Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (15 page)

You see, it had been a long, lonely three years for Elijah. Did he survive the drought? Undoubtedly. And through him God won the battle with a unanimous decision.

But winning can be as exhausting as losing. Sometimes the pressure of success can drain you at an even deeper level than the frustration of failure.

Elijah knows Queen Jezebel doesn’t have the power to call on her gods and end his life. If she had, he’d have been buried beside his bull back on the mountain. So it’s safe to assume that his greatest fear at this point isn’t dying. His greatest fear is living—and having to fight yet another agonizing battle.

Jezebel’s threat is ultimately impotent, yes. But that doesn’t make it ineffective. Because fear often finds its power, not in our actual situation, but in what we tell ourselves about our situation.

Have you ever been driven into hiding by a threat that, in actuality, had no power over you? If so, you’ve experienced the Jezebel Effect. The Jezebel Effect is the mechanism that allows the chatterbox to pump up the volume of the Enemy’s threats until they deafen your spirit to God’s reassurance.

Instead of preparing for the meeting you have in the morning, or praying about the relational conflict you will be forced to face at lunch, Jezebel will keep you up all night, wrestling with hypothetical disasters in the darkness of your mind. The Jezebel Effect robs you of the time and space that is meant to be reserved for restful confidence in God. What you get instead are exaggerated interpretations of negative outcomes of battles you haven’t even fought yet.

Living under the influence of the Jezebel Effect day to day will turn you into a zombie. It will send you scurrying from the cover of God’s authority and hurl you under a broom tree with a death wish.

It’s not just the unpleasantness of fear’s voice that makes it our enemy, although that sensation alone would be adequate motivation to silence it. It’s the imperceptible ways that it bullies us until we’re running in a headlong sprint away from the story line that God is trying to write through our lives. It barks condescending orders in our general direction until we find ourselves running
away
from our callings, our passions, and the source of our spiritual strength—God Himself.

Thankfully, the very thing that fear seeks to separate us from—the voice of the Lord—is infinitely more powerful and persistent than the threats that attempt to silence it.

When reading a story in the Bible like Elijah’s, I find myself thinking,
It’s a good thing I’m not God
.

Because if I’m God and you’re my prophet, that makes us partners. You just asked me to send fire from heaven, and I had your back. I showed you and everyone else what I was capable of. And now you want to run and hide and start quoting Kurt Cobain lyrics? You’re making me look bad, and I’m not so sure I want to be your partner anymore. Yeah, if you punk out on me, and I’m God, I might just take you up on your little offer. You want to crash under a tree and write a suicide note while the nation is on the brink of revival? Because you’re scared of one vengeful woman? I’ll give you your early retirement package, all right.

As I said, it’s a good thing I’m not God. His response to Elijah is the exact opposite of the approach I just described.

Not only does God not kill Elijah—He actually
cooks
for him. Not only does He ignore Elijah’s request to put an end to his life and, instead, provide him with sustenance—He
bakes
the bread.

He feeds him
health
food.

He places it right by Elijah’s head, where he can’t miss it.

How gracious is this God? I’m encouraged that when He finds us in our fears, He speaks to us, not with threats of retribution, but with reminders of His care and concern. When we’ve become embarrassingly paralyzed by the wrong messages, He gives instructions for our benefit:
Get up and eat
. This is the essence of what I believe God would say to any of His children who have become dominated by the spirit of fear.

See, Elijah wasn’t hiding because he lacked courage. The rest of his life was a case study in courage. And if you have been born again by the Spirit of God, you are not without courage either. In fact, in the New Testament, Paul puts it plainly:

As believers, when we feel ourselves surrendering to fear, we usually feel like our problem is that we lack bravery or resolve. So we ask God to give us more courage, almost like it’s a commodity we’re currently short on.

But often the issue isn’t a measure of courage that’s missing in our hearts. It’s that our courage is malnourished. God has given us the gift of faith and fortitude in full supply. But for the gift to grow and rise up and overpower our fear, it has to be fed.

Get up and eat
.

We do not live by bread alone; we must live by every word that comes from God’s mouth.
¹
That’s true. It’s also true that God’s Word cannot adequately sustain you—no matter how prevalent it is
around
you—until you receive it within you.

Nate Silver is a statistician who has demonstrated spooky smart powers of prediction (he correctly picked the winner of all fifty states in the 2012 presidential election). He also wrote a bestseller called
The Signal and the Noise
, which gave me some interesting new ways to think about the chatterbox.

