Let me be the first to wish you a happy Thanksgiving!
You’ll hear a lot about giving thanks throughout this season, but gratitude is far more than a nice thought or a good feeling. It’s more than simply cause for a big holiday meal or a retail marketing season.
Gratitude is an essential component of our design as God’s creation.
Gratitude addresses central questions of our walk with God:
Do I want to thrive spiritually?
Do I want to be part of God’s plan around the world?
Gratitude is a crucial component of the answer—because we’re designed to thrive NOT on gain, but on gratitude.
And gratitude drives not only His plan for your life, but for His plan for all mankind . . . because gratitude is an engine of God’s harvest work.
Of course, as you know, God doesn’t need anything from us—yet He wants us always to be grateful!
Look at Psalm 50. This solemn word is a summons to His people:
“The Mighty One, Elohim, YHWH, has spoken, He has summoned the Earth . . . Gather my godly ones to me, who have made a Covenant with me by sacrifice.” In this reference to the Mosaic Covenant, God is asking His people to enter into a genuine and vital relationship with Him—not to enter into mere formalism. He does not desire anything insincere or empty!
The animals specified as sacrifices were a dramatic symbol—to engage in this process was a vivid, personal way of recognizing and affirming the Lord’s provision, and clearly expressing trust in that divine provision . . . and gratitude for it:
“Offer to God the thank you [the Hebrew word is toda] and keep your promised obedience to the Most High. Then call upon Me in the day of trouble. I will rescue you and you will honor Me.”
Here we can plainly see the dynamic of our relationship with the Father: no, He doesn’t need anything from us, but He urges us to be grateful—and to honor Him in obedience. It’s for our spiritual health!
In our worldwide ministry, in our training of a generation of evangelists and church planters, we are serious about teaching and inspiring gratitude.
We actually established, years ago, a Thanksgiving holiday tradition with our students in Spain. Of course, Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, but we wanted these young leaders to grasp the essential importance of gratitude. Now, they would not miss it for anything!
They enjoy the food and the fellowship, but most of all, they love the spirit of the grateful celebration. We “go around the room,” each in turn sharing the blessings of the past year that we’re most thankful for—the “happy takeaways” we’ve experienced by the grace of our loving God.
Some students, after graduating, ask to return to the seminary and be included in the annual celebration. But many have taken the Thanksgiving tradition with them into their fields of service; they celebrate Thanksgiving in their churches, or with a close group of believers.
One graduate wanted his entire family to be able to participate, so he moved his ministry’s annual Thanksgiving celebration to Saturday. Others have wanted to “carve out a day,” to keep it truly special—a unique, standalone observance, a time to stop everything and say “thank you”—so they’re adamant about keeping Thanksgiving on Thursday!
However we give thanks, we are grateful ultimately to God, the One Source for all dependent creatures. We are all dependent upon Him for our existence and for our sustenance.
And yet, gratitude “spills over.” I’m grateful not only to God but to you, because you allow Him to use you as a channel of His grace, a conduit of His ongoing provision for the work, and I am so grateful for the support of so many workers and their families and ministries!
I am grateful, too, for our salvation . . . and for our calling to be part of God’s special team to reach out to a needy world.
- It’s an immense privilege to be the “hands and feet of Jesus,” reaching out to people in need . . . providing water through borewells and offering food and relief after hurricanes and other disasters.
- It’s a blessing to be the “beautiful feet of those who bring Good News”!
- It’s an honor to stand with you as together we serve as links in the compassionate chain that brings God’s grace and gifts to so many in Cuba, Asia, Ukraine, Mexico, Venezuela, and beyond.
- Together we have the joy of bringing hope to children and families, offering compassion, relief, and a future—in this life and for eternity!
Gratitude! What a joy to see it all around us. One beautiful, living example comes from our students in Spain. As I was teaching in Madrid and the Canary Islands these past two weeks, I witnessed it first-hand. And what are the students most vocally grateful for? Air! Beauty!
Why? Because the location of the new campus on the mountain is literally a “breath of fresh air.”
