Let me add my welcome to everybody at all of our locations. I am loving the ‘Voices’ series. Last weekend, Bob Goff blew us away. Next weekend, Lysa TerKeurst, New York Times bestselling author is going to be a huge blessing. But this weekend, you are in for a treat. It is so wonderful to have the Tiller family with us. We have become friends over the last several months and I love their hearts and their stories. Revelation 12 says that we overcome the enemy by the blood of the Lamb and by the Word of our testimony. I think our testimonies are so critical. So tonight, we are in for an incredible treat as John comes and shares the story of their family and some of the challenges they’ve faced but the way they have overcome. So would you give a huge NCC welcome to John Tiller as he comes to share with us?
[John]
Thanks Pastor Mark. Isn’t it cool to be in church on Saturday night! I’ll tell you what, I like church and I like theater. I like movies. Our lives are kind of like making a movie. We all have dreams and plans for our lives, a script for how we think things in our lives should go. A lot of times, things stay on script and sometimes they go off script and when that happens, like actors in a movie, we need to do a little ‘improv’ improvise, make a few adjustments to account for the things we didn’t plan for. Most of the time, life goes right back on script and it’s no big deal. But sometimes when life goes off script, it goes so far off script that it involves pain, real pain, and we’re just not sure what to do.
In 2003 at 29 years old, my life was going pretty much according to the script I had envisioned. It might be something like the way you’ve envisioned your script. I had a great business. I had a great wife. I mean, I had a great wife and I had a great business! I had a nice home on a few acres. I even had an SUV with Onstar and heated leather seats! Life was pretty good. But best of all, I had a perfect healthy three year old baby boy named Eli. Eli wasn’t just any baby body. You see, much like Pastor prayed for a few moments ago, we had lost a baby early on in our marriage. It took us five years of deep agonizing prayer before God gave us this son and he was perfectly healthy. Now he was three years old and life was going even better than I had envisioned. But scripts can change at just a moment’s notice. Take a look.
[video clip of Eli] [video of news clips about Eli falling from a second-story window]
That was not the script that I had planned for me or for my family. On an unseasonably warm morning in January of 2003, we left one window open in our house. My son was playing in his second-story playroom over the garage and his mom was in just the next room working on the computer when she heard an unusual silence. She went to check it out. She walked into the room and called for Eli and there was no answer. She quickly scanned the room and all of his toys were spread all over the place like normal, but there was one toy that was conspicuously out of place. He had one of those little plastic Playschool table and chairs sets and he had taken one of the chairs and pulled it all the way across the room and under that one window. Her fears came true when she looked up at that window and she saw that the protective window screen was missing. She went over and looked out the window and 13 feet below laid our only child, our precious three year old, lifeless. She ran down the stairs grabbing the phone to call 911. That day I was working in my real estate business. I was interviewing for the job of selling a large property. I was walking the perimeter of 27 acres and I remember my phone kept buzzing but I was with the owner interviewing for the job and I kept thinking, ‘Can’t these person just leave me alone? Don’t they know I’m busy?’ It just kept buzzing. After the appointment, I got in my SUV and I drove to the end of the long driveway and I had several messages. The first one was no big deal, it was a good friend just asking to do lunch. The next two were the message that would change my life forever. They were Trisha, my wife, in a panicked voice, ‘John come quick, Eli has fallen from a window! Please hurry!’ The next one in an agonizing voice, ‘John the police and the rescue squad are here, they are taking him to the hospital, please meet us there.’ It was like standing in the surf and being hit from behind by a gigantic wave. I didn’t know what was going on but I knew that it was not good. So I threw my truck into gear and headed toward the hospital and continued to listen to my messages. The next one came in a stoic voice, ‘John this is Virginia State Police Special Agent Adams, your son has been insured and he is being med-flown to the Medical College of Virginia. Your wife and her mother are with me. Please meet them there.’ I thought, ‘Wow, this must be really bad if they’ve decided to med-flight him to a university hospital.’ The next message though I was totally unprepared for. It was the Chaplain at the university hospital telling me where to meet her when I got there. You see, I didn’t have much experience with Chaplains and hospitals and how that all worked. The only time I thought a Chaplain called was when your loved one had already died. This was devastating! My life had just gone way off script! What do you do when life goes so far off script that you don’t know what to do?
Experts say that in crisis, we go back to what we know or what it is that we truly believe. I was at the bottom of the bottom and my world was spinning out of control. All I could think to do was pray, and I remember that prayer on that drive. ‘God, I don’t’ know what’s going on. I don’t know if he is dead or alive. Please don’t let him die! It just wouldn’t make any sense! But God I know, after what we’ve been through, You love him even more than I do, so no matter what happens, I trust You and I will continue to serve You no matter what.’ I did all that I knew to do. I remembered that Psalm 22:3 where it says that God inhabits the praises of his people and I needed God more than ever before so I turned up the worship music in my cd player as loud as I could for the rest of the drive to the hospital.
