Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (10 page)

She asked, “What are you typing? You’re really going for it, huh, mate?”

“I’m trying to write a book,” I answered. “But I’m not much of an author, so I’m struggling.”

“A book, you say? So you’ve never written one before?”

“Well, actually this is my third.”

“Hmm. Sounds like you must be a pretty good author if it’s your third. You’ve already written two more books than most people.”

It was the simplest exchange. But it snapped me out of the chatterbox-induced funk.
You know what, she’s right. I
am
an author. A
published
one
!

And I kept writing. That’s why you’re still reading.

Sometimes all we need is a basic paradigm shift—back to what we already know is true, what’s always been true, but in a way that’s personalized and immediate.
Sometimes that’s all it takes to crash the chatterbox enough that we can get on with our work, get back to our calling, and resume our relationship with God. And the more of God’s Word we know and the more we’re reminding ourselves of His truths, the less dependent we become on others to snap us out of our self-induced negative spirals. We can begin to rely on God’s Spirit to renew our minds. So we can get back to writing our books, producing our albums, raising our families, loving our neighbors, coaching teams, studying biology, or whatever God has called us to do in any given season.

When your perspective is preloaded with the Word of God, lies lose their power over your life.

But it’s obviously not just our knowledge of what is written in the Word of God that causes the lies to lose their power. Anyone who has sat through Bible classes, read Christian books, heard weekly sermons, or even immersed himself in spiritual-development programs, only to find that change is not the automatic result of knowledge, can tell you that.

The power of Jesus’s defense wasn’t simply that He knew what the Word said but that He knew who He was in relation to that Word.

And here’s where a little biblical context can give us great insight. What event happened just before Jesus was tempted by Satan in the wilderness?

He was baptized in the affirmation of His Father in the Jordan River.

The last event before Jesus’s first showdown with Satan was the remarkable scene we studied in the last chapter—when the voice of God pronounced the words that have always been and would always be true about the Father’s affection for and acceptance of Jesus:

It was as if the Father was preparing Him for the temptation He was about to face.

So not only did Jesus know what was true:
It is written
. He also knew it was true for Him:
I am the Son of God
.

Maybe that’s what’s been missing for many of us. Maybe it’s been missing for you. You know what is true, but in some way it has never become true for
you
. You know what is written, but you don’t fully embrace who you are and how those two connect.

Other people
are meant to have joy, hear from God, and be used by Him in ways that are significant and memorable. Other people are equipped to do good works, endowed with spiritual gifts, and blessed in order that they can be a blessing. It’s not so much “Did God really say … ” but “Did God really say
to you
?”

Perhaps God wants to baptize you in His affirmation now. To take you beyond a realization that the Word of God is true and into a belief that the Word of God is true
for you
. It is at the intersection of knowing
what is written
and
who you are
that you locate the lies of the chatterbox. Once you find those lies, you can replace them. You can overcome them.

And while we don’t have the benefit of being the only begotten Son of God, we are children of the same Father. We have what the book of Romans calls “the Spirit of sonship.”
⁹
The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.
¹⁰
You can hear it if you listen for it. It is the same Spirit that presided, in the form of a dove, over the baptism of Jesus. It’s within you, working for you, all the time, to remind you.

And you know how it goes:

Paper beats rock. Rock beats scissors. Scissors beats paper.

Dove beats serpent.

In which we overpower

the lies of fear

with the truth

God says He will
.

Discovering who you are in Christ is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing, life-giving, often paradoxical, and sometimes brain-bending experience. Hopefully, we’re starting to grasp some of the clear yet counterintuitive teachings of Scripture about the way God sees us. An understanding of our identity that is based, not on what we see in ourselves, but on who God says we are.

God says I am His child, totally loved, and actually liked, by my heavenly Father
.

God says I am chosen to fulfill His special purpose in spite of my weakness
.

Initially, this revelation of the love of God can be hard to receive and believe. It can be even harder to nurture and sustain. Using any means necessary, the Enemy will attempt to uproot, choke, and scorch our budding understanding of our infinite potential in Christ and our inestimable worth in His eyes.

He has a seemingly endless supply of tools he uses to strip the seeds of the implanted Word of God. We’ll talk about these different tools in detail throughout the rest of the book. But whatever tool he uses, and however he uses them, they all operate on one power source: fear.

Fear was the auto response of Adam and Eve after they were deceived by the serpent. As the voice of God called out to locate His children, who had become hopelessly lost in lies, the force of fear was competing for their attention and dominating their decisions.

This is a crucial insight into the way fear works. After the Enemy has hung a question mark over God’s intentions and instructions, fear seizes the opportunity to isolate us and push us into hiding—just as it did with Adam.

I heard you, but because I was afraid, I hid
.

We’ll never hear God’s voice above all the others if we’re tuned in to the frequencies of fear. If the lie is the chatterbox’s native tongue, fear is its favorite song. And the refrain only has two words: “What if …”

Overpowering fear is the focus of this section. If we’re going to put our roots down deeper and deeper into the soil of who God says we are, we’ll have to learn to push past all varieties of heart-hardening fears.

