Things My Son Has Taught Me by Justin McTeer

Jesus, thank you so much uh just to be in this place, God, and and to to know that we're all loved.

Um your love really is extravagant, God, and we are so God, just thankful that we are the uh the object of your affection, God.

We love you so much in return.

And this morning, Holy Spirit, we just ask that you would be here and and that you would literally speak to our hearts, God, that whatever it is we need this morning that we walk out with.

Um and we just ask all this in your name.

Amen.

Well, uh, the last time I got a chance to share in here, uh, or a couple times ago, I'm not not really sure, I got to talk about my son Liam.

And uh and and I'm a new father, he's five months old, and obviously uh I love being a dad, I love him, and uh and this morning I kind of want to continue with what I talked about a few times ago.

If you weren't here, my wife and I had our first son, Liam, five months ago, and we had a lot of complications uh, you know, right after birth.

He was in the neonatal intensive care unit for about a little over a week, and the doctors thought there were a lot of serious, uh, you know, serious conditions that were the cause of his problems.

He wasn't breathing very well at all, um, having major spells where he wouldn't breathe at all, and he had seizures.

There were just a lot of things going on.

And we know a lot of you guys prayed for us, and we prayed, and what's great is that now, you know, we're we're five months after that fact, and and he's had no breathing problems whatsoever.

He has had no seizures.

We've had tons of tests, and yeah, it's um it's been it's awesome, and it really is, it really is a God thing.

There you go.

Yeah, he's he's come a long way.

He really has, you know, from little kid to to that.

Very dapper in the tux.

Um no, we're we're excited to be, you know, to be parents.

I love it.

And and what's great is that I'm still in this phase of amazement.

I know a lot of us in here are parents, and you guys have probably been through this before, but I'm still in that in that first stage where like daily I am blown away by by how fast he's growing and how much he's changing.

And it seems like if if if I'm busy at work and I have a couple days where I don't get to be at home as much, I I come home and it's like a totally different person.

He's just growing and developing so fast.

And and I'm trying, you know, as a parent, I'm trying to teach him things.

He's young, but I want him to learn.

I want to be a good example.

I don't know how much he's learning from me at this point in time.

I will say that uh a couple days ago, or I guess a couple weeks ago, he started to uh to reach out, grab his feet, and use his toes as like a pacifier.

And I'm proud of that because I put my foot in my mouth all the time.

And so I know, I know that he is picking something up, for me at least, you know, uh, no matter how small it is.

But what's really amazing is how much I've learned from him in just a short period of time.

You know, being a dad, it's it's really incredible how many things he's been able to show me about how awesome God is, about what being a father is really about.

And so I feel like I'm learning just as much, if not more, than he is, being his dad.

There's a movie that came out about a year ago starring Eddie Murphy.

It was a movie called Imagine That.

And the premise of the movie is that Eddie Murphy is this really successful businessman.

And you know, he's he's been kind of a financial wizard, but he's sort of hit this point in his career where he has run out of ideas.

He doesn't know what to do anymore, he's lost his touch, and he needs a solution, and he finds those solutions, he finds those creative ideas he's looking for through his young daughter's imagination.

As he spends time with his daughter, as he plays with her, and sort of enters into her imaginary world, that's where he gets the solutions that he needs for his business.

So he actually becomes dependent on his daughter's imagination to succeed in his life.

And I don't know if that movie was taking a cue from Jesus or not, but it definitely, you know, that concept definitely fits with something that Jesus taught us in Matthew 19, 14.

It says, Jesus said, Let the children come to me.

Don't stop them.

For the kingdom of heaven belongs to those who are like these children.

And he placed his hands on their heads and blessed them before he left.

Jesus loved children.

And he's telling us in this instance that we actually can learn a lot from kids.

We really can.

As parents and as older people, we we obviously want kids to learn from us, but Jesus is kind of setting children aside and saying, hey, pay attention to these because there's a lot that we can learn or unlearn or maybe relearn by watching them.

And so this morning, I just want to take a cue from Eddie Murphy, and more importantly, Jesus, and just share a few small things that my son has taught me about God in the last five months.

The first thing has to do with communication.

I talk a lot.

I just do.

And when I was young, I was always in trouble for talking.

And then I went to college and I majored in communication, which is another word for talking.

And so, you know, I just you take you turn a weakness into a strength, is what you do.

Um but but communication's this big deal.

And what's what's awesome is that Liam hasn't said a word yet.

I think he's close, but he still hasn't spoken yet.

He hasn't verbally said anything, but even though he can't speak, he is still a very good communicator.

He really is.

He's extremely expressive.

People always say that about him.

He's really expressive.

He can give us uh, you know, looks where he shows us he's really interested in something, he's really concerned.