Many people hear that story and they have one of two reactions to how I responded, they either say, ‘John, you are super spiritual! I hope if I was ever in a situation like that I could handle it the same way.’ Or they say, ‘Come on man! Seriously? Your kid’s life is hanging on the line and you just turned up the music and praised God? Right.’ Well, I’m not super spiritual. I have struggles every day just like everyone else. And at the time, I couldn’t explain my response either, but after thinking about it, I think that my response was actually predictable and I think that yours would be too.
Leadership expert John Maxwell makes a case in his book Today Matters that we really only make a handful of true decisions in life. We spend the rest of our lives managing those decisions that we’ve already made. We might make a decision to live out our faith or to live healthy and to eat right and exercise, to take care of our family, to serve others or to manage our money well. But there are only a handful of true decisions in life that we make and then beyond that, we simply manage those decisions.
In 1519, Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortez set out on the last leg of his trip to Vera Cruz, Mexico from Cuba. He had 500 soldiers and 100 sailors and 16 horses and 11 ships. They had set out to conquer the largest known land and treasure in the world from the Aztec Indians. If they could capture this land and this treasure, it would be the biggest thing anyone had ever done. In fact, for 600 years, others had tried to conquer this exact same land and all had failed. Cortez reminded his men on the way that if they could capture this land and this treasure, it would change their lives and the lives of their families forever. As they landed in Mexico, he needed to give a pretty good rally speech. In his speech, he gave three words that would demand commitment, three words that would eliminate the option to fail. Those three words in his final speech, “Burn the ships!” “If we are to go back, we will go back on their ships!” So they set fire to the ships that they had sailed in on. They were committed to their goal and to their new lives. No matter the cost, even if the cost was life itself.
You see, our decision to follow Christ is much the same. When we make a decision to follow Him, we’ve got to burn the ships to our past without Him.
Eight years before my son’s accident, Trisha and I knew we wanted to have a family. And we knew that going to church was probably a good thing to do if we wanted to start a family. So we did. I thought maybe even I could get my ticket punched to go to heaven someday if I really did well when I went to church. What happened though is I really got a lot more than my ticket punched. You see, those people in that church, they loved on me and they gave me time to check out these claims that Jesus made about Himself. Then when the time was right, they let me know that God has an imperative, an imperative for each of us to make a decision about our own faith and I knew it was time for me to make a decision. There were two things in the Bible that I knew I would have to believe on faith or choose not to believe. See, I figured out early on that God is bigger than my own understanding, so I would never understand everything there was to understand about faith. That’s why they call it faith, apparently! The created would never fully understand the Creator. So for me there were two primary decisions that I had to make. The first one is found in II Timothy 3:16-17. This is where the Bible says about itself that all Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. This means that the Bible says that the Bible is God’s Word to us, and if I was going to believe that, then I would have to treat the Bible as an instruction manual of sorts for my own life.
The second big thing I would have to take on faith is found in the gospel of John, Chapter 14 verse 6 where Jesus makes an amazing claim about Himself. He says I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. Jesus was claiming to be the only way to God, so I would have to choose to accept or deny that claim Jesus made about Himself. The question for me was, would I believe these things as truth. For me, I knew my decision had eternal consequences and I knew that even a decision to not make a decision was a decision to not follow Christ. The facts were in front of me. So that year, I decided to believe and I decided to follow Christ.
In 1519, Hernando Cortez made a decision to burn the ships to his past. Eight years before my son’s accident, I made a decision to burn the ships to my past without God.
My response that day was predictable. I was simply managing a decision that I had already made to follow God no matter what.
On that day of the accident, I arrived at the hospital to find that my son was hanging on to life. When I arrived in the emergency room, I discovered that the doctors did one and only one thing, the big issue, he fell straight on his head, none of his body was hurt except for his head. But that fall cracked his skull and it created pressure inside his brain, life-threatening swelling and pressure. So the only thing the doctors did was they drilled a hole in the top of his skull and placed a tube to drain the pressure and to drain the excess fluid. For the next three weeks, my son laid unconscious in the hospital, and no matter how hard I pressed them, those doctors could not tell me if he would survive. I wanted desperately to understand what was going on, so I began to interrogate God. Why God? Why do little boys fall from windows? Why did my little boy fall from that window? Why him? Why me? Why God why?
