Mean Old Harold landed in Oubangui-Chari in central Africa as a young and visionary servant of God in the same year that I landed on Planet Earth like a small, bald, parboiled monkey. World War II had just ended and there was built-up pressure in the areas of missionary service and procreation. Twenty-six years later, he returned from Africa, having planted seventy-two churches. That same year, I began driving a Sunday-school bus. MOH was on the pastoral staff and I in the motor pool of the same church in Southern California.
MOH got his name from the secretarial pool of the church because he always sounded gruff, harrumphing about the office whenever he had a deadline for the typing pool, and yet he was the gentlest and kindest of men. I am now the teaching pastor of a church in Northern California but, had it not been for Mean Old Harold’s involvement in my life, I might still be driving a Sunday-school bus.
After a few years of volunteering in the children’s ministry of that church, I was asked by the elders to quit my job and work part time at the church as I prepared for full-time ministry. Although I had a great job working at a nearby university, having completed the coursework for a Master’s degree in Medieval Literature, I gladly jumped at the chance to earn $2.35 per hour as a general-ministry flunky in a large church as I went back to school to earn a completely different Master’s degree. In all of this, I did not hear the still, small voice of God telling me what to do.
I loved literature and I loved my job at the university. Literature I have always loved, knowing that it made my world a much larger world than I would have ever known otherwise. But in the fall of 1975, I started becoming dissatisfied with my job without knowing why. There had to be something more to my life than this. It was simply a feeling disconnected from any divine pronouncement from heaven.
I saw this change as dramatic and complete and decided at that time not to bother to take my final comprehensive exams to complete my MA in Medieval Literature. At this point, MOH stepped in, suggesting I finish the first Master’s since, “it is an additional key in your tool bag that will possibly unlock doors out in the world that a theological degree will not.” Since then, I have told every young person who has come within my gravitational field to “pick up every tool you can come across because you do not know where God will ultimately lead you." The Apostle Paul considered everything that had come before as rubbish as he pressed on to his upward call, but I was instructed to shoulder all I had ever learned and trudge on.
Once I was on the church staff as an intern pastor, MOH began to play a greater and greater role in my life. I began taking some classes from him, I remember particularly his class on the book of Romans. My young wife and I both took the class and it has had a lifelong impact on us. I hear myself saying some of the same things I had heard from MOH.
I have only once been thrown out of someone’s office. It was the office of MOH. It started off innocently enough. He asked me how I was doing in my classes and ministry and I told him. Then he asked, “what is God calling you to do with your life?” I believe I stammered. He began to press, “what are you going to do?” I knew I had to say something bold and spiritual. “I wish only to serve the Lord.” As you might have guessed, it was the wrong answer. To recover lost ground, realizing that he was getting ready to earn his name with me, I determined that he was wanting my future job description. “I think I would like to do something in Christian Education.” He began to stand up behind his desk. I did not realize how big he was nor how small I was becoming. He pointed to the door behind me and said, “Get out of my office and don’t come back until you know what God wants you to do.” Hardly a burning-bush experience in spite of getting my tail feathers burned as I retreated from his office.
Two years later, I was licensed to the gospel ministry in that church and left one year after that to plant a church in Ventura, California. I had been offered a church in Los Angeles, but, when MOH heard of the offer he called me aside and said simply, “You don’t want to go there.” I didn’t. After a year, I was ordained to the ministry and MOH preached the word for my ordination service.
