Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (28 page)

How can you stay down in the presence of a person like that? How can you pout around a guy who, instead of calling it a rainout, calls it an opportunity for our ushers to shine? I was simultaneously encouraged by his perspective and ashamed that he had to be the one to show me—his leader—the silver lining. I was also still a little annoyed by his Mr. Brightside demeanor, if you want to know the truth, probably because I was convicted by it.

I tend to be one of those people who takes great pride in calling it like I see it. I say things like,

“I’m not being grumpy or negative or pessimistic. I’m just keeping it real.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m just calling it like I see it.”

But people armed with a spirit of gratitude know that often it
is
what you
call
it.

So what if, instead of calling it like we see it, we began to call it like God
says
it?

If you call your schedule busy, hectic, and overwhelming, that’s how it will feel. Your words will give weight to the very dread and discontent that the Enemy intends to use to discourage you. But if you call your schedule full and challenging yet fruitful, it will begin to take on those dimensions, first internally and then externally.

I have noticed that certain seasons of my life that had the potential to be the most stressful turned out to be the most joyful and productive because I disciplined myself to speak and think about them in terms of opportunity, not obligation.

I have also experienced the opposite far too many times.

If you call your job a dead end, that’s exactly what it will become to you. Your work will seem stagnant; therefore, your passion will stagnate within the environment you have created with your attitude. But if you call your job a training ground and thank God for using it as a means of provision, God will see your faithfulness in little and in due time will make you faithful over much more.

This morning I caught myself yelling at my kids, “Come on, you don’t have to be so annoying!”

Then as I began my day’s work and was forced to remember the subject matter I’d be covering in this chapter, another thought occurred to me:
You don’t have to be so annoyed
.

There was a way for me to correct my kids’ behavior without setting such an edgy tone for the day. There always is. There’s always a way to deal with discouragement that doesn’t give leverage to discontent.

No matter the depth of discouragement or discontent, God will always give me a way of escape, called gratitude.

Now, the opposite is also true, because no matter how good God is to you, the chatterbox will spin it to make it look like your life is the worst.

I know it’s crass, but I think it gets the point across: the chatterbox is a crap factory. No matter what goes in, it comes out crap if you give the chatterbox the opportunity to start interfering and misinterpreting.

For example, I was congratulating someone on a big raise a few years ago. I told him I thought it was incredible.

He brushed off my comments. “Ha! I’ll tell you what’s incredible,” he said. “My new tax bill. Through the roof, bro!”

The guy was a crap factory. God gave him a raise. But instead of receiving it as a blessing and turning it back to praise, he let the chatter of discontentment turn it into crap.

I have one even worse than that. A few years ago in our church, we baptized over two thousand people in just
two weekends
. It was an incredible outpouring of God’s Spirit, a watermark event in the life of our church, and one of the most amazing spectacles of God’s grace I’ve ever seen.

I was telling another minister about it, and his response still makes me laugh—and cringe—to this day. “Wow! Two thousand people!” he said with astonishment. “Your water bill must have been
outrageous
!”

He went on to question the veracity of the faith of those who had been baptized. Even though I explained to him how we presented the gospel as clearly as possible and didn’t water down (couldn’t help it) the message or invitation, he wasn’t satisfied.

Crap factory, I say. A miraculous report of how God had moved went in, but crap came out. Even two thousand baptisms weren’t a pure enough reason to celebrate. Apparently, it’s good enough for the angels in heaven to throw a party in celebration, but this pastor’s not interested. There are water bills to worry about and tares that need to be separated from the wheat.

And I have still another example, a more personal one.

One night our youngest child, Abbey, was screaming her head off in those high-pitched, nerve-shattering tones that only a one-year-old can produce. Abbey is a completely healthy, delightful, but incredibly vocal little girl. And I’ll admit, I don’t do so well demonstrating patience during this stage of child development.

But on this particular night, as I was whining to myself about how Abbey wouldn’t stop whining, a series of impressions hit me. I believe they were sent by God’s Spirit to gently but firmly correct my attitude.

You prayed for that little girl. I gave her to you. Now you’re complaining because she’s crying—doing what healthy babies do?

Are you really complaining about a blessing that you asked Me for?

Someone else would love to have a little girl crying in their living room tonight, but they don’t. You do—and you need to be thankful, even though it’s inconvenient right now
.

Crap factory.

I needed to shut it down.

Gratitude reinterprets the situations in our lives, beginning with the baseline acknowledgment that
we don’t deserve any of what we’ve been given
. It’s all a product of God’s grace. The eyesight that allowed you to read that last sentence, the mental abilities that allowed you to comprehend it, the manual dexterity that enabled me to type it—all are products of God’s grace. The breaths you took while reading the last paragraph—all of them were borrowed.

