How will you celebrate Christmas, this wonderful, blissful time of the year?
How do you celebrate it every day of the year?
- The angels announced the arrival of Jesus one night 2,000 years ago—but you and I have the joy of announcing the news all year long! No short Christmas celebrations for us! We constantly see people who once walked in darkness discover the LIGHT!
This has been another grand year of joyful news, a year of salvation and hope, thanks to you, and friends like you, sending the blessed Gospel Light around the world.
I saw the evidence firsthand, just days ago . . .
We gathered field directors and ministry friends together with our seminary students in Madrid. The directors’ reports from their far-flung fields were inspiring! Everyone brought good news of the advance of the Gospel—and also of even greater opportunities for multiplying the impact of the Gospel in the months ahead.
In our World Link family, it’s Christmas every day . . .
Not just the traditional happy family celebration—but the sharing of the truth that a Savior was born—and not just for us alone, but for the entire world . . . in the words of the immortal song:
“A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
By God’s grace expressed through your prayers and giving, we see multitudes changing course and following that “light of faith serenely beaming”!
It’s difficult to communicate the scope of the impact you are making as you give. For example, when we agreed to plant churches in Ukraine, our friend Anatoly thought his country might wind up with a handful of churches, maybe even a dozen. Then he was invited to an event for members of new congregations . . .
Anatoly was stunned—overjoyed—to see the masses. “Where are these throngs of people coming from?” he asked, almost unwilling to believe his own eyes.
In the Philippines, we typically see as many as 25,000 people presented with the Gospel each month—and as many as 15,000 of those same people come to the light of Jesus!
It has taken only two years to see a half a million presented with the Gospel there. We’re praying and trusting that in another two years we’ll celebrate the one millionth Filipino receiving the Lord! We have only another half million to go! God is using your generosity to reach almost unimaginable numbers of lost souls in the Philippines!
Is it too big a challenge? No. Jesus is the One on the job. He said, “I will build My church.” We are simply the “ambassadors of Christmas,” sharing the Good News that a Savior has come to the world.
Visit a formal church, and you hear the liturgy of Christmas, the admonition to the faithful, at the end of the service, to “go in peace,” or “go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”
The people’s response is “Thanks be to God.” Why? Because it is not a chore, it is no loathsome burden, to pursue this calling! We proclaim “Thanks be to God!” for the privilege!
This liturgical dismissal is not merely the ending of the service, but a mandate to the faithful—a statement of mission—to take the grace and teaching they have received into their daily lives and share the Good News with their world.
This is the force that drives us every day of the year.
We did not make it up. This was God’s plan from the beginning. Christmas was meant to be our theme from the arrival of the Savior to this day. It’s cause for rejoicing! As the late E.V. Hill declared: “If this doesn’t get you fired up, your wood is wet!”
We are the “Christmas all year-round” people, and glad of it. There’s no counting the days till Christmas only to have the holiday evaporate in a few hours. We can celebrate it all the time.
(I can’t help but think of our Mexican brethren, who stick Christmas trees on the beach and spray them with fake snow—it’s delightful to see how determined they are to have a so-called “authentic” Christmas look. Likewise, we don’t rely on the calendar—or the climate—for Christmas!)
I wish you had been there, in our international coming-together. Spain won’t issue visas to people from India, but we had directors from Ukraine, Venezuela, the Philippines, Cuba, and Nepal.
What a thrilling gathering! Many shed tears of joy to witness accounts from the various regions about what God is doing.
And at the center of it all were the students. The next generation of evangelists and church planters. Everyone raved about the students! People were thrilled to meet and greet and hug them! By the end of the conference, everyone was talking about the students—wishing they’d been able to visit with them every day, even if it meant skipping the “tourist” sites like Ferdinand and Isabella’s castle.
(Some of our American visitors even urged us to set up a joint course of study, where they could learn right along with the students!)