Maybe you’ve asked that same question in your circumstances. Why God? I looked to the Scripture for an answer and it turns out that ‘Why God’ is not a new question at all. In fact, Jesus hit it head on in John 9. It’s a fantastic chapter and I really encourage you this week to read the whole thing, but today I’m just going to talk about the first three verses. Here’s what the NIV says:
1 As Jesus went along, he saw a man who was blind. He had been blind since he was born. 2 Jesus' disciples asked him, "Rabbi, who sinned? Was this man born blind because he sinned? Or did his parents sin?"
They are asking ‘Why?’ In that day, and I think in some circles today, there are people who believe that if someone if suffering from some disease or affliction, they’ve actually committed a sin, either a sin they committed or possibly even a family sin. Jesus answers that and his answer is fascinating. He said:
3 "It isn't because this man sinned," said Jesus. "It isn't because his parents sinned. This happened so that God's work could be shown in his life.
I love how Eugene Peterson interprets Jesus’ response in his version of the Bible, The Message. He says that when the disciples asked why bad things happen, Jesus responds this way: Jesus said, "You're asking the wrong question. You're looking for someone to blame. There is no such cause-effect here. Look instead for what God can do.
See, in our humanness, we lack God’s eternal perspective. Sometimes we miss the forest of eternity for the trees of today. I think it is easy to miss the fact that there are certain things that have to happen here and now, even though they are painful because we live in a fallen world, that provide purpose for eternity. I think Jesus is saying that in this life no matter our circumstances, we’ve got to stop looking for someone or something to blame, and instead, look for what God can do.
Burn the ships and look for what God can do!
Many people literally around the world prayed for our son. God saved him! He saved his life! I’m convinced of it. But that wasn’t the end of the story. It wasn’t the end of the movie. It really just marked the beginning of a journey, the beginning of a journey where we would work and we would pray for his healing, his full and complete healing. The journey started with him having to relearn every basic human function from thought to speech to mobility. I’m really thankful he is alive, but 10 years later, despite our best efforts, despite great faith that God would heal him, he still has severe symptoms. We don’t know if he will be completely healed this side of heaven. Now, at 12 years old, he has a severe stutter. The entire left side of his body is weak from head to toe. When he walks, he walks with a cane, and for long distances he needs a wheelchair. His vision is severely impaired. His short-term memory is too impaired. He is not the well child I had in my script. Since Eli’s accident, Trisha and I have done everything humanly possible to make our son well. We’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on uninsured medical equipment. For the first three years after the accident, Trisha and Eli literally spent 80 percent of their waking hours in therapy. We had faith that he would be completely healed. We knew it was going to happen. We knew this was another miracle that God was going to perform, so we just kept praying and we kept waiting. And we waited and we waited and we knew that one day, we’d be standing in front of crowds like you saying, ‘Look what the Lord has done! He has completely healed our son.’ But that’s not what happened. The movie of our lives has been all about continuous improvisation.
We’ve met many doctors and therapists through Eli’s treatment. Every one of them would tell you that a patient’s propensity to heal is directly related to the acceptance of their condition. In other words, when we burn the ships to our old scripts and accept our new script and instead of denying that it exists or spending all of our time trying to fix it, we actually heal more quickly. After three years of doing everything we could for our son, there was still more that we could, should and would do. But it was time for us to accept his current condition and choose to live life with disability. You see, this disability was something we couldn’t remove and God was choosing to not completely heal. So we had to burn the ship to our old scripts and look for what God could do with our new script.
So for the past five years or so, we’ve accepted life with disability. That doesn’t mean that I’ve stopped praying for my son like any father in this room, I’d give my right arm to see my son heal. I’d give my own life. It’s like Jesus said though, there is no such cause and effect there either. So instead, I have to choose to look for what God can do. I’m not perfect though! There are still times when I have pity-parties for myself, times when I go back to dreaming about my old script because I think that’s better than what God can do with my new script. I’m wired to be competitive. I like to win. Winning is not everything, but, well, actually, it is! Like many fathers in this room, when I found out that I was going to have my first baby boy, I started making all the dreams and the plans in our script for how we were going to live our life together and how, eventually, we would start throwing a ball and start playing organized sports. You know those two or three or four years, those are momma’s years. I couldn’t wait for him to turn four years old so we could do all those things together and I could teach him those things, the things a dad does for his kid. Once again though, the accident changed that script. It was just unreasonable to think that Eli would be able to play any kind of sports. I remember there was a day a couple of years ago that I was driving down the road with some fathers who were friends of mine and they were talking about all the dreams and the plans that they had for their kids and how theirs kids were now playing sports and how they were achieving those goals and doing so well, and I remember thinking to myself, ‘Hello guys, don’t you see me here? I had those same dreams, those same plans for my kid and they will never be, so would you please stop talking about how great your kids are doing and all the great accomplishments they are achieving!’ I didn’t want to hear it. I was still mourning the death of my old script.
