GOD’S GIFT OF A BABY
By: C. Mason Davis
A couple were about to have their first baby. I was standing just inside the door next to her husband, hearing her scream, which made him unbelievably nervous. He kept saying to me, “Oh, she’s gonna kill me for this.” She started screaming again as she was giving birth and yelled, “I can’t do this…it’s too hard!” Just then a nurse who was in the room, leaned towards her, and said, “Oh honey, this is the easy part. What’s hard are the next 18 years.”
TODAY’S SCRIPTURE
Psalm 8:2, “Through the praise of children and infants you have created a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.”
It’s great that the Lord has plans for us, but do we always follow those plans? There’s a lot of responsibility to this scripture. Jeremiah 29:11 reads, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” It’s not up to God to raise your children for you, but for you to raise your children in the way that God has planned. There is a roadmap to these plans, and it’s called “The Bible.” It is both the mother and father that will teach their child of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Most importantly, the child will learn from the parents that God is love; God is great!” Proverbs 22:6 states, “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old, they will not turn from it.”
You would think that coming out of the nation of slavery, being liberated from Egypt would be the hard part. No! You would think that coming into a land promised to you where there were already people living in the promised land would be hard. No! Part of the judgement of those people already living in the promised land was that God was giving their land to someone else. That was part of God’s judgement on those lands of Canaan occupied by those who had chosen not to believe in God. You would think that would be the hard part. Oh no…they’re just coming to the place where they were led. You mean that coming out of Egypt and causing the Red Sea to part and becoming free from Pharoah was the hard part? No! You mean that crossing the Jordan and facing all of these foreign nations and their armies from behind every tree and every hill, that’s not the hard part? No! This is the hard part…and it starts now. In Deuteronomy 6:4-9 says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.” This is God’s word for all of God’s people. Hear it! Believe it! Live it!
Now, this depends upon your interpretation of when you think that Deuteronomy was written, and there are two very strong things and one is that this is an original document, much less Exodus and Numbers which are part of the first 5 books. But there’s another thought that says when Assyria had fallen, and at its time it had fallen off the stage of history, Judith found itself free for the first time in generations. King Josiah was leading a reformation and there is thought that there is a priest who copied what was found in the first 4 books of the Bible into the Book of Deuteronomy so you may think that you’ve heard a lot of what you’re reading is sounding familiar, and it is. You may have read a lot of this in Numbers, Leviticus, Exodus, and Genesis, and you have. It was mostly copied into a better form for all his people during his time and slid it into the rubble of the Temple that they are now repairing. And as they repaired the Temple, they discovered a new book that was written for their time. At the beginning of it, is chapter 6.
Wouldn’t you remember what God has done for you and now that you come into this new land, as you come into this new opportunity, here’s the first thing you should hear…It’s hard! The visual of this passage is chiseling. The way that an artist would chisel out a statue from a block of stone. That’s the image. Teach your children! Chisel your children! Do this so that they’ll recognize that the Lord their God is one is the thing that you talk about all the time. When you’re walking down the road, when you’re sitting in your home. When you’re getting up, when you’re going to bed, there’s conversation that is constant chiseling, happens all the time. It’s a tough moment, isn’t it? When as a parent you realize that being a parent is a life sentence. Even if this child moves out of your house, they’re always yours. You’re always Dad! You’re always Mom! And you can always tell by the way that they say “Mom, or Dad,” when you pick up the phone, what the issue is going to be. There’s a difference between “Daaaaad,” and “Dad.” There’s a difference! It’s still going to be hard, but it’s going to be hard in a different way. Being a parent is hard. Discipling those who have just committed their lives to Christ is hard. Matthew 10:18 states,“Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.”
It's easy to lash out at your child when they do something wrong. It’s easy to punish them rather than turn the other cheek. It’s easy to blame them when anything goes wrong or gets broken. Never mind that the vase that was broken was placed too close to the couch or edge of the table where it could be knocked over easily. Was it the child that placed that lamp in that place? No! You need to learn to forgive. That’s hard! Learn to forgive your children when they make mistakes because their mistakes are your mistakes. I was raised in the belief not to sweat the small stuff, and that it’s all small stuff. We are not perfect, and neither are children. In fact, children are less perfect because they are new to the world, new to life, and still in the early learning stages of life. Stop expecting your kids to be perfect! Just accept the fact that letting go of perfection is hard.
