s what it means. Now apply it.” Inductive says, “See lots of examples and kind of pick up how it works.”

And I think, in many respects, it just makes more sense to be deductive about it, and say, “Hey, let me explain to you what meaning the aorist tense form encodes.”

Now, sure, it can get complicated—but at least you have a basic sense of it. And you can do that way more efficiently just explaining it.
So that’s—yeah—there are many ways in which it’s just a more efficient way to learn.

And also let me say—we are inevitably going to pick up false intuitions about the language. Because Greek or Hebrew is different from English or Kiswahili or whatever other languages you already know.

And it’s very natural as a language learner to kind of let the way your native language works map onto the language you’re learning—in ways that actually aren’t true.

And if all I’m ever doing is totally inductive—just giving you examples—you might be starting to develop these mistaken intuitions about the language. You’ll kind of think, “Oh yeah, it’s just like the English ‘this,’” and you kinda map that meaning onto it in your head.

Whereas if I’m willing to be deductive about it and say, “Well actually, you know, this looks a lot like an English construction, but let me tell you—it doesn’t quite mean the same thing,” then that gives you an opportunity to nuance and correct those false intuitions, to be deductive.

So—in praise of deductive teaching—those are some of the things I want to say.
And so yes, we do have a lot of that in the classroom as well. That would look more traditional.

Joshua:
Right.

Tim:
Now, the advantage of also incorporating more inductive or what we might call communicative elements—where, let’s say, we’re actually using Greek or Hebrew names, and we’re saying simple sentences back and forth in class…]

Like, I ask, “Where are you?” and Nduarte has to tell me, “I am in front of the table”—and he says that to me in Hebrew or Greek…
The advantage of doing those things is that that mode of learning, I think, leads to more durable and more fluent connections in your head between form and meaning, right?

Because there’s something that’s more visceral, more direct, more immediate that happens in your mind when you actually experience —like standing in front of a table and telling me, “I am in front of the table.”

So it’s slower, yes. It takes a lot more repetitions to form those connections. But the connections you do form will last a lot longer. They’ll last you beyond the quiz you have to take next week, for further out, as you’re trying to read the Bible in your life going forward.
And it’s not just more durable—it’s also more fluent.

Because if it’s all deductive, your head’s going to be full of a lot of charts. Which—I mean, my head does have some charts in it, and the charts can be helpful.
But if it’s all charts, those charts are ultimately like a middleman between form and meaning.

You see a word, and then your mind says, “Wait, that looks like this form,” and then you start mentally flipping through a chart in your head… until you land on the right row.

And then you think, “Okay, that row corresponds to this meaning,” and then your mind latches onto the meaning.
But—if you’ve had some communicative practice with that same form—you might not need to go hunting through a chart at all.
You just see the word, and the meaning hits you instantly.

And when it comes time to actually read the Bible—which is what this is all aimed at—you can see it and immediately recognize what it means.
And that means you can spend less mental energy hunting through charts—and more mental energy thinking about the text and interpreting the text.

A couple of other things I’d say in terms of advantages—when you have some communicative elements, like actually speaking in class, practicing sentences, me asking simple questions and getting simple answers—it just gives students a chance to hear the language a lot more.
And again, the goal isn’t to develop a really high skill level in hearing Greek and being able to comprehend it fluently by ear.
The ultimate goal is reading skill, not listening skill.

But what people understand now is that the ear is actually foundational for reading. When you read—even if you’re reading silently—in your brain you’re still sounding out the words. We call this subvocalization.

And actually, the only time you don’t do this is if you’ve learned the technique of speed reading. The technique for speed reading works by circumventing this thing your brain normally does—blocking the tendency to silently vocalize the text in your head—and that lets you move faster.

But I’m not trying to teach anyone to speed read the New Testament! We want to read normally.

Joshua:
Yeah, hopefully not!

Tim:
So if you get really, really solid at hearing and producing the sounds of the language, it’s going to be easier to read it.

Joshua:
Yeah.

Tim:
Also, I’d say one other side advantage is it’s just a lot easier to throw in lots of simple, repetitive examples if you’re doing spoken things. In five minutes, you can pack in several really simple back-and-forth examples of how to use a phrase or construction, and it just helps students pick up a feel.

Joshua:
Yeah. Thanks for that passing comment – the payoff here is to be able to read the Bible better. It’s Jesus we want to know, and it’s Jesus we want to tell other people about.
There’s a lot of diligence needed. You need to apply yourself if you want to grow in this skill.

So Nduati, what are some particular skills you’d encourage incoming students, if someone is considering learning biblical languages? What are some things they should pray that the Lord would grant them the grace to have? What are some practical outworkings of diligence that one needs?

Nduati:
Maybe I can just start off by sharing where I’m at right now.
I’m doing Hebrew, and it’s requiring a lot of patience and being able to put in the work. It’s felt slower than Greek did, but even with Greek, it was slower than English—at least for me. That’s just the process.

There are letters in Hebrew that need to be drawn quite artistically. And when you’re drawing them for the first time, it takes time. Before, you might have written a word in half a second. Now, it might take 5 seconds just to write one word. But that’s the journey.

So one: is a lot of patience in terms of being willing to be there for a while. And I think this is the idea—when God invites us to do His work, we might assume because it’s God’s work, it’s going to be easy. So whatever work God assigns us to, sometimes it is easy, but sometimes it’s a lot of work. So there’s this idea of patience.

And something else as well, is putting in time and not all at once, but taking time throughout the week to do it.

Joshua:
Right. Don’t wait until the last night before class to do all your assignments.

Nduati:
Yeah. One, you’ll get overwhelmed. But just, number two, for the sake of long-term memory, It’s easier. The same way you speak English every day or you speak whatever language, your native language every day, and hence, it’s automatic. It’s because of that daily, repeated, frequent nature of it. And so, the same thing. As much as you can, Don’t wait till the last minute. As much as you can of it. A bit by bit. Day by day, a little bit. Just something everyday.

Tim:
Absolutely.

Joshua:

Well thank you guys, this has been great.
I’ve learned so much. There’s so much I need to listen to again and unpack. So beneficial.
Would either of you brothers like to close us out with your favorite verse in Greek?

Joshua:
Do you have one?

Nduati:
Well, I’m trying to come up with one right in front of my teacher here.

Joshua:
You should see how intensely Tim is looking at him!

Nduati:
Actually, I wanted to go with John 11:35.

Tim:
Let’s do it!

Nduati:
Can I remember the actual word?
Jesus is there, right?

Tim:
Yes, yes.

Nduati:
Okay, it’s something like kra… not sure…

Tim:
Kra…?

Nduati:
Yeah, Tim’s helping me. It starts with “cry” or something.
I think the word is krauō (to cry).
Oh, okay, yes.
So the noun form—ho dakrūn (the tear).
Anyway, it’s “Jesus wept.”

Tim:
Yeah, that’s a powerful verse.

Joshua:
You shared earlier how this verse was very meaningful to you.

Nduati:
Yes, it really was. I have to come clean—I don’t know a full verse in Greek yet. I don’t think I do.
But I can read it, and I’m grateful for that. Tim has a whole chapter.

Joshua:
Tim, do you want to give us one?

Tim:

It’s hard to pick just one, but from the Beatitudes, I like this one:
Makarioi hoi katharoi tē kardia —
So I can translate it as, “Happy are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

Joshua:
Amen. Thank you so much, brothers. Beautiful.

Thank you all for listening to the podcast. If you want to learn more about NIT, go to ekklesiaafrika.org — there you’ll find the Nairobi Institute of Reformed Theology. God bless you! Bye!