Acts of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Modern Times

All persons who come to know Jehovah God through reading his written Word will sooner or later want to tell other people about it. They learn that God’s will is for ‘all sorts of men to be saved and come to an accurate knowledge of truth.’ (1 Tim. 2:3, 4) Love for Jehovah makes them want to be imitators of him, reflecting his qualities and sharing his outlook. (Eph. 5:1) So they exert themselves to share with others what God’s Word says. This was true not only in the days of the early Christians; it has also been true down through the centuries right to the present. When the apostle Paul was writing to the Romans, he said: “For if you publicly declare that ‘word in your own mouth,’ that Jesus is Lord, and exercise faith in your heart that God raised him up from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one exercises faith for righteousness, but with the mouth one makes public declaration for salvation.”​—Rom. 10:9, 10.

When an individual dedicates his life to Jehovah, he will of necessity publicly declare the word about Jesus, his resurrection and the way of salvation for all mankind. In fact, he feels just as Paul felt when he said: “If, now, I am declaring the good news, it is no reason for me to boast, for necessity is laid upon me. Really, woe is me if I did not declare the good news!” (1 Cor. 9:16) This we have seen in the previous experiences set forth in the Yearbook, but now we want to go into detail in regard to the modern-day witnesses of Jehovah and how they got started in certain countries. You will be interested in reading these brief histories from the countries of Luxembourg, Newfoundland, which is an island in the North Atlantic, also South Africa, including the early beginnings of the work in Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. These last three mentioned countries have had name changes since the early days of Jehovah’s witnesses. In conclusion, there is the history from Sri Lanka, which most people throughout the world know as Ceylon, in the Indian Ocean. The work in all these lands had early beginnings that were very small, but the acts of Jehovah’s witnesses in these countries are very interesting, in fact, fascinating, when you think about what a few people did, with the aid of God’s spirit, in preaching the good news. In these places today we see fine results and a great ingathering of a crowd of people that truly love Jehovah God. So let us go back in years and let time pass before our eyes as these stories bring us right up to 1975.