Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (27 page)

One of my most valuable sidekicks in ministry is a guy named Buck. He’s part bouncer, part prayer warrior, part travel wizard, part physical trainer, part ministry assistant. He’s also one of my best friends. I’ve known him since college. We’ve done a lot of cool stuff together. Once we were chased out of a Chinese discotheque together. He’s one of the most reliable travel team members a pastor could have.

Except one time.

A while back, on the Monday after Easter, we were scheduled to leave from my house to go on a week-long ministry trip. We were headed to Sydney, Australia. (This was the same trip where I gave my boys a sneak preview of the future, à la Marty McFly.)

The rest of the team was busy loading stuff into the vehicles when Buck asked if he could talk with me privately. The look on his face let me know he wasn’t pulling me aside to thank me for the opportunity or to quote a few lines from
Crocodile Dundee
or to usher in the Spirit of Oz as we embarked upon our journey.

“Pastor, I can’t find my passport,” he said.

I nodded slowly so as not to appear frustrated. He was already flustered and embarrassed enough.

“Well, what are you going to do?” I asked.

His response was an instant classic. “I guess I’ll just fly from Charlotte to L.A. with you guys and see what happens when we get there.”

Buck and I both knew what would happen when he got to customs with no passport and attempted to board a plane bound for the other side of the world.

And that’s exactly what did happen.

The rest of the team continued on to Sydney. Buck headed off, alone, in the middle of the night, to rent a car. After a few hours of sleep in a pay-by-the-hour hotel (okay, I made up that part for effect), Buck arrived at the customs office. After waiting almost all day there, Buck was the proud possessor of a special-issue passport.

He took the next flight to Australia and joined the team a day late, exhausted—and still furious with himself.

When he arrived, the conference I was preaching at was already in full swing. I happened to be speaking about gratitude in the first session he attended. And as I read Psalm 100:4—the part about entering His gates with thanksgiving—I thought about Buck’s passport. On the spur of the moment, I decided to turn this little passport predicament into a preaching illustration.

“Buck, stand up,” I said.

And in front of a few thousand Aussies, with Buck standing red-faced the whole time on the front row, I shared the parable of the passport.

“Praise is like a passport,” I explained after telling the story in vivid detail and getting more laughs than Letterman—at Buck’s expense.

“Buck flew all the way across the country and sincerely desired to go on to his destination … had a good reason to go on … had the resources to go on. But how many know that without a passport you’re not getting past the gate?

“And I came to let you know today that without praise, God says, you’re not getting past the gate. ‘
Enter
his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with
praise
.’ ”

The people loved it. Buck was a good sport.

I thought, and still think, it was an excellent illustration of how gratitude gives us access to the places God wants to take us and enables the things He wants to do through us.

But it wasn’t until dinner that night that the fullness of the parable of the passport was revealed to me.

As we were eating, reliving the afternoon session, I asked the crew, “How did you guys like that story about Buck?” I was rather proud of my impromptu illustration.

“It was classic, mate, and you didn’t even tell the best part!” one of our ministry hosts volunteered.

“The best part?” I asked, clearly confused, but still smiling to give the appearance of omniscience.

Buck spoke up. “Well, I was waiting for a better time to tell you this, but there’s a Part B to the story.”

And Buck proceeded to tell me how, after he had gone through all the necessary steps to get a new passport issued, and while he was waiting in L.A. for the next available flight, he sat on a curb outside the passport office. In a half-praying,
half-self-flagellating way, he was trying to figure out what lesson he needed to take away from this situation. Was God trying to teach him something?

How could you be so stupid
, he was saying to himself as he banged his head on a leather notebook he carries with him everywhere. A notebook where he often keeps important documents. A notebook that contained, upon further inspection, his original passport tucked inside the back flap, a place Buck had not thought to look throughout this entire ordeal.

All the delay, discouragement, and dismay could have been avoided. The document he needed had never left his possession. It was on him the whole time.

I’ve now preached the parable of the passport all over the world. I always thank Buck, because the dumbest mistake he ever made turned out to be one of the greatest illustrations I’ve ever used.

But now when I preach it, I share the
full
meaning.

The truth is, many of us are stuck at the gate,
waiting for God to give us something that’s already ours
. We’re waiting for joy when God has given us the power to rejoice. We’re waiting for encouragement to come to us when, in fact, the encouragement we need is locked in an opportunity God has given us to encourage someone else.

In the Furtick house my children are taught to say “please” when they want something and “thank you” when they get it. God puts things in a little different order. He teaches His children to say “thank You” for what we already have—as well as what we’re expecting Him, by faith, to give—before we say “please” and ask Him for what we need next.

Obviously, God doesn’t require us to rattle off a comprehensive list before granting us permission to pray. But before we ask God for
anything
, we should be thankful in
everything
.

So often we live as if our discouragement is a by-product of our difficulties. This leaves us feeling helpless in the throes of discouragement. And, to be sure, certain situations and setbacks are so challenging that they can knock the wind out of us. Not only does it become difficult to want to praise God, but it can seem impossible to do so.

But gratitude allows us to disconnect discouragement at the power source by choosing to call God good in spite of our situation.

Discontentment, on the other hand, will seize on hardship to paralyze our
spiritual strength. It will even vandalize the great gifts God gives us by causing us to take them for granted.

Because, in actuality, gratitude is not based on how good my situation
is
.

It’s based on how good my situation seems to me.

We’ve talked about various ways of finding and replacing chatter. We’ve developed strategies to counteract forms of spiritual sabotage. But the one we’re talking about now could be considered the Magna Carta Holy Grail.

