Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (25 page)

Or should we expect another?

It’s a reasonable question to investigate. But it seems bizarre to hear the very
one who had announced the reign of Christ now questioning the ministry he had boldly announced.

To be clear, nothing in the text suggests that John was denying Christ or compromising his convictions. And this is important to point out, because the chatterbox will try to use your questions about the way God is working in your life to accuse you of weak faith. We’ve already seen how counterproductive that kind of condemnation, powered by accusation, is to our relationship with God.

I’ve heard people claim that John’s question was a result of spiritual immaturity on his part. But that assumption doesn’t hold up. As we’re about to see, Jesus has some pretty complimentary things to say about John.

John’s discouragement isn’t due to a lack of belief. It is the result of an unmet expectation.

See, when John commended Jesus to the crowds, he did so with a certain expectation. He expected that Christ would conduct a ministry of judgment. He explained how Jesus had His “winnowing fork … in his hand” and how he would “clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn.” He assured the people that Jesus would be “burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
¹
His expectation was that the vindication of God’s people and the cause of righteousness would be swift and severe.

Now, as John languishes in Herod’s prison, disappointment is setting in. John has done his part—scorching the Pharisees, even rebuking Herod himself. But from what he’s hearing, Jesus isn’t doing any scorching. When John introduced “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,”
²
he had no doubts. But Jesus was not taking away the sin of the world in the way John had hoped he would. How could He deliver His people when, so far, He appeared to be the type who wouldn’t bust a grape in a fruit fight?

In other words, John had spent himself to do the work of the Lord. But from his vantage point,
it wasn’t working
. Now he’s wondering,
What’s the point?

Let me offer a working definition of
disappointment:
disappointment is the gap between what I expect and what I experience. And the chatterbox looks for ways to exploit your disappointment by filling that gap with doubts about the goodness of God.

Disappointed expectations, when full-grown, give birth to chronic discouragement. If you allow this discouragement to run rampant in your life, you’ll lose your hope.

So how do you manage the gap between the chatterbox’s claim that you can’t and God’s insistence that you can?

Some choose to pretend it doesn’t exist. When faced with a disappointment, they deny its effects and pretend everything is fine. But nobody is immune to discouragement. And if all you do is hide the symptoms, your hope still dies. It just dies silently.

Ignoring the gap won’t produce transformation. It will only postpone the reality of frustration, allowing it to pick up momentum. Then when the frustration finally hits—and it will—it will be devastating because it wasn’t dealt with in a realistic yet faith-filled way.

Others, instead of ignoring the gap, give up in the gap. Sick of being let down, they simply lower their expectations to the level of their experience. And then they start to live by mantras like “Well, I’ll hope for the best, but I expect the worst.”

Something goes wrong, and their auto reply is “Story of my life.”

Giving in to discouragement pacifies your disappointment—at first. Then you realize the pacifier is poisonous, because as believers, when we lower our expectation to the level of our experience, we factor God out of the equation. Instead of looking for His favor in every situation, we begin to anticipate the outcomes we dread. And since much of our experience is regulated by the level of our expectation, we begin to get what we were expecting. And we’re not surprised.

It’s the chicken and the egg. Which came first? The lowered expectation? Or the lackluster result? (Does it matter? Either way we’re hopeless.)

Ignore the gap. Give up in the gap. I’ve done both. And both backfire every time.

I want to train myself to do what John the Baptist did: I want to learn, more and more, to allow God to fill the gap.

John took his disappointed expectation to the only One with the authority
to appropriately address it. That’s a great example for us to follow. Few of us will suffer the kind of persecution John did. But that doesn’t make our frustrations any less acute. It doesn’t make our real-time, real-life disappointments any less pertinent.

My father-in-law has a great line he used to tell Holly all the time. He wanted to make sure she set her standards high and held out for the right man. Obviously, this was a successful campaign. Anyway, he’d tell her, “Holly, there’s only one thing worse than being single and lonely. And that’s being married and lonely.”

He was trying to help her see that, in marriage, expectation and experience can be as far apart as the health benefits of kale chips and Doritos. He wanted her to understand that it’s not just unmarried people who feel frustrated.

When you expect to get married by a certain age, and it doesn’t happen, it can be devastating to your expectations. Often this is because the expectation we place on marriage is a faulty one. The wedding day is, after all, supposed to inaugurate an era of contentment, harmony, a shared Netflix account, and total-life happiness.
You had me at hello, and now you complete me
.

But it’s not quite like that. When two incomplete people come together, expecting the other to make them whole, the result is not wholeness. Instead the marriage creates a shared brokenness, which results in resentment and misery.