As I’m sure you already know, fear is an insidious force that has silenced the dreams and sabotaged the development of so many of God’s children. But the confession we’re about to activate gives us access to a much greater force—the counteractive force of faith:

God says He will
.

I was nine years old when Hurricane Hugo hit Charleston, South Carolina. It came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane, and before it left the state, it had killed twenty-seven people, left nearly a hundred thousand homeless, and done $10 billion in damage.

The thing is, I had to look up all that factual data about those effects of the storm. But there are other aftereffects that I remember as though they happened twenty-five minutes—not almost twenty-five years—ago.

I remember how, just before the power went out, Charlie Hall, our local weatherman, was pleading with the passion of John the Baptist for people to evacuate
immediately
. I remember begging my parents to listen to him and being confused when they tried to explain how our town, Moncks Corner, was not among those that were being told to evacuate. I insisted that we would die if we didn’t leave right then. They reassured me, repeatedly, that we wouldn’t die, that we’d just have to spend the night in the hallway of our three-bedroom house, and it would be a long and scary night.

To be sure, it was the longest and scariest night in South Carolina history
for me, and I can’t imagine how long it was for my parents. Because they had to endure not only the thunder and lightning but also the incessant questions of a petrified nine-year-old. It baffled me that my little brother, Matt, could sleep, leaning against the rattling walls in that tiny, pitch-black hallway. Not even the oak tree roused him as it crashed on Mr. Buddy’s Pontiac next door. He woke up the next morning, stretched, and asked, “Is it over yet?”

We all laughed. It was over and we were all right.

Lots of trees were down, but that created a backyard wonderland that I thoroughly enjoyed throughout the cleanup process. The power was out for three days, but that meant no school for three days, and the trade-off was, for me, a happy one. A little damage to our home and neighborhood, but nothing irreparable. Massive damage and even casualties in surrounding areas, but what can a nine-year-old comprehend about that?
The storm is over, we’re all safe, and school’s out, baby
.

What I’m trying to say is, I didn’t know anything major was wrong with me until Ryan Haynes called a few days later and invited me over to spend the night. Then I felt it. It was the kind of mule kick you get in your stomach as a grownup when you’re in a crowded place, and you haven’t been paying attention for a few seconds, and you look up to discover your toddler isn’t in sight. Sheer panic. A flash flood of fear broke loose in my heart because suddenly I realized that I didn’t want to spend the night away from home.

I gave Ryan a made-up reason that I couldn’t come. Then I hung up the phone, wondering what was wrong with me.

“Who was that, honey?” my mom wanted to know. After I told her that it was Ryan and that he had asked me to spend the night and that I had said no, she tilted her head and squinted at me like she was trying to make sense of a map that identified Boston as the capital of South Carolina.

“But you love going over to Ryan’s house. He’s one of your best friends. Why did you say no?”

Whatever excuse I offered her was insufficient. I know I didn’t tell her the truth, because I was humiliated to admit that, for the first time in my life, I was scared to death to spend the night away from home.

“You need to get out of the house, Son. It’ll be good for you.” (Possible translation: “I need you out of the house, Son. You’re driving me crazy.”)

“Call Ryan back,” she said. “Tell him you’ll be over there in thirty minutes. I’ll take you.”

I desperately wanted to spill it all to my mom—how the idea of spending the night away from home was making me want to throw up, and could we just keep this between us? Instead, I got in the front seat of the Dodge Caravan and rode silently to the Haynes house.

After I walked in the front door, everything felt better. Mr. Gene was cooking chili, and Ryan had selected our teams for Tecmo Bowl and paused it on the kickoff screen.

Everything went great until we turned the lights off to go to sleep. That’s when I started to feel very, very sick. At least that’s what I told Mrs. Linda when I woke her up and asked her if I could call my parents to come pick me up. The truth was, I wasn’t sick at all; I was scared out of my mind about something I couldn’t quite describe and didn’t have the guts to own up to. I had been lying in the dark for thirty minutes and crying quietly into my pillow, hoping Ryan couldn’t hear me. I was convinced that something terrible would happen to my parents and my brother while I was gone and I’d never see them again. I felt sorry that I hadn’t told them a better good-bye, and I felt awful that I hadn’t been a better son.

If my nine-year-old emotional state sounds irrational and melodramatic to you, just imagine how it feels for me to be typing it, finally admitting it.

Mom came to get me, and I could tell by her questions she suspected my story wasn’t 100 percent accurate. Her suspicion was confirmed when, for an entire year, I absolutely could not make it through an entire night at someone else’s house. Not Jeffrey’s, not Hamilton’s, not Ryan’s. My mother and I would prep and talk about it before I left, and I’d resolve to get it together
this
time, yet it would always end the same way—with Mom picking me up or someone’s dad dropping me off, probably swearing as he peeled out of the driveway, “That’s the last time you’re inviting that Furtick boy to spend the night.” I wouldn’t have blamed him.

But I’d come home dejected, each failed sleepover feeling like a dishonorable discharge. I’d see in the light of the morning how silly and unwarranted my panic had been. But that knowledge didn’t keep the panic at bay the next time I was alone in the dark in someone else’s house.

Gradually, of course, I got my nerve back. And although I don’t get invited to many sleepovers these days, I’m confident now I could pull one off without incident if called upon.