| The
Praise Report Winter 2006 |
 Blessings to you! From Bryan, Mercedes, and Patrick Marleaux |
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Click here to support |
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| God has been moving
powerfully and we’ve been blessed to see His power manifested in some
glorious ways as we’ve been ministering in Mexico and other places.
The Holy Spirit continues to fill, heal, and save as we’ve been ministering
and we’ve been seeing the glory of God manifest. We preached in Ontario recently where the Holy Spirit moved in great power filling and touching many deeply and we were encouraged to hear the testimony of a number of people who told us that the message and ministry were exactly what they needed at that time. We recently ministered in El Cajon at a Set Free Church. Set Free reaches out to a lot of bikers, gang members, and has a rehab for addiction problems. We ministered at the rehab center and a service, and not only did we see a good number receive as well rededicate themselves to Christ, but the Holy Spirit moved very powerfully also, and many were touched and ministered to powerfully. One woman who was ministered to greatly by the Lord said she hadn’t experienced a move of God like that since the days of the Jesus People revival. |
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We also preached in La Jolla a short time ago and had a blessed time as the Holy Spirit moved powerfully. Many were ministered to as we spoke about the true Spirit of Christmas, the Holy Spirit, and then ministered in His Power. A young man received healing in his shoulder that had a long-standing pain in it. He felt heat come upon him and as he began to move his shoulder the pain began to lift. Back on Christmas day we preached and ministered in a church in South San Diego in a Hispanic neighborhood. The Spirit of God moved in great power and brought some surprise Christmas gifts to those at the service. While many were touched and ministered to by the Holy Spirit, there were a couple of young teenagers who were very powerfully baptized in His Power. A few young ladies in particular were inundated radically and were really overcome by God’s power. It was the first time they had ever experienced the filling of the Holy Spirit and it was a joy to witness it happen. One of the young teenage ladies didn’t even know what the filling of the Holy Spirit was, and as she kept getting hammered by God’s presence she would stop and look around wondering and asking what was happening to her with tears and trembling. When we explained it was the Holy Spirit just filling her, it would start again and she would begin to cry more but with the joy and love of God filling her to overflowing as she was filled again and again. Others were touched similarly and powerfully and the Holy Spirit brought to life the reality of those Scriptures in Luke that tell us the Christmas story and show us how the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary, filled Elizabeth and empowered Zechariah to prophesy. God is the same yesterday, today and forever and it is a joy to experience in the “here and now” the presence of God, as the figures in the Bible did back then. We had a powerful divine appointment recently too when our friend Harald Bredesen gave me a call and introduced me on the phone to a fellow missionary working in Mexico. I was in the middle of running but we felt led to turn around and go to his house and meet her and her friends. We had a blessed time of fellowship and the Holy Spirit led me to pray for her and she was powerfully impacted by the power of the Spirit and ministered to and encouraged towards many things God was leading her into. We had another divine appointment when a friend asked us to come to dinner with a couple of friends of his from Mexico. The Lord led me to ask the friend’s wife, who was not saved, if she new the Lord, and I then began to explain the need for salvation. Our friend Jeff had felt the Lord would use us to reach her. The Lord led to set up the meeting, myself to boldly confront her about her need for Christ and open up the subject and then Mercedes’ Spanish skills to talk with her and then pray with her to be born again and receive Jesus as her Savior. She had tears in her eyes while praying and it was a joy to be a part of a new spiritual birth. |
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| A
Brief Summary of the Last Year |
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| At
the beginning of the year last year we were in Ghana, Africa on a six-week
mission trip. While an arduous trip, it was also very fruitful. We had
over 80 people come to Christ while we ministered in various locales including
three crusades in the city of Accra and then a big convention/crusade
out in the unreached area of the Sahel desert in a town called Jirapa.