Holly’s dad was trying to raise a daughter who not only would have the right expectations but also would place her expectations on the right person—Jesus. In fact, both of Holly’s parents worked very hard to teach her what it meant to be complete in Christ. That’s one of the things I found most attractive about her when we were dating. She was the kind of girl who let God fill her gaps.

Allowing God to fill your gaps means refusing to pretend the gaps don’t exist. But it also means refusing to attempt to fill the gaps in ways—or with people—that can’t get the job done.

Only God is big enough to fill the gap.

A friend recently turned me on to a little book featuring the correspondence between Rainer Maria Rilke, a famous Austrian poet, and a younger aspiring poet Rilke was seeking to encourage. The book is entitled, appropriately,
Letters to a Young Poet
.

The young poet was struggling through military school—the same school
Rilke had attended—and was locked in cycles of discouragement. Rilke admonished him in one passage that was especially moving to me:

Living your problems and loving them like locked rooms is much different from denying them or capitulating to them. It is believing that God is
with
you in the imperfect, even disappointing circumstances of your life.

It is saying to Him with faith in your heart,
You will, and therefore I can
.

John the Baptist may have been discouraged. But he wasn’t derailed by his discouragement. He stuffed his pain in a box with packing peanuts and FedExed the whole package to Jesus.

Jesus sent the messengers back to John with this reply:

But Jesus didn’t stop there. “As John’s disciples were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John.” Here is what He said:

Talk about a celebrity endorsement. What a reassuring affirmation! Hearing those words spoken about him must have fortified John in unimaginable ways.
The greatest born of a woman! More than a prophet!

John had sent Jesus a question: “Are you the one?” Instead of answering that question directly, Jesus confirms John’s calling to the whole crowd. Speaking of John, Jesus says, “This is the one about whom it is written.” And He goes on to offer proof after glowing proof about the validity and effectiveness of John’s ministry.

While John is wondering whether Jesus is the One, confused by circumstances that seem to point to the contrary, Jesus wants to make sure everyone in attendance that day knows that
John
is still the one. John was, and is, the chosen messenger to prepare the way of the Lord. Not only does Jesus not criticize John for asking the question; He turns the question inside out, using it as an opportunity to esteem John publicly.

Undoubtedly, it bolstered John’s belief in the mission to hear that such things were being said about him.

Except that John never heard any of it.

The first time I realized this, it blew my mind. In the text we read earlier, Jesus’s response to John is divided into two sections. And those two sections are divided by a few inconspicuous but all-important words in verse 7:

In verses 4–6, Jesus instructs John’s messengers to give John the status report he asked for. But notice, there’s nothing in the report about how great John is. The report is all about what Jesus is doing. And the instruction is for John to endure.

Then after John’s disciples are out of earshot, Jesus starts bragging about John, heaping accolade upon accolade on the ministry of this faithful man.

Which leads me to ask a question. Why did Jesus wait until John’s messengers were gone to start highlighting John’s significance in the kingdom? Wouldn’t this be the kind of stuff you’d want somebody to hear if you were trying to motivate him to endure?

Instead, Jesus in essence talks about John behind his back. Apparently, Jesus doesn’t want John to hear the next part. If so, He’d say it before the disciples split.

Make sure John knows he’s a total rock star
.

But apparently Jesus doesn’t want John’s confidence to rest in John. Jesus structures the message in such a way that John’s confidence can only rest in Jesus.

“Jesus began to speak
to
the crowd
about
John …”

The only motivation to endure that John is given is based on the work Christ is doing, not the work John has done, as remarkable as it is.

Is it possible that when we’re not getting the affirmation or confirmation we desire, it’s because God doesn’t want our faith to rest in affirmation we can feel? In these times could it be that He’s at work on a deeper level, teaching us to rely on His character rather than our performance?

“Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed.”

I wonder what God has been saying behind your back lately. Unlike John, we’re not dependent on a courier to relay the message to us. The Holy Spirit, who is inside you, lives to testify with your spirit, affirming you in this moment:

You’re doing better than you think you are
.

It’s less about you than you think it is
.

You matter more than you think you do. More than you could ever know
.

It’s working. It’s not in vain
.

Don’t stop
.

The chatter of discouragement is so noticeable and constant. Sometimes, by contrast, the affirmation of God can seem so hidden and sporadic. Especially in the gap.

Maybe the gap between what you expected in this season of your life and what you’re experiencing is a chasm that seems too wide to cross. Even with God’s help.