It's very if he's really freaked out about something, he's got a great freaked out look on his face somewhere.

There you go.

That's a ah, you know.

So for five months old, he can say a lot with his face.

He has all these different cries, these different whimpers, that that, you know, he's expressing himself in a lot of different ways.

My wife Megan is amazing in her ability to understand what he's trying to communicate.

And I think there's a lot of moms like that.

You have this superpower of understanding young children, so he'll cry and she'll just be like, oh, he's tired, or oh, he's hungry.

He wants his pacifier, and I'm like, okay.

Um when I'm alone with Liam, which happens, I don't she trusts me enough, but when I'm alone with him and he cries, I just I have this trial and error process where I just go through a checklist of things and I'm like, oh, does he need picked up?

No, okay.

Uh pacifier, no, hungry, no, diaper, yes.

Okay.

Um that's what I do.

But but I'm getting better at understanding what he's trying to communicate as he gets better at communicating.

And so a couple weeks ago he started doing this new thing, and this is like my favorite, is that when he wants picked up, he reaches his arms out.

And I I know for all parents that have had kids that do that, it's so, it's just so cool, you know, because I don't know, there's something about it.

It's so special.

They're just raising their hands and saying, please pick me up, and it's kind of like us and God, and it's it's awesome.

And so I love it because now when he wants picked up, he just reaches out his hands and I can pick him up.

He's communicating to me and he's telling me what he needs.

And the thing is, is as his dad, it does not bother me at all that he can't communicate eloquently.

It doesn't bother me at all that he doesn't have words to say, or that he doesn't have the ability yet to express himself in these really elaborate ways.

In fact, it's kind of nice that he can just communicate so simply and so directly by just crying when he's upset or reaching out his hands when he needs to be picked up and held.

I love that simple communication.

And that's something that Jesus talked to us about in our relationship with God.

There's a parallel there with us and God.

Jesus said in Matthew 6 through 7, or 6, 7, and 8, he said, When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him.

The way that the message translation of the Bible reads it, it says, This is your father you're dealing with, and he knows better than you what you need.

With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply.

See, when we communicate with God, we're communicating with our dad.

And we don't have to communicate eloquently, we don't have to use the right words, we don't have to pray a specific way.

We can literally be like his children and just express what we need in the simplest terms possible.

Romans 8.15 says, You received God's Spirit when he adopted you as his own children.

Now we call him Abba Father.

That word Abba doesn't have the same meaning to us that it would have had to the people that Paul was writing to in Romans, but in that world, Abba was the most intimate and childlike way to talk to your father.

That would be our equivalent of daddy.

And so if you were in it were in Israel today walking down a busy street, you would hear the word Abba a lot, and it would be small children talking to their dads.

And what God tells us is that he has adopted us as his own children, and now he's dad, he's daddy, and we're we're his kids.

It's not like we're his kids.

It doesn't say that he is like our father.

It's not using it as an analogy, it's saying that he is our actual father.

We are his actual sons and daughters.

And that's really mind-blowing when you think about it, because that means when he looks at us, he sees the same thing he sees when he looks at Jesus.

He sees his children that he loves.

And just like he told Jesus when he was baptized, this is my son who I love, you bring me great joy.

He thinks the same thing about us.

We're his actual sons and daughters.

And so when we communicate with him, we can just be his kids.

We can just be heartfelt and simple and direct.

Whenever I pray, I have to force myself to communicate simply.

I grew up in church, and it's just really easy for me to shift into this like this other language that I use words that I never use in real life.

And there's nothing wrong with that per se.

There's nothing wrong with tradition or anything like that, but sometimes I'll pray and I'll end up reciting a bunch of things that I've either prayed before or heard before, and whenever I say amen and it's over, I know God knows what I need, but I don't really feel like I actually communicated anything.

I'm almost like, what did I really pray for?

What did I ask for?

And instead, what I want is to just express myself to my Father.

To communicate simply.

So if I'm if I'm scared about something in life, I can just say, I'm scared.

Please help me out.

If I'm if I'm overwhelmed and I don't feel like I can take anymore, I can just say, I don't think I can take this anymore.

We can just be direct with our dad.

In fact, like Jesus said, He encourages us to be direct because he cares about our needs.

In Matthew 7, 9 through 11, Jesus said, You parents, if your children ask for a loaf of bread, do you give them a stone instead?

Or if they ask for a fish, do you give them a snake?

Of course not.

So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your he will your heavenly father give good gifts to those who ask him?

Jesus is saying that we're regular people.

We have problems, we have sins, and we still care about our kids, and we still care about their needs, and we want to bless them.

And if that's how we feel about our kids, how much more does God feel like that about us?

And so when we go to Him and we just communicate what we need simply and directly, He loves it.