The oxygen produced in the mountains has earned them the nickname of the “lungs of Madrid.” With nearly 7 million people, you might expect this city to be just another smog-blurred splotch on the map, but the prevailing winds of the Guadarrama mountain range actually seem to “blow the smoke away.” The mountains’ enormous tree population also pumps oxygen into the atmosphere.
This is our new home, by the grace of God and the generosity of caring partners like you!
Here, just 30 minutes from Madrid’s northern suburbs, our students are reveling in the mountain-fresh air and the awesome views. I see them grinning from ear to ear as they walk around the campus! It’s quite truly a mountaintop experience every day!
Students come up to me again and again with their “rave reviews.”
- “This place is a paradise every season of the year,” one said. (Some can’t wait until we get hit by snow!)
- “Thank you for working so hard to get this site for the school,” said another. (Their thanks goes to you!)
- “I am worried,” another said, “I only have three more years to enjoy this!”
I could fill a page with their expressions of joy, their hearts overflowing with thanksgiving.
This is toda. This is gratitude.
God calls us to this . . . to “offer to God toda” . . . and to pay our vows of obedience to Him . . . and then, with confidence, to go to Him in our time of need: “Call upon me in the day of trouble,” he says in Psalm 50:15.
The quality of our relationship with Him, deepened through gratitude, is our guarantee of divine intervention in our time of trial. When we stay in true fellowship with Him, we know He will be more than happy to help us!
This is especially comforting in this season of explosive growth in our ministry together. We have “growing pains”! As problems go, these are good problems, but they do need to be solved just the same. How thankful we can be, knowing we have God’s pre-approved invitation to call upon Him . . . an invitation He has given us because He knows that without Him we can do nothing!
Today, I invite you to join me in prayer, to address our “growing pains” and to address the many troubling events across our nation and around the world. Let’s follow the biblical priority, seeking first His kingdom and His righteousness, trusting that the Lord will then graciously make sure that all the other things we need will be “added unto us.”
Let’s pray, and let’s give—to turn our faith into action. In the next 60 days, we need a supernatural outpouring of favor to meet all the needs in all the harvest fields where we’re serving. So many people are hurting, so many are lost, so many seem to be beyond hope—and yet we know, there IS hope through faith in Christ.
Please pray with me that we can end 2024 in a strong way, well positioned to meet the challenges of the New Year . . . a year of greater force, greater capacity . . . another banner year. To live is Christ and to die is gain. What we do for Him is what will go on with us into eternity.
Five God-given focal points for the days just ahead:
(1) We must make the final installment for our flagship campus in Spain. Total need: $500,000. Does this seem like a big number? Relative to the enormous total miracle God has already wrought to give us this amazing property, this is a relatively small final hurdle before we reach the finish line!
(2) (3) and (4) We have summons upon us to go to three new countries in the year ahead: Iran—Kenya—and Peru!
(5) As I write this letter, I’m only a couple hours away from meeting with a partner ministry—together we saw a million people come to Christ in Cuba—now burdened to join forces again and plant another 1,000 churches in Venezuela!
At the same time, we’re asking God to lead us to partners who will help us plant a third group of 1,000 churches in Venezuela.
Will you be led of the Lord to join the momentum of these closing weeks of the year, to meet these challenges, to surmount these hurdles, to achieve these victories? Please give to help us secure our flagship ministry campus, so on New Year’s Day we can turn our full attention to the soul harvest for which we have been made responsible by God . . . our calling as the watchmen of our generation (Ezekiel 3 & 33).
I invite you to offer a Thanksgiving gift to God’s work today. We have been reconciled to God; let’s celebrate the relationship . . . offering sacrifices of gratitude.
I am truly thrilled to be in His service with you. I love it that God so clearly calls us to do this TOGETHER. Hebrews 12 speaks of the great “cloud of witnesses.” Then it says “God had provided something better for us, so that apart from us they would not be made perfect.” Today, we join them as worthy partners in the great march to eternity! I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you in advance. God bless you!
Joyfully in His service,
Dr. Manny Fernandez
P.S. However you count your blessings on Thanksgiving Day, you’ll have the joy of knowing that you are part of God’s great harvest work around the world, because of the gift of love you gave today. Thank you again!