Anyone who knows me realizes that the skill set needed to plant a church (a winning personality, a constant smile, and the ability to gather a crowd) is not part of my makeup. In my sense of mission as I prepared to leave the many comforts of a large church for the insecurities of a church plant, I made a rash vow to God that I would stay there ten years to plant the church. In the fifth year, I knew I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. But I had made a vow to God and it would be fulfilled. Was my rash vow a distraction from God’s call on my life or part of “The Plan”? In other words, did I step through the wrong door and was that ministry God’s “second-best” for me? Another question to be answered was whether or not my wife and children merely tag along or were they uniquely called as well?
Ten years and thirty seconds after I arrived in Ventura, I was unpacking my furniture in Tracy, California, in a small but established church. I remain there to this day, happy in the knowledge that I am in the center of God’s will.
In all of this time, through all of these events, I never heard God say, “Go through that door right there, and, whatever you do, don’t go through that door.” How then did I get here?
On the wall of my office is a single document, my ordination certificate, signed by a number of men who confirmed by their signatures that God had indeed call me to the ministry. The first name on the list is Dr. Harold Dunning, Mean Old Harold.
My wife had a more-straightforward course to traverse, at least once she married me. In some ways, I was her ticket to ministry. I know it sounds awful but she was in effect the women’s auxiliary of the Robert MacMillan franchise. At our wedding, we had the congregation sing our dedication hymn, “Take My Life and Let It Be, Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.” We meant it even though we did not know what it would someday mean to us. After the wedding, she finished her degree in music and I finished mine in medieval literature. God led us to a Bible-teaching church in a most-pedestrian way. As poor (read impoverished) college students, we had no car and there was no Bible-believing church within bicycling range. One Sunday morning, as we despaired of ever getting to church, we noticed a Sunday-school bus going down the street outside our apartment. We called the church and they agreed to stop the following Sunday outside our apartment. And that is how I became a Grace Brethren pastor. The sovereign call of God was not quite a Damascus-road event, but it was a road, and there was a bus on the road. Hardly the material to inspire a hagiography, though. My wife and I got on the bus, and so the call to the Grace Brethren Church of Long Beach was effectual in my life and my wife’s.
Over the years, Sharon has been a faithful and active pastor’s wife, discipling women, schooling our children, teaching Sunday School, singing and playing in the worship team of our church. But has God called her or did she simply follow me?
I have four children, a first-born son and three daughters. My son is an engineer being paid obscene amounts of money to keep U. S. Navy ships from sinking out from under their captains. It is a manly occupation and he is good at it. Did God lead him to it or was it just part of my son’s plan: “Dad, I want to earn white-collar money for blue-collar work.” He and his wife now live in Japan believing that God has led them to the Western Pacific and the life they are now living.
My three daughters all graduated from Christian colleges, two of them graduating from seminary. When my oldest daughter began attending college, majoring in a ministry degree, I asked several denominational leaders, including the president of the school, if there would be a place of ministry for my daughter in our fellowship of churches. The response was silence and a wry smile. Two of my daughters (the seminary graduates) live and work overseas. My youngest, the only one of our children living in the same hemisphere with my wife and I, just got a job in commercial property management, using the degree in marketing and business she had just received three days before her first day of work. Was she called to this?
Were my children called? Was my wife called? Or is there some plain-vanilla default for people who have been included in someone else’s burning-bush experience?
I got saved in the incipient days of the Jesus Movement. The woman I was dating, and later married, often witnessed to me, but the tipping point was the Four Spiritual Laws published in the Hollywood Free Paper. God loved me, it said, and had a wonderful plan for my life. And here is the focus of this blog—how do you learn what that plan is, or do we simply muddle through, and is it any different for wives and children when the husband and father is called? Does a wife have a call to ministry independent of her husband’s call? Does God call a wife to ministry when her husband is unconcerned with the will of God?

