Ministry In Dallas Last Weekend

Last weekend I enjoyed again being at Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship with my friend, Tony Evans. On Saturday I spoke at a marriage conference held at the church. Then I preached in the church on Sunday morning. This is the audio of the message I shared on Sunday morning, called "That's My Shepherd."

Another McVey Graduates To Heaven

My Dad is on the right and my Uncle on the left. They left this world exactly 100 days apart.


Last Saturday morning my uncle, Robert McVey, stepped across the boundary line from the shadowlands into the full light of heaven. He left this world exactly one hundred days after my Dad had gone.

Robert was my Dad's only sibling. He had been battling cancer for three years. He and Dad used to teasingly refer to the fact that they were "racing toward the finish line" together. When my Dad died on November 30 and I called to tell his brother, he began to weep. When he spoke, the first thing he said was, "He beat me!"

My uncle and aunt (Elizabeth McVey) had no children and Melanie and I have tried to be as attentive to their needs as possible, given the distance we live from them. When the doctors determined that he would not survive the cancer, my aunt asked me to share the news with him. I'll never forget that day. While I have always respected my uncle's faith, it made an indelible impression on me then.

I sat down beside his bed and said, "You and I both deeply love a doctrine that we have discussed many times -- the doctrine of God's sovereignty. You are going to need to rest in the truth of that doctrine now more than ever before. Unless God does a miracle, the doctors have said you won't survive this cancer." My uncle Robert listened intently as I spoke. Then he looked away for only a moment. His eyes misted over with tears and he looked back at me and said in a strong voice, "To God be the glory!"

I'll never forget his response. You and I know that nobody fakes it at a time like that. I saw an expression then of the man I had always known him to be. For the rest of his days in this world, he often said, "I am only praying for God to cause me to be faithful to the end." He was -- in a way that proved his home was not this world.

His death leaves me as the oldest surviving man in my Dad's family carrying the McVey name. I am sad. I love my uncle and will miss him, yet I know that he is there with my Dad, Mom and many other family members and friends. I know I will see him again. Until that day, I pray that I might carry the legacy forward that McVeys who have preceded me have left behind.

Divine Protection

This past Tuesday night at around 8:00 Melanie and I were involved in a car accident that required her to be taken by ambulance to the hospital. Thank God, she is doing fine, as am I.

We were about two miles from home when the car in front of us suddenly slammed on his brakes. I later learned that he hadn't seen the road where he planned to turn until the last minute.(He was on his way home from traffic court when this happened . . . without a tag on his car - yet the car behind us was charged with fault.) Of course, I slammed on my brakes too and stopped just short of hitting him. I immediately looked in my rear-view mirror and saw an oversized pickup truck that was pulling a fully loaded trailer bearing down on me.

Before I could even warn Melanie, he hit us in the rear, slamming us into the car in front of us. He was trying to swerve, so his driver's front end hit the passenger's back end of our car. Thankfully, the impact threw us forward, out of his way and he kept rolling forward another hundred feet before he was able to stop.

Our car was totaled. By the time the police and ambulances arrived, Melanie was hurting in her chest, back and neck and was having trouble taking a deep breath. They put the neck collar on her and lifted her out of the car onto a back-board, loaded her into the amubulance and took off to the hospital. The officer told me I had to stay there until the report was completed before I could leave to go to the hospital. I was so shaken that I don't know how much good I was. I couldn't even remember my address when she asked for it.

When the scene at the accident was settled, the policewoman brought me home and I went to the hospital in Melanie's car. We were there until about 2:00 AM. Thankfully, she had no broken bones. Her pain was from the seatbelt and from being slammed around. They released her and she is fine now.

I clearly see the hand of God protecting us through this situation. If the man in the truck behind us had not been able to swerve to the right as he did, he would have hit us at full momentum. Considering that, after hitting us, he still rolled forward another hundred feet I wonder if we would have survived if he had hit us straight on at that speed.

As we looked at the car in the salvage yard today, we both walked away and thanked God for protecting us. I suspect that when we all get to heaven, all of us will find that there were times our lives would have ended on earth had it not been for the intervention of our Father providing his divine protection.

P.S. Talk about word traveling fast - A friend in London, England sent a message asking about the accident this morning because he had heard about it from someone in Wales. That's what caused me to post this blog, to provide the details to those interested.

The God of the Microcosm

Our God is the Lord of detail. He manages the minuscule of this universe with the same skillful power used to manage the majestic. The majesty of our Sovereign Lord is beyond comprehension. It is amazing to contemplate that His power reaches equally far in every direction. He is not only ruler of the macrocosm, but also of the microcosm that surrounds us.

Thomas Dubay in his book, The Evidential Power of Beauty, describes subatomic particles of a smallness that stretches the imagination beyond our ability to conceive. They are called superstrings (pictured here) and are incredibly tiny. Imagine the size of one atom. Now compare that atom with the size of the earth. That ratio describes the comparison between a superstring and an atom. If we have a hard time imagining the smallness of an atom, what happens to our thought processes when we try to conceive of a superstring? It is almost beyond belief that anything that small could even exist.

Consider one living cell in your own body. A single cell contains more information than all thirty volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica combined. Our own DNA polymers are giant molecules made of small molecules in definite and intricate arrangements. This solution, says one expert, exceeds that of any other known system. It is so efficient that all the information needed to specify an organism as complex as man weighs less than a few thousand millionths of a gram. Amazing? Yes, but consider this: The information necessary to specify the design of all the species of organisms which have ever existed on planet earth could be held in a teaspoon and there would still be room for all the information in every book ever written.

One hymnal expresses our response well:

O God, you are great and glorious, we marvel at your power.
Lord, how your wonders are displayed, Where e’er I turn my eye,
If I survey the ground I tread, Or gaze upon the sky!
There’s not a plant or flower below, But makes your glories known.

Wherever paths of science lead,
Thy presence they reveal,
In order and unfailing law,
Of every cosmic field.

Open to us, Lord, the deepest nature and value of every created being,
so that, celebrating You, we may associate it to ourselves in a song of praise.
Show to us, O Lord, your goodness diffused in all created things,
so that we may contemplate your glory everywhere.

Everything God has created is His canvass, painting a Self-Portrait that we might open our eyes and see His beauty to such a degree that we never want to look away again. Never.