Christmas Blessings

The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.” 

Luke 1:35

When you take a good look at the Christmas narrative it is amazing how much the Holy Spirit is mentioned again and again. Luke’s account stresses the role of the Holy Spirit in a major way and this continues on through his other book called Acts.

Even more amazing is that the same Holy Spirit is given to us freely as believers. Sometimes we don’t know how much we need something until a unique situation displays our need. 

We were hiking through a desert area up to a mountain on one occasion when we ran out of water in the hot desert section of the hike. How quickly the body feels its lack! Our mouths quickly became parched and the heat amplified our need, as our bodies ached and weakness continued to grow. We finally dragged ourselves up into the cooler mountain area where there was a campground and a water spigot, hallelujah! Water never tasted so good!!

Jesus explained that the Holy Spirit is like the water we need to live. In fact, He referred to the Holy Spirit as living water. Billy Graham says in his book Peace with God that we should recognize our need for the Holy Spirit and pray that God not only fill us and help us but that we ask the Holy Spirit to take over in our lives so that we will find joy and peace, the fruits of the Spirit, as we yield completely to Him.

Praise God! Jesus came born in a manger and died on the cross to pay for our sins and freely give us favor with God the Father, that we might justified by grace and have peace with God. He gives us the Holy Spirit to comfort and guide us as we walk with God. 

May the Lord renew and refresh you in the power of the Holy Spirit this Christmas and into the New Year in the name of Jesus Christ who came to give us life!

Bryan, Mercedes 

and Patrick Marleaux

Thanksgiving Reflections 
and Ministry Update

We also hope you had a blessed Thanksgiving! We did an online article for Thanksgiving on the early Pilgrims who came to America’s shores and their Christian Faith. They were actually directly connected to the Reformation and they left their homeland to have freedom of worship in the New World. They stated, after coming across on the Mayflower and before they took up the colony, that they were doing this “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian Faith,” which they wrote in their charter upon landing at Plymouth Rock.

We also just recently passed the 503rd Anniversary of the Reformation. We did an article and video for this occasion as well. We focused on two early reformers, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, who helped lay a foundation and were forerunners to the later Reformation. Wycliffe also translated the Bible into the English language so people could read it for themselves. We owe much appreciation for those who went before us and who suffered for the cause of Christ. 

If you have not had a chance to read these articles or videos, you can access them at: http://gwmgracenotes.blogspot.com.

Divine Appointments 

We have had a number of divine appointments recently, and one in particular was especially powerful:

We were traveling out in the desert Southwest when it was getting late and we needed to stop for the night. Many things were booked up and full as it was on a weekend. We found a place that we could stay in with just travel points, but as we prayed on it we felt the Holy Spirit saying it wasn’t the right place. This, in the natural, made little sense.

We yielded, however, and drove on another hour in the night and found another place that we felt that the Holy Spirit was leading us to go to. We didn’t know what the purpose of this leading was, but we knew the Lord had a purpose in it. Then, the next morning, I ran into one of the motel maids while getting ready to leave—actually the car was already running. I began to briefly talk with her. As we spoke I suddenly had a word of knowledge that she needed prayer.

When I asked about praying for her she responded with a loud “hallelujah!” It turned out that  she was a believer and that she had been praying for the Lord to send someone to minister to her! She lived in an area where there were no born-again Bible-believing Christian fellowships and very few believers in general.

Mercedes and I prayed for her, and the Holy Spirit came on her in a very, very, powerful way to where she kept having to hold herself up from falling over. She was gloriously filled with the Holy Spirit and received healing and deliverance from some heavy burdens, as well as being deeply refreshed and renewed in Christ.  

She was overjoyed with how the Lord had answered her prayer for ministry and we were blown away ourselves about how the leading of the Holy Spirit in the situation brought about such a powerful divine appointment. Hallelujah!

In another situation recently, I had an interaction with a guy who spoke mostly Spanish and very little English. It worked out that I had a chance to witness to him and minister to him all in Spanish and was able to bless him as I shared about the goodness of Christ to him with a lot of help from the Holy Spirit. Gloria al Señor!

Season of Healing and More Maid Ministry

The Lord has continued to use this unprecedented time we are all living in, in a unique way. In fact, the Holy Spirit has been doing a deep work of healing, especially in Mercedes’ life. Some of the healing centered especially around her relationship with her father and some of the issues of brokenness she experienced growing up in household where her parents divorced while she was still very young. 

Right in the middle of all this, as the Lord was bringing all this healing, her dad had a serious heart attack. This resulted in needing a quadruple bypass surgery which went way longer than it was supposed to, almost 12 hours, which is more than twice as long as it was supposed to go. Things got pretty dicey to where he was right on the edge of not making it.

While taking some time to visit him, we were able to share about Christ’s love and grace with him. Lo and behold, he was much more open than in the past—seeing the possibility of it all ending shortly has a way of doing that. Mercedes also gave him a Bible and had an opportunity to pray with him as he opened up to the message of Christ. All this is after many long years of praying for him.

Another interesting aspect to all this is that the lady who is his housekeeper has actually attended some of our meetings in a nearby church in the past! She has been sharing some of our evangelistic videos with him, completely all on her own initiative! (We just found this out recently.) She only speaks Spanish, but since our videos are in both English and Spanish, she was able to listen to the Spanish and see them as a good resource to share the Gospel and have him listen to the English. They were a tool for cross-cultural witnessing, so on top of everything else, this was another confirmation from the Lord of doing our videos that way. 

We have continued to minister in various ways, both online and in person. We have had opportunities to share about the history of revivals as well as systematic teachings on New Testament Epistles in different online meetings. We received some very encouraging responses from those blessed by what we shared. 

We also have been doing some various in-person small group meetings as well as some church meetings. We’ve had some blessed Holy Ghost meetings and ministry times in North County, San Diego, Orange County, and in the High Desert. We have been refreshed in the presence of the Lord as the Holy Spirit ministered powerfully in each situation.

We very much appreciate all your prayers and support!