Love, So Called
By Robert MacMillan

His sweaty, probative palm lurking beneath her peek-a-boo bra
after a lengthy stealthy approach;
Her untouched heart well-beneath, hoping for something that won’t happen.
She, resisting and hoping against all evidence.
He, rejecting her every plea for innocence.

Assuming Aphrodite although her name is Clair;
Sailing for Byzantium, and yet his mind a scow of lust.
He wouldn’t know, but neither would he care.
Hands in the suburbs wishing but a trip downtown.
Her treasured innocence elicits only a frown.

Both in a black-and-white world of getting and spending,
but pretending a world of Kodachrome.
Her father failed her but still she dreams;
His father trained him or so it seems.

He offers love to get her sex;
She offers sex to get his love.
Neither will get though both will falsely give.

Both pretending:
She, romantic love and a match made in heaven;
He, claims to fallacious manhood falsely won.

She will never gain; he will never be.

Nor did they learn the ancient verities that made sex sex;
Nor met the Source that made love love.
They conjoin in a glandular glut of limbic excess
And so they try to mate in weightless confusion.
Joined together in selfish sad isolation.

And he will continue to sweat and press and she to allow;
And well beneath, her heart will beat,
Not knowing what else to do.

Walking with Jesus

"Walking with Jesus."It is so easy to say--it comes trippingly off the tongue; but it takes an entire lifetime to do. In our apostate days, legions of those who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ are walking away and Jesus asks us, as He asked His disciples in Capernaum, "Do you also want to go away?" Our problem is that many who are walking away from Jesus are not walking away from church. They still attend, still participate; but their hearts have left the building.
Oddly, God's purpose in Jesus Christ has always been to restore us to intimate fellowship with Him--fellowship we lost at the Fall when Adam and Eve hid themselves from God in the cool of the evening, a time when they habitually would go for walks with Him.
What did they talk about? The question is intriguing but only slightly more intriguing than what He would say if we were having a quiet walk with Him in the cool of our evenings.
Everything God did prior to the Fall was to establish a race of beings who could have intimate fellowship with Him, people made in His image, people to whom He could express His infinite love. Now, mind you, He had no need for this (He wasn't lonely!); He simply, as a being of infinite love and kindness, desired to express Himself outside of the Triune Godhead.
Adam's sinful rebellion against God ruined all of that and, since that time, man has been hiding from the presence of God. As an act of unbounded grace, God has taken the initiate to restore what had been lost.
In preparing us, for His great act of reconciliation, He taught Adam, and every true worshipper since, that only by blood could man approach God. An admission of sin that was concomitant with that blood sacrifice was mandated. What was once a pleasant walk in the Garden, now became a grievous, bloody march towards Calvary.
The day is quickly approaching when God will finally dispense with sin in His Creation and complete His restoration of fallen man; but, the closer we get, the worse sin becomes and the separation grows greater and greater--and not only between God and man. It is seen in the alienation of children and parents, husbands and wives as divorce rampages through our society and our churches, and warfare among nations and people groups is the order of the day. Strife is a constant and all differences are irreconcilable.
The restoration is eschatological (dealing with end times), but we can realize some of that end-times joy by abiding in Christ and allowing Him to abide in us. 1 John 2:6 states, "He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked."
Please don't waste other peoples' time by telling them how active you are in your church or how much you read your Bible. Are you walking with Jesus?
Would you like to hear a message on this topic? http://www.tracygrace.org/media.html.

Voting in a Democracy, Living with a sovereign God

Each time I pressed the screen on the voting machine at our most recent election, it was like the kiss of death for the candidate for whom I voted. Few candidates I voted for won. Few propositions I supported won. But the perfect candidate for the job was elected every time.
How can I be so much at peace about an election that "didn't go my way"? Easy. I know that it went God's way.
In Daniel 2:21, Daniel, in his prayer, states that God, "removes kings and sets up kings." Nancy Pelosi will probably be the next Speaker of the House because that is the person whom God wants. Does that mean she is a godly example of a humble servant of Jesus Christ? Not necessarily. It means that, as God prepares the nations for His return, He does whatever He desires to arrange the governments of the Gentile nations (including the USA) to accomplish His sovereign will on earth. Will the Democrats, who now control Congress, be more submissive to God than the Republicans? Not a bit! Surely you didn't think that the Republican party was God's party?
Although I do not expect an overflowing of righteous actions from Washington now, I know that God's will is going to be done and I can take great comfort in that even if I grieve over some of the legislation that will come out of that benighted city.
How important is my vote in light of the sovereignty of God in democratic elections? Very. I am not responsible for electing certain representatives over others, but of acting in a Christian manner in all that I do and of honoring the government (read Romans 13), and, in a democracy, that means I most vote. In voting, I vote primarily on moral and ethical issues. Sadly, too many Christians vote on pocketbook issues. That should be the last thing we should consider. Most candidates and propositions, however, do have a moral or ethical basis upon which we can make a biblical decision.
Next time there is an election, vote; but take comfort in the fact that God is still sovereign and the candidates whom He chooses for His own purposes will win.

Being Jesus in our marriage

Is there nothing more to a marriage than a primal need to procreate? Does it not represent something eternal even though marriage itself is temporal?

What if a marriage were representative of something greater than merely the joining of two people? Or did you think it was all about you?

Marriage between believers represents the relationship we have with God. For the married women: If there is anything tentative in your marriage relationship, then the world will see that you can’t trust God! For the men: If there is anything tentative in your marriage relationship, then the world will see that God cannot be trusted!

Marriage represents the integrity of God’s word. By “God’s word,” I mean His promises. If God’s word to us can fail on any point, then He cannot be trusted in anything. In your marriage vows, you have represented God and He holds us accountable for the vows we made. “For richer, for poorer, for better, or for worse; in sickness and in health, so long as we both shall live.” We glibly speak our wedding vows, but they are more than just something that is expected at a wedding: they are contractual agreements attested to by God as the executor of the contract. They are holy promises that we make, not just to our intended spouse, but to God. And they bring His good name into the contractual arrangement of marriage between Christians.

Some of you have divorce in your background—you have broken vows before God and man, thereby misrepresenting His faithfulness as unfaithfulness. Isn’t grace a wonderful thing! That in Christ you can be a delight to God and His particular treasure in spite of your failure?

Marriage also represents God as a restorer. And, as we see in God's dealings with us, restoration is not based on the merit of the one restored. Calvary is the epitome of such restoration: Christ dying for those who not only needed to be restored but for those who were actively hating Him, not wanting restoration, even while He was dying for their sins (Romans 5:8). Can you talk of love for God and thanksgiving for His salvation and still not be able to forgive and restore your spouse?

As the product of God’s restoration we are made reconcilers. Such restoration must be initiated without thought to the response. You cannot say, “I will forgive and restore if she will . . . .” Or, “He can move back in if certain commitments are made.”

