Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (19 page)

The Scriptures suggest that children are a gift from the Lord. I affirm this, because where else would I get new material for sermon illustrations every week? I’ve learned to observe my children closely. Who knows when they’ll say or do the perfect thing at the perfect moment that illustrates a future subject I’m preaching or writing about?

Like just now. I opened my laptop to start writing about these three p’s. On the other side of the yard, I noticed that Holly had just set up a cornhole board we borrowed. Then I noticed that Elijah was mindlessly jumping on the board. The next thing I know, Holly is reprimanding him, with appropriately mild severity, while folding up the now-broken, inoperative cornhole board.

I silently debated whether to jump in and offer my disciplinary assistance. But I quickly realized it wouldn’t be necessary. Elijah was soon apologizing for his actions through tears.

Then I spoke up: “It’s okay, buddy. We forgive you. But you will be helping us pay for a new one. That will help you be more careful with others’ stuff.”

He agreed to chip in, as if it were a suggestion, apologized some more, and then walked away to continue sulking. But what he said under his breath next is the reason I’m telling you about this: “What’s
wrong
with me? I
always
mess up
everything
!”

In two short sentences my son had just outlined the three
p’
s of condemnation with a simple profundity that was well worth the cost of the damaged cornhole board.

The three
p’
s of condemnation—from the lips of an eight-year-old. I hope
this doesn’t feel too elementary, but I’m going to break down his statement. I’m guessing something he said will remind you of your own condemning chatterbox.

P
ERSONAL:
“What’s wrong with ME?”

He didn’t say, “I need to calm down a little and be more careful and responsible.”

Instead, he turned it into a reflection of his deep-seated inadequacy. “I broke the board; therefore, something is fundamentally wrong with me. I’ll probably end up living in a trash dump with Wreck-It Ralph.”

P
ERMANENT:
“I ALWAYS …”

Not “Stuff that I stomp on seems to have about a 70 percent casualty rate. So from now on I won’t assume every item I see is a dance floor in disguise.”

Rather, he’s tattooing a new motto on his forehead: “I break stuff … 
all the time … all the time …
break stuff.”

P
ERVASIVE:
“… mess up EVERYTHING!”

He didn’t focus on the issue at hand—his rambunctious disregard for personal property.

Nope. He identified himself as the source of all human unhappiness. (Well, at least next time you see
everything
messed up, you’ll know who to blame.)

I’m well aware that the boy was likely turning up the drama in an effort to minimize his consequences. And that he is simply fulfilling one of his purposes on earth by destroying things, thereby helping me more fully appreciate the patience and sacrifice of my own parents. I suppose I should thank him for the added perspective.

But don’t you find yourself often entertaining these same types of personal, permanent, pervasive thoughts about your failures and mistakes?

I’m such a …

I always …

I never …

Now everything is …

If we’re going to grow in Christ, we can’t keep thinking and speaking like little children. Maturing in Christ means developing the ability to decode the Spirit’s conviction even as condemnation fills the airwaves of our minds with chatter. It
means getting beneath our sweeping feelings of shame, applying the mercy of God to our weakness, and moving forward in greater strength.

So let’s consider each of these individual characteristics. How, specifically, do they relate to condemnation?

The three
p’
s are a concise and insightful analysis of the general nature of negative thinking, for sure. But they also provide us with a precise framework for detecting condemnation in our lives. And the better we get at recognizing condemnation, the more confidently we can root it out. Then God can replace it with something
true
.

Later, imitator.

Condemnation will always prompt you to speak in the first person about your failures and flaws. To a degree, this is appropriate, even helpful.

In the previous chapter we established our responsibility to take our sin seriously. We’ll never cure condemnation by blowing off the internal warning signs when something in our hearts isn’t right. We’ll only give the Accuser more ammunition.

Furthermore, in many respects, God expects us to take our sin
personally
. Blaming other people or circumstances for our actions can be even more destructive than blowing them off. Jesus said to take the log out of our own eyes before pointing out a speck in someone else’s.
⁴
I say that we need to put down the magnifying glass, with which we so thoroughly evaluate the faults of others, and pick up a mirror. Michael Jackson would have agreed—when something needs to change, the best place to start looking for a solution is within. Take a look at yourself.

So, obviously it’s necessary—and profitable—to own up to our dysfunctions.

