Greetings in the name of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. We are sorry that it has been so long since our last update. It would be impossible to tell you everything that has happened over the last few months, so we will just mention some of the highlights.

Church Ministry

We are thankful to the Lord for our local church Emanual Baptist Church. Pastor Melvin and his family continue to serve the Lord with energy, and are a great example to the rest of the church. Mark has had many opportunities to preach over the last few months and continues to work through 2 Peter. He also had the privilege of preaching at another local church in town (Betania). Christy continues to teach the children on Sunday evenings and stays involved with the children’s day home at our church.  The Day Home was recently blessed with money to purchase Christmas gifts.  She and the other ladies went on a five-hour shopping spree, and were privileged to see all the excited, smiling faces as the gifts were delivered.  We are continuing to strengthen relationships with the other saints and enjoy having them in our home. We also took a two day trip to Copan with a family from church. We enjoyed getting to know them better and seeing other parts of Honduras. This was particularly good for our Spanish as we spoke only Spanish the entire two days.

Please pray that our church would continue to grow in the knowledge of Christ and His word. We desire to see families mature in Christ and obey Him in all things. Pray also for the men of the church. Right now there are only a handful of men who come to church regularly. Pray that these men would be godly husband’s and fathers and that other men would come to church with their families to be taught the Word of God.

MEDA

2008 Seminary Graduates

We ended the year with our biggest conference ever. John MacArthur, Henry Tolopillo, Evis Carballosa, Carlos Montoya, and Adrian Donato were all speakers at our year end conference. We had a little over 700 people attend this two day event. It was a great time of preaching and fellowship. We pray that this conference will be used to help grow the ministry of MEDA in the years to come as more people were exposed to our ministry.

We had several families and friends come from the States to attend the graduation and conference. It was great spending time with our dear friends and being encouraged by them. One “special” surprise guest was a dear friend of our family, Kendall Yates. It was a tremendous blessing to be able to spend several days with him, and he was a great help and encouragement to Mark during the conference and graduation. Kendall began working immediately upon his arrival at MEDA.  He and Mark stayed up till 1:00am his first night here getting things ready for the conference.

Another friend of MEDA, Simon, who is an electrician in the United States, came to serve as well. Simon installed new lighting in our library and worked on several other electrical needs. We are thankful for our brothers in Christ being willing to come serve Christ here at MEDA, by using their gifts to serve.

Thankfulness

Our family is grateful to the Lord for His continued faithfulness and provision for our family. Even with the hard economic times in the United States the saints have continued to support our family in many ways.  We are truly thankful to those who support us faithfully each month, making it possible for us to minister the gospel of Christ here in Honduras. Please pray that the Lord would give us many oppportunities to proclaim the great message of salvation in Christ alone.

Our church in Florida was extremely generous in sending Christmas gifts to our entire family a few weeks ago.  It is such a blessing to see the love of Christ displayed by many people and in various ways. Our boys can’t wait to open all the gifts on Christmas day!

Our boys continue to be a blessing to our family and ministry. Josiah, Caleb and Noah all worked extremely hard during the conference and graduation, mowing, gardening, cleaning, and serving.  Even the little boys pitched in when they could.  Now they are staying busy with the children’s choir at church and getting ready for a Christmas drama here at MEDA.

Please continue to pray for our ablity to communicate in Spanish. We have made good progress, but still have a long way to go. In January, our family hopes to attend a Spanish school in Copan. They have teachers that work one-on-one with the student for one week at a time. It is our desire to attend these classes once a month.

As we draw near to the celebration of the birth of Christ, I hope that each of us will remember that the One born in the manger was no ordinary person, but rather, He was and is God in flesh.  He is the Creator and Sustainer of the world. Jesus came for a specific purpose – to save sinful rebellious people from their sin. The Bible says that everyone born into the world are born sinners and enemies of a Holy Righteous God. But the good news is that Jesus came to give His life for our sins. He came to be nailed to a cross and to be judged by God the father, for your sins and my sins. When He was hanging on the cross God the father was pouring out His wrath on Jesus for the punishment of our sins. In other words, the sinless One was being jugded as a sinner. He was being judged for sins He didn’t commit. So the question is: are you trusting in Him ALONE for your forgiveness of sin? Or are you trusting in a church, baptism, or “good works” to get you to heaven? The scripture says in Acts 4:12

“There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”

If you want to be forgiven of your sins, you will only find forgiveness in Jesus.

The scripture states that when we die there are only two places where people go – heaven or hell. I know that some churches teach that there is a third place, purgatory; however, this is not taught in the Bible. The scriptures state that those who are trusting in Christ alone for their salvation and forgiveness of sins will enter into the presence of God when they die; however, those who refuse to turn from their sin and who refuse to place their faith in Christ will enter into hell when they die, a place where they will be under the judgment of God for all eternity.

So as we draw near to Christmas and as you think about Jesus coming to earth, think about the reason why He came to earth, think about your own life, soul and eternal destiny. Do you want to continue being a slave of sin, or would you rather be a slave of Christ?