Choosing a Bible Translation from a Thankful Heart
A number of years ago, Grace Publications had the privilege of anglicising the Christian Standard Bible. Part of our ongoing work is to commend this excellent translation to individuals and churches for private devotion and public worship. Over the next few weeks we want to share some of the heart issues that should inform how we decide which Bible version is best for us.
Having a Bible in our home language, our heart language, is a privilege beyond words. We believe that the Scriptures comprising the Old and New Testaments are God’s inspired, infallible word, his full and glorious revelation of himself, the incomparable story of redemptive history of which the Lord Jesus Christ is the very centre. To have a Bible is to have access to what God himself has said and, by the Spirit’s enabling, to have insight into what his mind and purposes are.
Over generations, men and women have pursued having vernacular Scriptures – often at the cost of their reputation, their position in society, and occasionally of their lives. During 2026, Christians all over the world are marking the 500th anniversary of William Tyndale’s New Testament being published – a landmark in the social and spiritual history of the Western World. Tyndale paid dearly for his work in getting the Scriptures into the language of the people.
History is populated with similarly courageous people who desired to hear God’s voice in their own language, and for people of all ages and educational backgrounds to have the Scriptures in words they could easily read and understand. The answer to their prayers and the fulfilment of their life goals can be viewed on our bookshelves, in the wide range of Bibles available in the English language.
These realities should lead us to generosity as well as to gratitude. To make Bible translation a point of division among Christians, to develop a partisan or exclusive mindset about one particular version, is to stand at odds with the other-centred attitudes that led our forbears to fight long and hard for the availability of English translation. This doesn’t mean that we cannot make a case for one Bible version being used over another, but it does mean that all such conversations must be seasoned with heartfelt thankfulness for the many translations on offer to us in the English language, often coming to us through the sacrifice of others.
