Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (18 page)

For the rest of my drive, I can honestly say I felt as though I had beaten condemnation at its own game. This was something I could recover from and learn from.

Of course, I would have preferred to have never thrown the fit in the first place. Ideally, I’d have seized the
kairos
moment and done a Holy Ghost Christmas rain dance with Graham. I’d have made up a song with him about how Jesus cleans up all the trash in our lives and would have woven in some anti-litter messaging. I’d have set it to the tune of “Rudolph,” substituting the names of the apostles in the place of Dasher and Dancer and Prancer. Most important, I’d have Instagrammed Graham during the cleanup effort, using hashtags like #daddyslittlehelper and #InstaGraham.

Would have. Could have. Should have.

This is the language of condemnation underscored by the passivity of regret.

It’s a dead language.

The thing is, you can’t un-sin. You can only repent.

And every time you do, you find that God doesn’t leverage our sins against us like the chatterbox does. His
kindness
leads us to repentance. He leverages grace against our sin to bring us to deeper dependency upon Him.

Furthermore, even though there are consequences for our sins, they’re usually
not as irreversible as the chatterbox would have us believe. Even when the damage is severe, God’s grace is sufficient to rebuild us. To modify something I heard my friend Brian say in a sermon: The chatterbox takes what is glorious and ruins it. But God takes what is ruined and turns it into something glorious.

When I finally arrived at my in-laws’ home that day, there was no firing squad. Only macaroni and cheese alongside the honey-baked ham.

I apologized to Holly. I told her I was wrong and really out of line. I was so sorry for being mean to her when she had only been trying to be extra helpful. I could tell she felt hurt—which I hated—but I could also tell it wasn’t going to be the end of the world or a permanent mark on our marriage record. She is much too mature to judge my character on just one incident. She didn’t erase from her memory all the times I
have
responded to tough situations in a Christlike way just because of this one time I didn’t.

She forgave me, and thankfully my outburst didn’t ruin Christmas in Whoville after all.

P.S. As an experiment, I just summoned Graham, who is now six years old, out to the porch. I read him this story out loud for a quick fact check. I was anxious to see how much he recalled and exactly how he recalled it. He says he remembers the packing peanuts. But he doesn’t remember the bad words or the flying iPhone. He giggled when I read his lines.

But he did have one thing to add: “You know what I remember, Daddy? I remember how bad I had to use the bathroom while we drove to DeeDee and Pa’s. Do you remember that?”

I’m not saying it’s no big deal to freak out in front of your kids or disrespect your wife. And I’m aware that the incident I just relayed is only one example of one kind of sin and the shame that resulted from it. To some it may seem like a mild infraction with a relatively happy ending. (
Is that the worst thing you’ve ever done? Peanuts, bro
.) Let me assure you, it’s not the worst thing I’ve done, said, or thought. It’s just one snapshot for the purpose of analysis.

On the other hand, those who don’t struggle much with rage or anger might find my actions appalling and unforgivable. A preacher using foul language in
front of his child might be enough reason to burn this book and lose all interest in any further insight I have to offer.

I’d understand.

But we each have our garbage. Some seems to be heaped higher and smell stronger than others. It depends on your vantage point. To God, sin is sin. We all fall short.

The point is, regardless of our particular variety of temptation and condemnation, the Enemy wants to magnify our failures to the millionth power with his exaggerations so he can pervert the power of the Spirit’s conviction. Ignoring the Enemy’s accusations is impossible. Besides, we don’t want to minimize the nature or ramifications of sin. But we must develop the habit of separating our sense of worth from our appraisal of our behavior. It’s the only way we can rightly deal with our sin practically, confident in the fact that God has already
dealt
with it eternally. Now He deals with us, not according to what our sins deserve, but according to what His love decided—on the cross.

I relate so much to this observation by theologian A. W. Pink: “The great mistake made by most of the Lord’s people is in hoping to discover
in themselves
that which is to be found in Christ alone.”
²

A believer who is equally convinced of these two realities—sin is serious, but Christ is enough—is the Enemy’s worst nightmare.

In seminary one of my professors told me about a clever scene in the film adaptation of
Fiddler on the Roof
.

Tevye, the key figure, is delivering milk to the villagers. In a conversation that follows, one of the townsmen, Avram, tells the others that Jews in a nearby village were expelled from their homes.

One of the men says, “Why should I break my head for the outside world? Let the outside world break its own head.”

Tevye agrees, “He is right.”

At that point a young man named Perchik, an outsider, steps up and says, “Nonsense. You can’t close your eyes to what’s happening in the world.”

Tevye replies, “He is right.”

Avram answers back, pointing out the obvious contradiction: “He’s right
and
he’s right? How can they
both
be right?”