I read a
Fast Company
article where Silver referenced a fascinating claim by Google chairman Eric Schmidt. Schmidt has said that, on a single day, modern society generates more information than all of civilization had created before 2003. That fact alone, if properly recited, will make you sound smarter than your friends. Silver’s point, however, is that although this flood of information means more
noise
(useless information), it doesn’t necessarily mean more
signal
(truth).
²

My application? We can never hope to crash the chatterbox until the signal (God’s Word) becomes louder in our lives than the incessant noise around us that clamors for our attention and depletes our courage. Rather than waiting for more faith to magically manifest, we must intentionally feed the faith we already possess by fanning into flame the gift that is in us. We must eat what God has already cooked up.

When my wife, Holly, leaves town for a few days at a time, she precooks, labels, and organizes plenty of meals for me. The food is healthy, convenient, and delicious. By the time she leaves, she has walked me through—likely more than once—all the items she’s prepared.

But something strange happens when she leaves. I revert to the laziest and most self-destructive version in the history of myself. A switch flips, and instead of eating the life-giving things my loving wife has prepared, I can only ingest garbage—the kind of garbage I ate in college. For the next three days, I will choose ramen noodles, even though rotisserie chicken is steps away in the fridge. I will consume two family-sized bags of Doritos in lieu of the brown rice and broccoli. And I do this knowing that eventually Holly
will
call and
will
ask me, “What did you eat for dinner last night?”

And following my confession, I know she will scold me in what I choose to interpret as compassionate indignation: “You know, babe, I can only do so much. I can cook good stuff for you. I can show you where everything is. I can
even check in to see what you ate. But I can’t
make
you eat what you’re
supposed
to eat!”

I wonder if God often feels the same way about us? I wonder if He watches us as we run scared from Jezebels and sleep our lives away under trees of despondency and thinks,

You know, I can cook good stuff for you. I can give you My Word and put it right by your head
.

I can create men and women with the minds to develop the technology that will put fifty translations of the Bible on your mobile device
.

I can make sure you’re born at the greatest time in history, making entire libraries of edifying Christian content downloadable to your iPad or Nook, and podcasts of preaching instantly accessible and freely available for you to stream as you drive to work
.

I can put gospel-preaching churches on every corner in your community and surround you with opportunities to serve Me
.

But I can’t force you to read, listen, absorb, and apply. I can’t make you eat
.

What’s the first thing God speaks to His servants when the spirit of fear has transported us miles away from the place He’s called us to be?

Get up. And eat
.

Feed the faith you’ve already been given with the promises I’ve already provided. And expect the same kinds of results I’ve always delivered
.

This tender, direct, and necessary provision should be enough to reroute Elijah and get him back on track. But it’s not. The following verses reveal that he continues his tour de fear by heading south—another four hundred miles! Away from his post in Jerusalem, into a cave near Horeb, the mountain of God.

And as Elijah pines the night away doing his best impression of a bipolar caveman, God speaks again. This time he addresses Elijah in the form of a question.

This is a remarkably powerful question presented in brilliant simplicity. It’s reminiscent of the way God located Adam in the garden—“Where are you, Adam?”—but it’s even more penetrating.

It’s a question God’s Spirit has put before me many times when I’ve checked into caves of my own. When I’ve retreated into patterns of isolation, self-pity, and neurosis, I’ll sense a voice within me, calling into the cave, with a question that is not meant to be rhetorical but revelatory: “What are you doing here, son?”

Depending on which word in the sentence you emphasize, the question takes on multiple meanings. (Read the following options aloud for maximum impact.)

And (final option):

How do you imagine God posed His question to Elijah? With the same tone I address my eight-year-old, also named Elijah, when I catch him jumping on the roof of Holly’s SUV like it’s a trampoline? With an undercurrent of annoyance? incredulity? exasperation?

The text continues, revealing Elijah’s instinctive reaction to the voice and shedding some light on God’s underlying motive.

You cannot sincerely engage with this text and not appreciate the divine creativity and irony in God’s way of communicating with Elijah. Instead of directly addressing Elijah’s complaints and excuses, God gives him a command: “Go out and stand.”

In the cave it’s hard to hear God calling. The reception in there is terrible. So God invites Elijah to roll up his sleeping bag and meet Him on the mountain in an open, elevated space, with nothing to obstruct the signal.

God calls us out of caves because, in our caves, voices of fear and doubt and dread monopolize our minds. The Enemy can’t do a thing to diminish God’s promises—that ability is decidedly beyond the limits of his power. So instead he lures you into places where your
perspective
of God’s promises will be diminished. He convinces you that the cave you’re in is safe, when in fact it’s an incubator of disbelief and an echo chamber of lies. The chatter bounces around the walls until the noise is unbearable and escape seems implausible.

But on the mountain the signal is stronger than the noise. When you actively position yourself in the presence of God—responding to His voice in worship, confession, and obedience—your perspective realigns with His promises. You are reminded that He’s seated above whatever circumstance is towering over you.