When you start with this frame of reference, it’s hard to be discontent. But discontentment is empowered by a sense of entitlement. And there is an inverse relationship between gratitude and entitlement.

When entitlement is high, gratitude is low.

When gratitude is high, entitlement is low.

Gratitude begins where our sense of entitlement ends.

I remember the first time I accepted a job with benefits. It felt like winning the Powerball jackpot to hear that, in addition to my salary, my employer would be paying for my health insurance. I had been self-employed until this point and had picked up all those expenses myself.

I was stunned and thankful, and I started proudly telling my friends, “Check it out, check it out. In my new job I’ve got
benefits
.”

They did not seem impressed. Their responses were “Yeah, that’s kind of the way it works, man. It’s a part of the package.”

They knew the system. They had worked jobs with benefits for years. The thrill was gone for them, and it didn’t take long for me to lose mine too. Within days something that at first seemed like a tremendous benefit became just a part of the package to me.

I think the same thing happens in our relationship with God.

Most of us can point back to a time in our lives when God’s mercy seemed too good to be true. The fact that we could open the Bible and God would speak timeless truth to us in a timely way, specifically to our situation, was a benefit we could never repay. We couldn’t get over it.

But then a sense of entitlement sets in. And the things we used to
get
to do—serve God, come to Him in prayer, tell others about what He’s done in our lives—become things that we’ve
got
to do.

Discontentment dies every time you
remember
.

In an earlier chapter we talked about the importance of remembering the price Jesus has paid in order to take our stand against condemnation in the righteousness of Christ. But when thoughts of discontent storm my heart, it’s important that I have set up armed guards of remembrance of the Father’s blessings in order to keep them at bay.

The attacks of discouragement will never stop coming. But if they’re met with praise at the gate, they won’t find entrance into my heart.

I believe David wrote the words of this psalm as much to instruct himself as anybody else:

When it comes to our relationship with God, nothing is of higher importance and greater significance than gratitude. There is no more game-changing resolution than this:

I will not let the discouragement of what I’m going through make me forget the benefits of belonging to the God who has been so good to me. He has saved me,
blessed me, forgiven me, restored me, satisfied me, healed me, crowned me, and renewed me
.

When you start thinking, talking, and living like that, God sets up camp in the middle of your situation. And no matter where you look, you see a way you can, because the One who is always with you says you can.

Gratitude is the perspective that looks back and considers God faithful. This enables your faith to look ahead, believing God is able.

Discouragement, condemnation, fear, and insecurity find no base of operation in the heart that is filled with praise and gratitude.

By now I’ve told you almost everything I know to tell about crashing the chatterbox. It feels like just the right moment to wrap things up, to do a quick drive-by review of the ground we’ve covered so far. Perhaps you were expecting me to group the teachings into a list: Seven Power Principles to Crash That Chatterbox. I’m sure there would be value in that. After all, I believe the tools we’ve discovered from Scripture actually work in real life—if you work them. They certainly have served me well, though—as you’re well aware by now—I haven’t mastered any of them.

Yet one of the interesting things about the Bible is its almost relentless insistence on defying the easy ending, the neat wrap-up that brings together all the themes and key ideas in perfect symmetry. Even in the biblical narratives of A-list characters we have come to know and love, the stories of their lives often come to jagged ends. The Bible, like real life, resists the simplifications of a thirty-minute sitcom and refuses to tidy up a messy ending just so we can walk away feeling better. (Though, oddly enough, perhaps we end up walking away feeling better to know that these stories are in fact as complex as our own—thus we are not alone.)

So I’d like to leave you with an open-ended closing.

My recent book
Greater
was based on the story of the great biblical prophet Elisha. The Elisha stories are some of the richest and best loved in the Old Testament. In the book I retold some of the best-known Elisha stories and even tried to mine some of the more obscure ones.

But I decided to leave out the story of his final miracle—the one that occurs
just before his death. I didn’t know quite what to do with it because it felt out of place. For a man who lived such a big life, his final recorded act seemed anti-climactic—such an odd note to end on.

If a director were filming a movie about Elisha’s life, I imagine he too would skip this particular scene, especially if he wanted to sell a lot of tickets at the box office.

So I ended the book on a high note, a final suggestive scene after Elisha’s death where another man comes back to life simply by making contact with the prophet’s brittle bones. It got the job done.

But now, as we come to the end of this book, I want to pick up that old reel off the cutting-room floor.