I know it’s difficult to cover all the bases when you’re raising kids. It’s difficult to know the trouble they may come into from time to time, but no matter, forgive them for the troubles they cause, for those troubles are as much your fault as it is theirs. Just to tell a child to be good and not bad, to tell them to do right and not wrong, doesn’t mean that they know enough about life to avoid all troubles of life. Even dogs, who live without sin, still wets the carpet or bites the mailman, but still, they are without sin. It is not the dog’s fault that they are bad from time to time, or they don’t mind, but it’s the fault of the dog’s owner or trainer. Parents are life’s trainer for their children. In your effort to teach your children, you mustn’t be hard on yourself when they don’t learn as fast as you think they should. We’re all different, and so are they. Don’t give up too easily. No one said that being a parent would be easy. It’s HAAAAAAARD! I ask you…doesn’t this make perfect sense? Ephesians 6:1-4 says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy a long life on the earth. Father’s, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not preaching that it’s wrong to discipline or punish your child. If reasoning or speaking to a child about their wrongdoing doesn’t have the effect you wish it had on them, there’s always the road to retribution through punishments. If the child is unphased by the “hands-off” and forgiveness approach, perhaps the “hand-on” approach may be the best punishment taught for helping a lesson to be learned from the experience. There’s going to be times when forgiveness won’t make up for the wrongs done. The threat of punishment will always be a good deterrent to bad behavior. “Spare the rod, spoil the child” is a popular saying that comes from the Bible, Proverbs 13:24, which reads, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.” The verse is about guidance and discipline. The rod can symbolize any method of discipline, such as: a cane across the backside, a ruler across the knuckles, denial of privileges, and being sent to your room or given a “time-out.” Some say that the verse means that a father who does not give their child responsibilities, hates his child. Others say that children of parents who are sympathetic but maintain firm limits were found to perform better at school, to have better social skills, and to be generally happy. When I was growing up, I was paddled a lot, and I can now admit that I deserved it. I was quite the “Hellion” as a child. I look back to my childhood knowing that my parents only wanted the best for me in life and to punish me when I was bad was always a lesson very well learned. I’m a better man today because they cared enough to follow through with punishments. Remember this if it’s all you recall from this message, but un-coachable kids become unemployable adults. Although that’s a sports metaphor, it’s true about these issues of discipline and punishment.
In biblical times, the rod was often used by shepherds to herd sheep. The main purpose of the rod was to guide the sheep and protect them from danger, not to hit them. The “staff” in the verse is a Shepard's hook used to guide.
One of the things that the pandemic did to us was to lead us to believe that we could do digital discipleship. You can’t do discipleship any other way than life on life. Maybe you can watch something and discuss it or read something and discuss it, but sooner or later there has to be a conversation that is life on life. There’s no short cut, no other way to do it, but it’s hard! The reason I keep bringing up situations of life is that it’s hard not to feel defeated by this one word…”hard.” When you realize what you wanted to accomplish and what you wanted to do is hard, it’s easier to defeat the task at hand.
Some of us like to be challenged to the point of making hard things even harder. I’ll never understand why any body would do that. I can understand that a lot of people will take the easy way out when things become too difficult or hard, but to make things harder just doesn’t make sense, to me. Too many parents park their children in front of the television to keep them distracted, and that’s like letting tv raise their kids. The same can be said for the internet. These parents are taking the easy way because being a parent, is hard.
When you come to a worship service and hear the music, especially on the piano, you may be moved to learn to play yourself. So, now you want to play the piano. How hard can it be, huh? Then you sign up for lessons and find out that you are years from playing the piano. You have to learn scales, music theory, rhythm, hand positions, finger spacing, intervals, key signatures, and having to learn how to move your fingers. And you’re going to have to practice this finger movement even when you’re sitting by yourself watching tv. If you want to learn to play the piano, it’s haaaard! It’s why most of us don’t play. We want to, but it’s just hard.