God did not wait until we were repentant, sorry for our sins. And He certainly didn't wait until we had made the necessary corrections in our lives before establishing a relationship with us. In your marriage, do you forgive your spouse only after he or she has suffered enough to mollify your bruised ego, or to reestablish your control?

Marriage represents the gospel of salvation. To establish an intimate relationship with us, Christ humbled Himself by becoming a man and submitting Himself to a shameful death on the Cross. Many of the problems we face in our marriages are the result of a refusal to humble oneself before another.


Christ loved us unconditionally as He gave Himself for our salvation. We are called to love our spouses unconditionally: no strings attached. A women can put up with a lot if she is unconditionally cherished by her husband. Do you love your wife unconditionally? A husband can put up with a lot if he is respected unconditionally by his wife. Do you respect your husband unconditionally?

The Church is the bride of Christ and, as such, everyone member of the Body should know he or she is treasured by God.

Friendship and Marriage

We are a society of lonely people, regardless of how many people we have surrounding us.

Thomas Wolfe (writer): "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence."

We learn from the Bible that loneliness, even aloneness, was not God's plan for us: Genesis 2:18: "It is not good that man should be alone."

Man and woman were created to have fellowship with God and each other, but, through sin, became estranged and therefore lonely.

If the gospel redeemed us from the effects of sin, then why are we still alone and lonely? Could it be that the implications of the gospel are only partly known to us.

John 15:13-16
13 Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.
14 You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.
15 No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you.
16 You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you.

Please note the following about these verses in light of your marriage:

1. The extent of the Lord’s friendship is sacrificial love: v. 13.

2. The effect of the Lord’s friendship is change: v. 14.

Note that Jesus is not saying, “You become My friends, if you do whatever I command you,” but “You are My friends, if you do what I command you.”

Our obedience is evidence that we are His friends, not the means by which we become His friends. Most Christians get this wrong and they get it wrong for most of their lives, and they live in defeat, running on a treadmill of works, in the hope that by doing the wrong thing, they will achieve the right end.

Are you doing it wrong? Are you doing it wrong in your marriage?

3. The expression of the Lord’s friendship is intimacy: v. 15.

God calls us friends: that is the nature of the relationship He establishes with us.

4. The initiative of the Lord’s friendship is His love: v. 16a.

We did not choose Him, but He chose us!

Can we exercise the love of God in our marriages by initiating love that demanding nothing in return?

5. The goal of the Lord’s friendship is fruitfulness: v. 16b.

Is your spouse reaching his or her full potential because he or she is loved by you?
“If the life of my spouse is barren and fruitless, is it because I am not loving?”

The disastrous statistics and the general unhappiness in most Christian marriages tells me that most Christians have a truncated gospel: it might be sufficient to get them into heaven, but it produces hell on earth. The gospel is a relational issue, not only a judicial determination by the Judge of the earth. But we don't get that, do we?

God loves the single-parent

When a single, custodial parent finishes work at the end of a day, her work is only half over: she now becomes mother and father, counselor to her children, house keeper, and cook.

Three issues hit a divorced woman hard: loneliness, a nagging sense of failure, and personal rejection by the one person who had known her best.

Kids (particularly boys) are desperate for attention; especially someone who will acknowledge that they are suffering, too. Delingquency gives them that attention.

Description of child of divorce: withdrawn, cynical, hardened, sarcastic, and angry (if a boy).

Possible baggage carried by those who have gone through a divorce: self-pity (self-healing is accelerated by self-denial, not self-pity), depression, guilt, fear, economic devastation, anger, envy, exhauistioin, loneliness, frustration.

"Act" yourself into new feelings, do not try "to feel" your way to new actions.

Self-pity does no good! It mires more people in a wallow that prevents healthy action. Are you involved in self-pity? How much time do you spend asking the question, "Why me, why now?" The sooner you say, "Lord, heal me," the quicker you will begin healing.

No form of rejecction begins to compare with divorce. In divorce, the one who knows you best says you're not worth keeping anymore.

Jeremiah 29:11: For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.

Parents were not designed to raise children alone.

God is not just a father to the orphan and a husband to the widow: He is a good Father and a good Husband.

Every single parent should note what Hagar called God (Genesis 16:13): "the God who sees."

Three facts about the single-parent home:
1. The single-parent home is still a family.
2. There is no reason for a single-parent home to produce children deswtined for emotional illness, antisocial or self destructive behavior, or personal mediocrity.
3. Your chldren will reflect your personal values based on the way you demosntrate your beliefs.
Every practical solution to life's problems begins with prayer.

A single-parent needs: Time for rest, relaxation, and exercise. Time away from the children.
Time for friendship. Time for personal growth. Time for spiritual sustenance.

For more information: www.tracygrace.org, where you will find audio messages on marriage, family, divorce, and single-parenting as well as documents to guide you into the Bible for more information.