Some have wondered why we don’t gather all the students in Madrid and train them together. We set up extension sites in various locations because of Europe’s “provincialism.” Each culture has a certain “pride of place.” The United Kingdom, for instance, isn’t really very united: Scotland has wanted to secede for centuries, and many in Wales would prefer to be independent. Ireland has its own thorny history with the U.K.
Spain is also like that. The Basque don’t call themselves a province, but a “country.” The people of Galicia will tell you they’re Celtic, not Spanish. The Catalonians around Barcelona consider themselves a different people from the Spanish. The Valencians despise the Catalonians because the Catalonians say Valencia is part of Catalonia. And on it goes.
Rather than fight an uphill battle trying to convince people to trust a central seminary, we prevent that conflict by decentralizing, opening extensions in as many provinces as we can. (We even changed our name from Spanish Seminary for Theological and Evangelistic Training to “European Seminary” . . . which is well received since everyone seems to like being identified as European.)
Result: Our extensions all around Spain and now Portugal as well have been well received by the locals. And they are producing evangelists and church planters who are changing their worlds!
- At our main gathering, the eyewitness reports of major ministry efforts packed a tremendous punch. One American friend, who sits on our ministry board, was overcome with emotion. He confessed that he had wondered if World Link could really be making as great a difference as it seemed. Now, he realized, the reality was overwhelmingly greater than what he had heard or even imagined!
In a way, he said, it was scary to think back to the beginning of our ministry, and to imagine how the doubts of a few nearly canceled out the entire vision. Now, years later, he was so relieved that we said “yes” and stepped out in faith.
I believe this is what heaven will be like! In that place of joy, it might be somewhat somber to think we almost didn’t make the choices we made in our earthly journey. We’ll rejoice all the more that we exercised faith and said “yes” to the Lord.
The classic song “For Those Tears I Died” says:
I came so close to sending You away,
But just like You promised you came there to stay;
I just had to pray!
And Jesus said, “Come to the water, stand by My side.
I know you are thirsty, you won’t be denied;
I felt ev’ry teardrop when in darkness you cried,
And I strove to remind you that for those tears I died.”
Arriving on the other side, we might even sob with joy at the realization of it all. May we be found faithful and fruitful on that day!
That’s where Christmas is taking us. Christmas is what we needed. We needed a Savior to come to us, and to die in our place, and to rise again, conquering death.
“Lifted up was He to die, ‘It is finished!’ was His cry; Now in heaven exalted high—Hallelujah! What a Savior!”
Now the task is to keep the story going into all the world, so that people may hear it and be saved . . . yes, thousands and thousands—but one heart, one soul at a time.
In that land of Spain—where we have intentionally preached the Gospel thousands of times—I found myself riding in the jump seat of the bus. I asked the driver, Eduardo, where he was from. He said he had come from Peru, and told me his story. It was natural, then, for me to share how I had come to Spain, and why.
And before that bus trip was over, Eduardo received the Lord as His Savior.
If we will be faithful, God will honor our faithfulness, and lost souls will come to Christ through us.
This is the starting point: Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. But how will they call on Him whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher? How will they preach unless they are sent?
This is the challenge, the privilege, I bring to you today. Will you pray and give, to train and send evangelists and church planters into the harvest fields of the master?
I invite you to become an Ambassador of the Christ of Christmas, way beyond whatever holiday celebration you and your loved ones are planning. As you give today, you will touch the world from where He has planted you. You will bear fruit that will glorify the Father and thus prove that you are truly His disciple (John 15:8).
I look forward to hearing from you soon. I wish you a wonderful Christmas Day, and a wonderful Christmas every day!
Celebrating Christ’s Coming,
Dr. Manny Fernandez
P.S. We often hear about giving “the best” Christmas gift—every seller sells something different. But truly, the Christmas gift you give today will change eternity. A student will be trained, equipped, deployed . . . someone will hear the Gospel . . . and a soul will be saved. Yes—you’re giving the best Christmas gift!