On July 25, 2011, Joshua Liam
Davison was born. That little guy has
made some big changes in our family. My
daughter and son-in-law are now parents.
My boys are uncles. My mom is a
great grandmother. My camera is about to
burn up from taking so many pictures. The
poor little boy believes that he’s been born into a world where a bright flash
of light occurs every five seconds. The
two hour drive from Travelers Rest to Monetta is suddenly no problem. My wife and I have changed our preferred
names from “Dee” and “Linda” to “Papa Dee” and “Nama.”
I wasn’t surprised that
little Liam changed our family, but I was surprised by how much he changed my
heart. Liam’s birth, and these two weeks
that we’ve shared with him, has been a time when God has spoken to me as He has
at very few times in my Christian journey.
That very little boy has taught me some big lessons. He’s been like a little angel bringing
messages from God for me.
This morning, I want to share
with you a few of the lessons I’ve learned from Liam, ways that God has taught
me and touched me through him.
You Are a Miracle
I’ve heard many people say
that they believe in miracles. I’ve
heard a good number say that they’ve seen a miracle. But the experience of Liam coming into this
world took me beyond believing in or seeing miraculous things. His birth taught me that every person can
look into the mirror and say, “You are a miracle.”
Psalm 139 is a song through
which the singer praises God for the miracle of his life.
(Psalm 139:13-14) For you created my inmost being; you knit me together
in my mother's womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
During her pregnancy,
Elizabeth would send me updates on what was happening to Liam as he grew and
got closer and closer to birth. As I
read what science has learned about the growth of a child before birth, I
thought of those words again and again, “you knit me together in my mother’s
womb. I praise you because I am fearfully
and wonderfully made.”
Where do you see the glory of
God, the evidence of His power and His purpose?
You might see the glory of a sunrise.
You may look into a cloudless night sky and see the countless stars He
calls by name. You may gaze upon the
mountains, dressed up in fall colors by countless leaves changing at His
time. Or you may, like a friend of mine,
say that he no longer says that there are no atheists in the fox holes of a
battlefield. When he became a father, he
said, “There are no atheists in delivery rooms.”
But little Liam reminded me
that every human being, wonderfully made by God, knit together by His hand, can
look into the mirror and say, “I am a miracle.”
You are not merely the result of a process. You’re not an accident. In God’s mind, you weren’t a surprise. You are a mighty act of His power, His
creative purpose, and His love. And the
same God who did a mighty thing in creating you can do mighty things through
you. You can live in the confidence and
purpose that come from knowing, “I am a miracle.”
Liam taught me something else the night he came into
this world…
Pain is the Price of New Life
The day that Liam was born, Linda and I arrived at the
hospital and went to her room to visit with her and Josh. Every two or three minutes, Elizabeth would
have a contraction, a passing moment of tension and discomfort, but between
those contractions, she visited with us and talked about many things, posed for
pictures, and even joked about becoming a mother. But in a few hours, the hurt she was feeling
became far more intense and came more often.
I saw the look of pain written on her face and the fear that comes from
hurting like you’ve never hurt before.
The time came for all of us to leave the room, leaving Elizabeth with
her husband, her nurse, and the challenge of enduring the pain she was feeling.
As excited as I was about becoming a grandfather, I
spent the next several hours pacing up and down hallways, questioning anyone
who came out of Elizabeth’s room, and even putting my ear up against the door
to hear any clue that could tell me how my girl was holding up in her battle
with pain. A few times, a doctor or
nurse would open the door to leave, only to find me in the doorway with my ear
turned toward the door. I didn’t
care. I was worried about my daughter. Everything inside me wanted her pain to
end. For hours, we heard the voices of
doctors and nurses coaching her, we heard her voice as she fought the good
fight, and then, at 7:21 p.m., almost 14 hours after she had begun, my
daughter’s pain turned to joy, the joy of a new life. Outside in the hallway, we who had been
listening to Elizabeth’s struggle heard something new, a little voice crying
out to announce his entrance into the world.
I hugged Linda and we remembered three such days in our own
marriage. But now we felt the joy of knowing
our daughter’s pain led to the miracle of a new life.
Childbirth is one of the most painful and dangerous
experiences a woman can know. I wish
that it were different. I wished it a
hundred times that night. But in God’s
plan, pain is the price of new life.
It’s true for a woman giving birth.
It’s also true for any person asking God for a new beginning.