When Trisha later told me that Eli had been invited to play baseball in a league for special needs kids, I was very skeptical and very resistant. I wasn’t going to put my son on a field where he would fail. That was just wrong. There are lots of people who just don’t know what to do so they try to do things and it just doesn’t work out, and I didn’t want this to be one of those things. It would just be wrong. Turns out though that I was the one who was wrong. The Miracle League is a different kind of baseball league where the kids don’t fail at all. They come to town and the first thing they do is build a flat, rubberized field so kids with wheelchairs, canes and walkers don’t have any obstacles. And if they do fall, it’s soft. When they play, every kid has a teen-age or adult buddy that they play with. The only rules – every kid hits and every kid gets on base and every kid scores. If you saw them play, you’d call it a miracle. When I saw those kids, it makes me realize that I don’t have the problems that I think I have. I see these kids really play baseball by overcoming their physical and emotional challenges, and they are playing in a league in which they never would have otherwise been able to play. The Miracle League is one of the best examples that you’ll find of burning the ships to your old scripts and looking for what God can do.
About a year ago, the Miracle League did a black-tie fundraiser hosted by the local Richmond baseball team and it was at the Richmond Marriott and there were 450 attendees who paid $100 a plate. We still like baseball, we just invite the players in from other towns. So Daryl Strawberry was there, Major League Hall of Famer, and pitching sensation Javier Lopez was there also. Eli was asked to lead the crowd and he led the crowd in singing the crowd-favorite Take Me Out To The Ballgame. After singing the song, he told people why it is that he loves to play baseball in the Miracle League. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. He had everyone hanging on every word. By the end of the night, he had helped them raise lots of money for kids to play baseball. And by the end of the night, Eli was signing autographs with the pros!
The Miracle League is just one example of the great things that God has done through my new script. We’ve seen lots of miracles that I don’t have time to share with you all of them today, but there have been lots. And there is one thing I can tell you for sure, those miracles never would have happened if life had gone according to my old script. Burn the ships and look for what God can do!
Say that with me, burn the ships and look for what God can do. Is it time in your life? Is it time to make a decision to serve God with everything that you have? Is it time to burn the ships to your past without Him? Is there somewhere that life has gone so far off script that you weren’t sure what to do and you are looking for something or someone to blame where instead maybe it is time, instead of looking for someone or something to blame, maybe it is time to look for what God can do.
I’d like to pray with you about that now.
God, your Word says that You are the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End, that You have plans to prosper us and not plans to harm us, plans for hope and a future, but sometimes it is really hard for us to see that. Sometimes life just doesn’t go according to the script that we had hoped for. God I pray that tonight an today that You would give us courage, courage to burn the ships to our pasts of doubt and blame and courage to look instead for what You can do. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
This is my wife Trisha and our son Eli. Eli has a few words that he would like to share just for you in a song.
[Eli]
I look for God’s power every day. He is way bigger than my own understanding. God’s saved me from my accident in 2003 God basically showed me in the hospital that He truly was going to take care of me. He sure did! And it brought me here today. The song that I’m about to sing is by Chris Tomlin. It is called I Will Rise. I like this song because it talks about what will happen when we die. We will have eternal life with God in heaven. We will be praising God. But we don’t have to wait until we die for everything to be okay because we have a God who loves us and takes care of us. I hope you like this song too.
There's a peace I've come to know
Though my heart and flesh may fail
There's an anchor for my soul
I can say "It is well"
Jesus has overcome
And the grave is overwhelmed
The victory is won
He is risen from the dead
[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles' wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise
There's a day that's drawing near
When this darkness breaks to light
And the shadows disappear
And my faith shall be my eyes
Jesus has overcome
And the grave is overwhelmed
The victory is won
He is risen from the dead
[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles' wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise
And I hear the voice of many angels sing,
"Worthy is the Lamb"
And I hear the cry of every longing heart,
"Worthy is the Lamb"
[Chorus:]
And I will rise when He calls my name
No more sorrow, no more pain
I will rise on eagles' wings
Before my God fall on my knees
And rise
I will rise
[Mark]
We’ve had the privilege of sharing the stage together three times now I’ve heard John share their story and it gets me every time! Eli, thank you for blessing us! I know Chris Tomlin wrote that song but I’ll take you singing it any day! Can we express our love and appreciation to the Tiller family one more time?
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