We also witnessed God do many powerful miracles all through the time we
were there. Being in this little town in the heart of West Africa out
by the border with Burkina Faso, made us feel like we were at the proverbial
ends of the earth, fulfilling the great commission. |
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Ghana,
AFrica Bryan listens through an interpreter as a woman gives a testimony of miraculous healing |
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| It wasn’t a cheap trip and there were many health risks there, including being in the worst Malaria zone in the world. 90% of the infections of Malaria in the world take place in West Africa, which we were right in the heart of. Furthermore, Accra’s open sewer system makes this problem especially worse. Some westerners make the mistake of following the local attitude of casualness about the disease, forgetting that 2 million people a year die from it and 3,000 children die everyday in Africa alone from it. Defending yourself on all fronts including sleeping in mosquito netting, constantly using Deet repellant and wearing protective clothing is essential to staying healthy. Sleep in the hot conditions is difficult already, especially in the desert ,where I was lucky to get even 3 hours of sleep a night due to the netting that cuts off all the air. Preaching twice a day in those conditions and not getting sick—except from some diarrhea from a bad hamburger later—is a testimony to God’s grace and power. It is tempting to take that mosquito netting and throw it out into a fire or something but the possibility of infection is very real so you just have to stick it out even though your missing sleep. Needless to say, we were really wiped out and exhausted when we got home. We needed some serious rest and recovery when we got back. “Re-entry shock” is a term missioligists use to describe the transition from one culture back to another after ministering somewhere. We, however, had something more like “shock and awe” because we came home to a garage full of boxes needing unpacking. We had just barely moved only two weeks before going on the trip, and with all the preparations needed for the trip up to the last moment, as well as teaching at a Bible School over two hours away up to one week before we left, we just barely squeezed in moving our stuff out of our old place, packing it into boxes, and just sticking in into the garage of the new home. We were overjoyed to be out of our little 300-square-foot, cell-like apartment into a house, it felt like getting out of prison and is a tesitimony to God’s grace. God moved upon a dear brothert good friend”s heart who deals in real estate to buy a place and get us into it. The Holy Spirit had spoken to him and he in obedience in spite of the struggle and cost to himself followed what the Lord showed him, to help us out and get us out of our little cell into a house, praise to God for it is truly a miracle. The fact that we were only half way moved awaited us upon coming back, but it had to wait a little while after we rested up a bit. Then began the business of finding out how turned upside down your life gets from moving. We’d been living in one place for over 13 years, and even though we had spent much time in Mexico over the years and 3 months a year (1/4 of each year) ministering in Europe and other places the move still turned our lives upside down. Unpacking when we finally got around to it, began to release us from the state of “suspended transition” we’d been in concerning our move due to going on a long trip in the middle of everything. Unpacking boxes after a long trip, moving and traveling all at once, and then trying to get life back in order introduced us to a new form of craziness, everything seemed out of control for a while and we were joking that maybe little elves had come along and hidden important things and taken others and thrown them away and broken others to bits. The trials were really overshadowed by how glad we were to finally be out of our tiny shoebox though. Praise to God for his infinite goodness, he doesn’t forget the sacrifices of those who serve Him. |
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More Transitions |
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| It’s been
a year of transitions as Patrick began his first year of school too (Kindergarten).