Gratitude is a key that brings freedom, a weapon that brings victory, and a connection to limitless joy in all circumstances.

I’m not talking about the kind of gratitude that appreciates God only when things go our way. Even unbelievers tip their hats to deity when a little something comes their way—a bonus check, a snow day when they didn’t study for exams, or a police officer who lets them slide this time.

I’m talking about a Christ-centered gratitude that crashes the chatterbox by replacing everything bad with something better—a present awareness of the goodness of God. This continuous gratitude scrambles the signal and disrupts the flow of discouragement. It changes your life, whether your situation changes immediately or not at all.

In Acts 16, Paul and Silas have every reason to be discouraged. They’ve just been stripped, humiliated, and flogged by Roman guards for preaching the gospel of Jesus. Now their feet are in stocks, their reputations are slandered, and their lives are in jeopardy. What do they do? Scripture records:

How do you come out the prison of discouragement?

Paul and Silas prove that the same gratitude the psalmist says brings you
into
God’s presence has the power to bring you
out of
dismay, dejection, and disappointment.

It’s not a magic trick. It doesn’t mean if you’ll say “Thank You, Jesus” thirty-three times a day for the next thirty days, you’ll always be healed, rich, and in your ideal BMI range.

But gratitude does mean that, no matter how bad your situation is—whether mildly annoying or unspeakably agonizing—you have a secret passageway out of discouragement. Having a grateful attitude in adversity isn’t living in denial; it’s choosing to see your situation from a higher vantage point.

A spirit of discontent can make even the greatest blessing seem like a burden.

A spirit of gratitude can find a blessing within any burden.

It is a rare thing to witness someone with this kind of gratitude, but it happens. And when you get a glimpse of it, you never forget it. It marks you, and if you’ll let it, it transforms you.

I saw it when a couple on our church staff, Wade and Ferris, recently found out that their third daughter, Sydney, has cystic fibrosis. That’s a devastating blow for any parent, but it seemed especially unfair to Wade and Ferris. Four years earlier Ferris had given birth three months prematurely to twin girls whose
combined
birthweight was less than five pounds. Wade and Ferris had been steadfast in their faith as one of the girls recovered from the most severe, grade-four brain bleed the doctors had ever seen. They had been resolute in believing that God would enable both girls to overcome the most dire diagnosis—that they might never talk, walk, or function normally.

I told the miraculous story of the Joye twins in
Sun Stand Still
.
¹
It was a battle that included five initial surgeries, numerous infections, blood infusions, and sleepless nights in the hospital. But it has been an incredible victory. The twins turned five this month. Wade is currently reading them
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
at bedtime. They are fully functioning, princess-obsessed, constant reminders of the faithfulness of God.

But when I heard about Sydney’s condition, it seemed incomprehensible that God would call on this couple, who had been so faithful in their last fight, to have to battle again so soon. Shouldn’t the fight of your life be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence? Why was this couple, who serve God with such passion, having to gear up for another five rounds in the Octagon?

I got the news as my flight from Miami to Charlotte was boarding, and I called Wade immediately. The plane was full and loud, and the flight attendant was instructing me to put away my phone, but I had to talk to Wade before we took off.

Wade answered the call on the first ring, prompt as always, and I could tell he was tired and disoriented. But he was also strangely and authentically grateful. He was saying things like “I’m just so thankful for the things God taught us in advance to prepare us for this,” and “We just feel so blessed to be surrounded by people in our church who are lifting us up and covering us and standing with us.”

He wasn’t feeding me preprogrammed, disconnected lines in the style of South Carolina’s 2007 Miss Teen USA contestant. He wasn’t regurgitating these sentences in the way that many Christians have been trained to bluff their way through trials—“I hate my life, but praise the Lord!”

He was choosing to deal a deathblow to discouragement through the power of gratitude.

I know that with the symptoms and struggles Sydney will face, the Joyes’ battle has just begun. Ahead of them lie challenges as parents and as a family that no one can measure from here—that we can hardly even imagine. But at the level of the spirit, I believe the victory is already theirs.

To paraphrase a quote I heard a long time ago, gratitude is thanking God in advance for what will only make sense in reverse. The chatter of discouragement is inevitable. The misery of discontent is not.

How do you overcome discouragement? Through gratitude. There is always something to thank God for once you’ve made the decision to be a grateful person.

I’m sure you’ve known people like Ferris and Wade who seem to find a blessing,
enlarge a blessing, or create a blessing in almost any situation. And it’s not just when the big stuff hits, like a worst-case-scenario medical diagnosis. They do it even in the humdrum hills and valleys of everyday life.

I saw this principle in motion one Sunday morning early in the history of our church. One of the founding members of Elevation, Larry Brey, came to see me backstage after the service was over. He brought with him his typical energy—loud and abounding,
put on a happy face, what a wonderful world
.

I was pouting and in no mood to be cheered up or be around anyone who was feeling happy. Attendance had been horrible that day due to heavy rain. That meant a break in momentum, a drop in the offering, and a valid excuse for the pastor to be in a bad mood. I honestly couldn’t imagine any reason LB would have to be standing in my greenroom with that stupid smile on his face. What he said next was even more unforgivable.

“Now
that
was a great day!” he said, or rather shouted.

“Really?” I asked in disbelief. “And why is
that
?”

“Well, it’s the first nasty storm we’ve had on a Sunday. And it gave our ushers a chance to shine. You should have seen them out there. They were like an army, getting people in out of the rain. It was
a-maz-ing
the way they honored our guests. Plus we finally got to use our custom Elevation umbrellas—they looked
sharp
.”