Because He cares about what we need.

And He wants to help us, He wants to bless us.

Okay, so that's one thing.

Another thing that I've learned from my son Liam in just a short five-month period is that small children can make big messes.

It's amazing.

Yeah, there you go.

It's all over the face.

Yeah, it's it's pretty crazy.

Sometimes the mess ends up on him, sometimes it ends up on me.

And I've learned that you don't put on the shirt that you're gonna wear to work until after you feed and burp and all that kind of stuff.

It's like this lesson because it's just amazing how much can come out of a small baby, not to be graphic.

But it is.

And what's interesting is that uh is that you know, our whole life has gotten messier.

I think Megan and I always like to pretend like we want to be clean and and and and we we are in some ways, but it's just with a baby, it's like there's stuff everywhere.

It's just a mess, you know, where we're we're jumping over these huge things.

You guys, if you have children, you know you buy these things for your babies and you sit them in and they're they're massive and you have nowhere to put them.

And so they just that is your coffee table now.

You know, that it's what it is.

You you find a way to combine a jumpy seat with can this hold one of my drinks?

Is there anything you know what I mean?

It's just you have to because it's everywhere.

And and the thing about it is, is I I don't mind the mess that much.

Before we had uh before we had a son, changing a diaper was at the bottom of a long list of things I never wanted to do in life.

I mean, ever.

And and I had never changed a diaper, I'd made it 26 years without changing a diaper, and I was really proud of that fact.

And and when we had them, you know, it was amazing because I didn't mind.

Didn't really bother me.

The mess, it just kind of comes along with the territory.

I guess my point is that as parents, we know that kids are messy.

We just understand that it comes along with the territory.

When we have a kid, we expect a mess.

And we also expect to help them clean it up.

And the thing is, when God adopted us as his kids, he knew we were messy.

He knew that we were gonna make a mess of things in life at times.

And it can be relationships, it can be finances, it can be a list of things.

But he knew when he adopted us what he was getting into.

He knew we were his kids, and he knows, like we do, that kids are messy.

And so sometimes when we make a mess of things in life, we feel ashamed.

We feel like God doesn't want to have anything to do with it, that God wants to like push us away until we clean it up.

I know that's how I've approached God most of my life.

I grew up believing that God was very difficult to please and very easy to disappoint.

And so when I would make a mess out of something, I would feel like, okay, I until I fixed this, which usually involved me making these really emotional vows to God that I would never do this again, and I, you know, promises I'm gonna read my Bible every day and all these things, until I fixed it, until I could convince God that I was gonna be okay and that I had this under control, that God and I, we weren't in a good place.

It never occurred to me until having a son that God may not be as upset with the messes as sometimes we think.

Now, obviously he wants us to get it clean, but as parents, it's a process to teach our kids how to be clean.

It's a process.

It takes years to train them how to how to avoid messes, how to clean up after their own messes, and we know as parents that there's gonna be a period of time that we're gonna have to roll up our sleeves and get a little dirty and clean up the messes with them or clean them up for them because they're not able to clean them up on their own.

And if there's one amazing thing that Jesus coming to earth showed us is that God is incredibly willing to jump into our mess.

It says in Philippians 2, 6 through 8, though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to.

Instead, he gave up his divine privileges.

He took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being.

When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal's death on the cross.

So Jesus left the perfection of heaven.

And I have a feeling that heaven is very clean.

I don't know why, but just I would assume so.

And he just dove into our mess.

And he got right in the thick of it.

And Jesus, when he was here, he spent his time with regular people with real problems.

So much, in fact, that the super religious people of Jesus' day were upset about it.

In Mark 2, 15 through 17, it says later Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to home to his home as dinner guests, along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners.

There were many people of this kind among Jesus' followers.

But when the teachers of religious law, who were Pharisees, saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, Why does he eat with such scum?

When Jesus heard this, he told them, healthy people don't need a doctor, sick people do.

I have come to call not those who think they are righteous, but those who know they are sinners.

In other words, Jesus said, I came to get into the mess and help people clean it up.

And so we have a we have a father in God that doesn't mind our messes as much as we might think he does.

It's his plan and it's his purpose to help us get through it, to help us clean it up, but he will work with us.

Just like a parent wipes off their child's face or other things, he will help us.

He will roll up his sleeves, he will get in the mess.

So he knows we're gonna have addictions, he knows we're gonna have marriage problems, he knows we're gonna have financial problems, he knows we're gonna have crises in life, he knows we're gonna have messes because kids are messy.

They just are.

And and he's a God who will come alongside of us, and if we allow him to roll up his sleeves, and as he teaches us, and as we mature, he cleans up the messes with us.

If there's one more big thing that I've learned with Liam in our lives, is that um, man, I never thought it was this possible to love someone this much.