We are still getting in the flow of things with it. Homeschooling was the
best option for us due to traveling and ministering in different places,
but we are still looking for the right program that fits well with us. The
one we are using at the moment is run through the state and is a bit too
inflexible for what we need. Mercedes has been teaching the main courses and I (Bryan) have been teaching some Bible, Roman History, a little bit of the Greek alphabet and music. |
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More Ministry |
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| Having
done two trips overseas almost back to back—Africa and Europe with
much time spent in those areas—we felt it was important to refocus
some time back in Mexico this past year, and so we have been down there
quite a bit seeing God move powerfully and bring salvation and healing
again and again in various crusades, outreaches and churches. During the Summer, we were invited to be the main speakers at the Foursquare Hispanic Southwest District’s youth retreat, which was a wonderful blessing as we ministered to over 430 teenagers and twenty-somethings for a few exhausting days. It was well worth it to see so many young people filled, healed and empowered by God’s Spirit, a very powerful miracle of a healing of a deaf ear also took place in a young lady. |
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Patrick watches as some young people get powerfully ministered to by the Holy Spirit as we pray for them. | |||||
As well as ministering regularly in Mexico, we also ventured into some new ministry in some different places in the U.S. including: Monterey, Cambria, Los Osos, La Jolla, Orange, South San Diego, El Cajon and other places too. We have continued to do our two radio programs that have been going on for over 8 years now, one in Mexico and the other here in the U.S., geared toward both Hispanics and Anglos, as well as five local TV programs in the San Diego, Orange County, and LA areas. That we’ve kept all of this going while traveling and being under the gun financially is once more a testimony to God’s grace. We have also been working on making new videos, re-editing and improving our existing ones and working on updating and improving our website. As we move fully into the New Year of 2006 we look forward to God’s continued blessings and grace for we know, “The Lord is good.” Bryan, Mercedes, and Patrick Marleaux |
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Keeping
the right perspective is essential as time speeds us along into this New
Year and the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past.
A little blurb on that subject follows below. |
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Another year has gone, a new one has come. Can you believe January is already over and we are well into the New Year? It is a good time to reflect on the fact that we’re all another year older, and the reality that time as it speeds along allows no instant replays. Like a slow train coming, time continually motions forward and will not be stopped or altered. It is one of the great equalizers, no matter one’s status—rich or poor—no money, influence, or power can ever bring back time gone by, a date with destiny awaits us all. As surely as the tide rolls in, it ebbs out, and just like the rising and setting of the sun so is life, it begins and ends; it’s all just a matter of time. When Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes he surveyed man’s vain pursuits and saw the meaninglessness therein, for most live life with no view at all of the final destiny in mind. So much is spent and invested into that which is meaningless and in the end will rust and rot. As we speed along into a New Year, it hopefully makes us think for a moment of the brevity of life: life rushes along with so much to do that we can lose sight of what is important. In the middle of all the busyness that accompanies life, Christ’s call to take forth the Gospel in His Power remains a Kingdom priority. Taking forth the Gospel and supporting those that do should occupy a first place for us as Christians, for this has eternal value and consequence, and yet life’s busyness can obscure this reality Taking forth the Gospel, and taking it in His power is Christ’s highest priority. After His crucifixion and resurrection, His most important work, He spoke some of His most important words: “Go forth and preach to all creation… and these signs shall accompany you…” and “You shall receive Power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and shall be my witnesses…even to the ends of the earth.” Christ’s priority is not a new parking lot, new carpet, or a new stained glass window for the sanctuary (so much of the church’s focus ends up as majoring in the minors and putting time into temporal things) but Christ’s priority is that the Gospel be taken forth in His Power. This is what our hearts are about: going forth in His word and power to minister to those he sends us too. Be it in Mexico, Africa, or Europe, or wherever He may lead. We feel blessed to see His grace and power continually manifested through the saving, healing and transforming of lives as He sends us forth. We want to challenge you towards an eternal perspective to see that when you give to support us in this work of God you are not only helping reach others for eternity, and sowing blessing for yourself in this life, but also laying up for yourself treasures in heaven. A treasure that has eternal value and is of more worth than anything this world can offer—remember we won’t be taking any of this worlds goods with us—but treasure laid in heaven is something to look forward to. Join us today in helping take forth the Good News of God’s grace in His power even unto some of the poorest, who themselves cannot give the support that those like yourselves can. Your financial support is needed. The blessing that will be bestowed upon you in this life and the next is incomparable to any riches this fallen world can offer when you give in this way. |
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| Our
Contact Information: E-Mail: gracewm@flash.net Web page: http://www.graceworldmission.org Address: Grace World Mission P.O. Box 5071 Balboa Island, CA 92662 |
Radio
and TV Schedule: |
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