Liam’s birth taught me that, for any of us, pain is
the price of new life. So many people
want a new start, a new beginning, a deeper faith, a greater faithfulness, victory
over a struggle, joy on the other side of weeping. But what we must realize is that we won’t
hear the sweet sound of a new life unless we are willing to endure the pain
that new life demands; the pain of honesty, the pain of confession, of
heart-broken repentance, of letting go of the old in order to make room for the
new, of enduring a night of darkness in order to see the glory of a new
day.
The Apostle Paul tells the Galatians that he is
bearing great pain with the purpose of seeing Christ more alive in their hearts
and in their church. He writes, in
Galatians 4:19,
(Galatians 4:19) My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in
you…
Many times, over the past few
months, I have asked God why I’ve had to hurt so badly—why the people I love
have hurt so badly. I don’t know that
I’ll ever understand the reason for this pain, not on this side of heaven, but
I can find hope in the result of this pain.
By God’s grace and power, my pain and your pain, can be the beginning of
a new life.
When Elizabeth’s time of
hurting was over, when we heard Liam’s voice and then got to hold him and see
him, he taught me another great spiritual lesson.
We’ll Understand When We See Him Face to
Face
Several
times during Elizabeth’s pregnancy, she sent me ultrasound images of Liam. I don’t know how well you interpret an
ultrasound image. I find most of them to
be like a two-year-old’s picture that they draw in Sunday School. I look at it and say, “Wow, that’s
amazing! Tell me about it. (Which is a nice way of saying, “What in the
world am I looking at?”)
Sometimes I could be guided
to see Liam in the picture, other times I had to trust that others saw things I
just couldn’t see. But all of that
changed the first time I held him in my arms and looked into his little
face. That face-to-face moment revealed
more to me that I had seen in all of the moments before. Later, I returned to those ultrasound
pictures and, now, some of them made perfect sense, especially one in which I
could trace the features of his face and see that those hazy images were, in
fact, my Liam all along.
In 1 Corinthians 13:12, Paul
says that our journey through life is that very same way. He writes,
(1 Corinthians 13:12) Now we see but a poor reflection
as in a mirror; then we shall see face
to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am
fully known.
In Paul’s day a mirror was
nothing more than a shiny piece of metal.
The reflection it gave was often dark and distorted. We don’t see life so clearly while we’re
living it. We want to see the plan, the
purpose, the meaning; we want to see Christ working in the joys and challenges
we face each day. Sometimes we catch a
glimpse of him in that poor reflection our human hearts can perceive. Other times we don’t what we’re seeing or
what it means. We just have to live by
faith.
But one day, we will see
Jesus face to face. When we do, all of
those poor reflections, all of those small glimpses of His grace and His glory,
will make perfect sense. We will look
back and see that He was there, in every step we took, every tear we shed,
every burden we bore, even every question we asked.
When our faith becomes sight,
we will see that Jesus was with us every step of the way.
One more lesson my Liam has
written on my heart;
God Wants You to Know How Much He Loves
You
I had held little Liam for the briefest moment when I
heard myself telling him how much I love him.
Even though he’s a genius baby, as we call him, I don’t think that he
could see me clearly or understand the meaning of the sounds my voice was making. But I didn’t give up. I’ll never give up. I’ll always tell him and, hopefully, show him
that he has someone in his life, one of many, who look upon him and feel
nothing but love. And though I don’t
want to rush him in growing up—he’ll change too quickly, I know—I look forward
to the day that he knows, truly knows that I love him and he, in his own
childlike way, can love me back.
Paul wanted the Ephesians to have that same kind of
experience with God. Listen to his
prayer for them in Ephesians 3:17b-19,
(Ephesians 3:17b-19) And I pray
that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19
and to know this love that
surpasses knowledge-- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
I want you to know how much Christ
loves you. I want you to build your life
upon that confidence, “being rooted and established in love.” I want you to see how big his love for you
truly is, “how wide and long and high and deep.” And I want you to know His love, not just as
an idea in your head, or the right answer to a question someone asks you in
church, but as an experience that changes you from the inside out, that fills
you with the presence and power and peace of God.
As long as you have been in this
world, God has been telling you how much He loves you. For a long time, you didn’t recognize His
voice, much less understand what He was saying.
But God wants this to be the day when you know His love, when you
experience the love that gives you life, eternal life; the love that fills you
with God’s spirit.
Have you heard His voice?
Have you understood how much He
loves you?
He’s shown you most clearly in
Jesus, the One who died to take away the sin that stands between you and God,
the One who rose from the dead to say, “Love has won.”
This can be your day to know how
much He loves you.