My mom always used to say this all the time.

You know, until you have a son, you'll never know how much I love you.

And she'd say it all the time.

And I would just kind of roll my eyes and say, Yeah, I know, I know, but she was right.

And when we had Liam, it was like, you know, instant.

Wow.

He's incredible.

And his parents, I know so many of us have experienced that.

And for me, it really kind of came to another level on Mother's Day this last year.

It was it was early on a Sunday morning, and we were getting him ready to come to church, and that was the first time, at least, that we had ever seen him smile.

And we were feeding him, and Megan was holding him, and I got close, and he looked at Megan and he looked at me, and this really slowly, this big smile just crept across his face.

And it's it was it was awesome.

It was.

He's got a good smile.

That's my boy.

Baby pictures.

All right.

This great smile, and from that moment on, I'm I'm no joke, my life just changed because all of a sudden, I became obsessed with my son smiling.

And I'll do anything to make him smile.

I act like an idiot at home to make him smile.

I make funny noises, you know, I do goofy dances.

I just, I mean, I just run around like a like a moron, and all I want to do is I want to see him smile.

And the reason is because from that first time that he smiled, it was like his joy became my joy.

And and and I am at my happiest when I know that he is happy.

And that's natural for us as parents, and and like Jesus told us earlier, we have a how much more God.

So if we naturally want to see our our children happy and we want to see them smile, how much more does our Father want to see us happy and satisfied and content?

In other words, God wants to see us smile too.

It says in Ephesians 3, 18 and 19, and may you have the power to understand as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.

May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully, then you will be made complete with all the fullness of life and power that comes from God.

How wide, how deep his love is.

It says that until we experience that love, until we really grasp how insanely loved we are by our Father, that it's not until then that we're even ready to be made complete in life.

We need that love.

And he loves us, he loves us intensely.

And it's really that love that he has for us as our dad that puts everything else in life in perspective.

And so we talk about communication.

The reason we can communicate with God simply and just share our needs is because he loves us so much as his kids.

If he was not our father, if he had not adopted us as his own children, he would be our God, but not our father God.

And so when we would pray, we probably would have to be a little more ritualistic.

We probably would have to do it a certain way, because he would be our God, and he is our God, but he's our father God.

And so when we pray to him, we're not just communicating to God, we are communicating to Father.

And because we know we're loved as his kids, that changes everything in terms of how we can communicate.

The reason that God is willing to clean up our messes is because he's our father and he loves us.

And I'll just be honest, but before having a son, if anyone else would have handed me their baby and said, hey, can you change their diaper, I probably would have said, No.

No, I don't, that's not.

No, I'm not, no, that is not my thing.

I it's not, that's a dad thing.

But the reason I'm willing to clean up any mess that occurs is because he's my son.

I love him.

The reason God is willing to jump into our messes in life is because he loves us.

He's crazy about us.

And it's that love that changes our perspective on everything.

It's that love that he has for us that is so intense that lets us see life in a whole new way.

If the worship team wants to come up real quick as we wrap up, you know, I've only been a father for about five months.

Well, about exactly five months, and that's not a long time, but in just that short period of time, it's been amazing how many things having being on the father side of a father-son relationship has shown me about God.

And so I'm obviously looking forward to the rest of the time being a dad.

But this morning for all of us, you know, we have to live our lives knowing that we are the actual sons and daughters of God.

We have to.

We have to live our lives knowing how wide and how deep and how far reaching his love is for us.

And we can communicate to him simply.

Whatever our biggest need is in life, how can we communicate it today in the simplest ways?

How can we just tell our dad what we need?

Whatever mess we're involved in right now, there's usually a few.

How can we allow Jesus to jump in with us like he did when he came here and help us clean it up?

We don't have to do it on our own.

Before the worship team plays another song, we'll finish with one more verse that just reminds us of how incredible his love is for us.

It's Zephaniah 3.17.

It says, For the Lord your God is living among you.

He is a mighty savior.

He will take delight in you with gladness.

With his love, he will calm all fears.

He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.

We have a dad that rejoices over us, he smiles over us.

And this morning, as he rejoices over us right now, we're gonna rejoice over him and just worship him one more time.

And so let's pray and go about it.

God, thank you so much.

Father, Daddy, thank you so much.

You love us, you adopted us, we're your kids.

And that's just awesome.

It's incredible just to know that we're yours, that we belong to you.

And so this morning, Father, we just say that you're an you're an amazing dad.

And we love you so much.

And just like little kids, we just want to reach out our arms and ask that you would give us more love.

We praise you.

Jesus, you're amazing.

We love you.

We thank you for everything you've done for us.

And we just pray all this in your name, Jesus.

Amen.