Maybe you want to get in shape. You sign up to join a gym. You hire a trainer, and about 10 minutes into your first workout you begin thinking, “Jesus, if you let me out of here right now, I promise to be really good from now on.” How many of you have left the gym after your first visit and never gone back? I know I have. Why??? It’s hard! But do you know what is even harder? Raising children! It’s HARD!!! In Psalm 127 3-5 reads, “Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.”
There’s a couple of reasons I can think of and the first is that children aren’t born fully-grown. They’re not born knowing the ways of the Lord, or the world. You have to teach a child to share. You don’t have to teach a child to grab. They know that. It’s amazing how this beautiful child you held in the hospital becomes this demon from hell. “Who is this child shaking the bars of his crib, screaming at his parents at two in the morning, every morning?” You’re asking God what you could have done so wrong that he’s this mad? So, you have to chisel who they are to be out of who they are born. It is constant! This is what you talk about when you’re in the car together. This is what you talk about when your grocery store shopping. This is what you’re talking about when you’re watching television, and I don’t just mean during the commercials, Dad. This is what you talk about when you’re doing chores around the house. This is the constant thing, the constant chiseling. There’s a lot of ways of doing it wrong, but there’s only one way to do it right. There’s one way to put on a pair of pants. But when your little boy is learning how he can find a lot of ways to do it wrong. He comes out of his room, “Daddy, I’m dressed!” “I appreciate the effort there, my man,” the dad says. “But I don’t know how you got your pants on inside-out and backwards, but you did.” There’s a lot of ways to do it wrong, and only one way to do it right. There’s going to be this constant saying of “no,” that’s not quite it, but let’s do it this way. You will say “no” a thousand times for every time you say, “yes.” You will find yourself so tired of saying “no.” Well, tough! Raising a child in the image of Christ is hard. It’s hard to because nothing of the world helps you. The entire current of world thought, of world teaching, of world’s desires is against the best for your child. The world is out to destroy our children. Make no mistake about it.
Kids start getting on social media and start comparing themselves to each other. And there’s a horrible moment when they realize that they can’t keep up with their peers. Their tempted to take their own life. The suicide rate for teens is very high, and the age of this keeps getting younger, cause our world would rather destroy them. This is war! And it’s hard!
There are only some things about your child’s formative years that you can control, but a ton of things that you can’t control. This can range from bad behavior, bad language, bad influences, and bad idols that your kids see and hear when you’re not around to use those examples as a teachable moment. These days you can’t even trust your public schools to teach proper subjects to your children. If your kids attend public schools, it’s important that you ask them what they’re being taught and investigate even further. You can’t control everything your child sees or does, but there has to be discipline, no matter.
You can’t give up! Assign the spiritual teaching of your children to spiritual professionals. Just because you take them to church doesn’t mean that they are really getting what they need. The most influential person in my spiritual life was my mother. The most influential person in my faith was also my mother. So, parents, pay attention. Don’t just assume that they’re getting what they need in life by just going to church. Don’t just take anything for granted. It’s about your kids. It’s about God’s great gift to you. The soundtrack of my life is all in the hymnal at church because that’s how my mother showed me it should be, through example. More than 18 years of example it took to develop my spiritual life and my faith. She never stopped. She never gave up. She never took me for granted. She never assumed when it came to her kids. It was chiseled into each one of us. To me, that’s the greatest gift she could ever have given to me. And believe me, I was not easy, either. Like most kids, I thought I knew it all. I thought I knew better than her. So, for her to have any success with me…it was HARD! 3 John 1:4 says, “I have no greater joy than this: to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”
Do you know what it takes to make a diamond? A lot of time, and a lot of pressure. Joseph told his brothers that time, when they realized who he was in Egypt, that “When you meant to destroy me, God made for good. The pressure you put on me to destroy my life is the pressure that God used to make me the diamond that I am.” The pressure that the world puts on our families, the pressure that the world puts on our children, and the pressure that the world puts on you and me is the same pressure that God uses to make diamonds. And…it’s worth it. If you look back on your life and say that you had done everything possible, then you’ll be alright. What you can’t live with are regrets, by then it’s too late. It’s hard in the discipline to become the diamond that you’re called to be.
I pray to all you parents that you raise your children in honor of God. Amen!