The problem comes when we go beyond confessing our sin (which means agreeing with God about it) and begin defining ourselves according to the sin. In this way we allow our lives to be defined by what we
did
rather than anticipating our tomorrows according to what Christ has done. We allow the Enemy to rob us of the value of grace’s great exchange, which is the central proposition of Christianity. We stop learning from our mistakes under the tutelage of the Spirit. And we start accepting labels created by the lies of condemnation.

In her book
Unglued
, my friend Lysa TerKeurst writes about the limitation of living with the wrong kinds of labels. She explains how labels “imprison us in categories that are hard to escape”:

What labels have you been allowing condemnation to slap on you lately? Wouldn’t it be nice to start peeling them off and hand the label maker back to God? After all, isn’t the manufacturer and owner of an object the only one who has the right to label it? And doesn’t God occupy both of those roles in our lives?

You see, if
I
is the most common word in the chatterbox’s vocabulary,
God
is the most conspicuously absent. When we stop identifying primarily with our new life in Christ, our performance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with condemnation calling the shots.

Our sin is our personal responsibility, but in Christ it is no longer the center of our identity.

I can’t improve on this synopsis by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung: “We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.”

Freedom is not to be found in denial; neither is freedom to be found in deprecation. It is only to be gained by embracing the paradox of the Cross.

It is a paradox the apostle Paul summarized brilliantly in one of the best-loved verses in the New Testament:

This is the same Paul who said the following about himself in a letter to his protégé Timothy:

How can the same man deem himself the “worst of sinners” and yet so confidently claim full association with Christ? The key is in the phrase “Christ … in me.”

Yes, this seems to be a contradiction. But there is a difference between a contradiction and a paradox. A contradiction
cannot
be true. A paradox
appears
as if it cannot be true, but something beneath the surface makes it so.

The Christian life is a perpetual paradox. I am crucified, yet I live. I have sinned and continue to sin, yet I am without blame. Not because of the good in me, but because of Christ in me.

In the paradox of my failed performance and God’s faithful promise, Christ is revealed. The more He is revealed, the more I become like Him.

So I acknowledge what I was, but I place greater weight on what Christ did to change who I am. And I am being conformed to His image in the process.

None of this excuses me from the responsibility to change. But it liberates me from the bondage of lies so that change is actually possible.

First person is the default voice of condemnation. But identifying the tense condemnation speaks in is a little trickier because the voice of the Enemy traverses
all tenses. He loves to project the past into the future, thus squeezing out the potential of the present.

In other words, condemnation creates hopelessness by convincing you that change is unlikely or impossible. Condemnation interrogates in rooms without windows, making you feel as though you’ll never see another sunrise.

In contrast, every time God calls out a deficiency in your life, you can be assured that He is simultaneously offering an invitation. He Himself will fill the voids He is identifying—if you will cooperate. I could provide pages of examples of these kinds of invitations, but this one is my favorite. In these verses the prophet Isaiah is pleading with rebellious Israel on God’s behalf:

The book of Isaiah delivers oracle after oracle of impending punishment for the people’s repeated violation of their covenant with God. Yet, in the final section of his prophecy, Isaiah sounds the first notes of the invitation hymn: “Come.”

That’s God’s favorite way to start conversations with His children: “Come.”

By contrast, condemnation will never call you to come into God’s presence. It will convince you that you have nowhere to go because of where you’ve been. One of my friends told me that the most prominent feature of depression is the unremitting belief that things will never get any better than they are right now. In the same way, one of the most prominent features of condemnation is the unshakable sensation that I’ll never change from who I am right now. I’ve always struggled with this; therefore, I’ll never conquer it.

Condemnation is the older brother in the parable of the prodigal son. He
wrongly believes—and wants to make you believe—that because you went to the pigpen, the pigpen should be your permanent mailing address.

But it’s not his house we’re returning to or his rules we’re abiding by. The Father makes a different proclamation:

Now that’s more like it. The past is buried (he
was
dead); the present is resurrected (he
is
alive). That’s the way the Father speaks. He understands the correct usage of tenses. What
was
does not determine what
will be
, because God is in every moment, redeeming it for His glory.

And it gets even better than that. Not only does the Spirit set us free from chains that have bound us to our past, but He actually unleashes the Father’s vision of our future into our present reality.

That’s why Jesus could say about Peter, “I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it,” only to directly correct and confront Peter just verses later: “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns” (Matthew 16:18, 23).

Peter was completely missing the point of why Jesus came to earth. His priorities were in the wrong place, and Jesus called him something much worse than a silly goose for it. Peter would later deny even knowing Jesus at the most crucial moment of His life and ministry.