Smirking, Tevye responds, “You know, you are
also
right.”
³

I find myself, as the apostle Paul did in Romans 7, caught in a contradiction. I hear the things God has spoken about me, and I want so badly to believe them. I want to believe that I’m filled with the Spirit, as He says I am. But if I’m filled with the Spirit, why am I so often led by my selfishness? Why are my motives constantly compromised by socially acceptable expressions of envy and subtle manifestations of greed? If what God says about me is right, why can’t I
live
the way I claim to believe?

That’s when the other voice speaks up—the voice of condemnation.
This stuff you believe about how you’re filled with the Spirit is a lot of hocus-pocus, isn’t it? If not, why isn’t it working for you? Even your good deeds aren’t as good as you would have others believe. If you’re filled with the Spirit, why would you
[insert recent act of selfishness—we all have plenty to choose from]
? And if you’re really a follower of Christ, then why wouldn’t you
[insert recent missed opportunity to glorify God]?

I have God’s Word telling me I’m seated with Christ in heavenly places, free from blame and clear of accusation, a new creation, a changed man, by the power of Jesus.

On the contrary, I’ve got the chatterbox accusing me of all kinds of shortcomings—all the ways my heart is incongruent with God’s Word, all the old habits that still persist in my daily life. And the worst part about this chatter is that so much of it is
true
!

I want to shout with the villager Avram:
They can’t
both
be right!

And the dilemma is even more complicated. Because I’ve spent so much of my life consumed by the voice of condemnation, my ability to distinguish is corrupted. How can I tell condemnation from conviction?

Like any thief, no matter how skilled or experienced, condemnation always leaves a few clues at the crime scene.

You just have to know where to look.

Have you ever heard of Harold Staley? Well, it’s high time you did. Not only was he my boyhood guitar teacher, but he’s also the former front man of the Imitation Temptations. That might not mean much to you, but in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, where I grew up, the ITs were it.

At least that’s how it seemed to an eight-year-old like me.

And why wouldn’t everybody feel the same way? Each Fourth of July they rocked the Moncks Corner Street Dance at the old train depot like it was Wembley Arena.

They wore fancy white tuxedos with tails, and it seemed like a magic trick to me every time Harold hit the high note on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” (“When he
di-i-i-i-i-i-ied
, all he left us was a-lo-oh-one.”)

Plus, they were backed by Gene, Jack, Donny, and Truman—the Customs 4.

Every little boy needs real-life superheroes—and the Imitation Temptations were mine.

So you can imagine how completely crushed I was when Harold finally explained to me why they were called the
Imitation
Temptations. Since Moncks Corner is more than eight hundred miles from Motown, I never had any reason to suspect that my musical heroes were a cheap knockoff of a
real
group from a million years ago. Learning this was traumatizing, like when you first find out about Santa Claus or Donald Trump’s hair.

Of course, growing up means finding out that much of what you thought was real is not. A lot of things you thought were awesome aren’t so much. You learn to test for authenticity because survival in adulthood requires it.

Likewise, maturity in Christ is largely about becoming familiar enough with what is true to see through what’s false.

Here’s how the writer of Hebrews explains what it means to be established in faith:

The problem is, most believers never mature enough in their faith to distinguish between conviction and condemnation, good and evil.

Condemnation’s greatest talent is
imitation
. Conviction is the work of the Holy Spirit. Condemnation is the Enemy’s best impersonation of the Holy Spirit’s work. And the chatterbox is as adept at trying to sound like the Holy Spirit as Harold Staley and the boys were at nailing the chime harmonies of “My Girl.”

I like the way Jerry Bridges describes it in his book
The Pursuit of Holiness
: “The Holy Spirit makes us more aware of our lack of holiness to stimulate us to deeper yearning and striving for holiness. But Satan will attempt to use the Holy Spirit’s work to discourage us.”
¹

In an earlier chapter about fear, we began to explore the contrast between the Enemy’s threats and God’s whispers. In fact, throughout the book we’ve been drawing an extended contrast. By learning to distinguish between the way God speaks and the way the Enemy speaks, we move toward words of life and grow in the ways of God. Now I want to continue that contrast, digging a little deeper into how this applies specifically to condemnation.

I have a friend named Henry Cloud, who is a well-known Christian psychologist. Recently he was at our church, teaching a seminar based on his book
Boundaries for Leaders
. Toward the end of his last session, he started explaining something called “learned helplessness” and the three
p’
s of negative thinking. I was captivated because so much of what he was sharing coalesced with what I’ve been learning about the chatterbox.

Henry explains in his book how chronic, ongoing failure causes “ ‘software’
changes in the brain, and negativity seeps in. And when you have negative expectations, a different chemical cocktail gets brewed in your brain. The result is not just a temporary sense of feeling like ‘life sucks,’ but a fundamental change in outlook and how experiences get processed.”
²

That’s good stuff—but it was the three
p’
s that really got my attention. Citing a study by researcher Martin Seligman, Cloud categorizes negative thinking styles using the following three descriptors:

I want to spend the rest of this chapter talking in depth about those three words.