Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (3 page)

The term
chatterbox
is my way of representing the lies we believe that keep us from accurately and actively hearing God’s voice.

So how can we even begin to understand this invisible chatterbox?

It’s quite complicated, as you can imagine. But we have to start somewhere.

Jesus said that when the devil lies, “he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
¹
However, as I said in the introduction, our most immediate problem isn’t the devil on our shoulders but a deeper reality about the condition of our hearts and minds. To blame all our wrong thinking solely on the devil is to ignore obvious practical considerations, scientific facts, and most important, other clear biblical teachings.

Like this one: the apostle Paul talks with great openness about something that is at work within him, waging war against his mind and making him a prisoner.
²
Here’s one of the greatest Christians who ever lived, talking about an enemy within that is terrorizing his freedom in Christ. And in doing so, he doesn’t mention the devil. Rather, he talks about what’s happening in his mind.

Because it’s in the mind that the transmission of God’s plans for our lives either succeeds or fails.

I read online that the average person has more than sixty thousand thoughts per day, and over 80 percent of these thoughts are negative. Is that accurate? I don’t know. Honestly, the website seemed sketchy. And I’m no expert in the science of the subconscious. The other day I saw an R.E.M. anthology called
Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage
. That pretty much sums up my understanding of the way the human mind works. And I don’t want this to turn into a Wikipedia article about neuroscience.

But let’s think together about the possibility that 80 percent of our thoughts are not only devoid of any power to help us but actively work against us. When we allow our thoughts to go unchecked, a steady drip of lies cements the wrong patterns within our minds, building a Berlin Wall of bad beliefs.

I wonder how much of its forty-eight-thousand-word quota your chatterbox has already filled today?

Did you hear it in the closet while you were getting dressed, telling you that it doesn’t matter what you put on, that nothing will look good on you because you’re too flabby, too bony, too pale, too old, or, in a single word, defective?

Did you hear it in the office where you work or in the home where you raise your children, telling you there’s no point in trying so hard because no one ever notices anyway?

Do you hear it loudest at the end of the day, when the mistakes and regrets and missteps can bounce around the room unobstructed by progress or perspective?

You sounded really stupid when …

How will you ever recover from …

Why would anybody want to be around a person like you, who …

God must be awfully disappointed in the way you …

There’s a word to describe this kind of barrage. I came across it for the first time recently. I’ll share it with you now—it can be our word of the day.

The best part about our new word? It’s pronounced law-g
uh
-REE-
uh
. I’ll let you make your own “sounds like” association.

Seriously, could there be a more fitting term to describe the way the chatterbox spews lies and garbage in our minds? It’s a voice that drones on and on, always intimidating, always insinuating.

The chatterbox wants to inundate us with logorrhea. To wear us out until we don’t want to try or until we have no idea what to do or how to answer our growing list of doubts and deficiencies.

And it’s not just what this chatter says that makes it dangerous.

It’s what it keeps us from hearing.

Most people go through life thinking God never speaks to them when in fact He’s always speaking. To everyone. Always directing. Sometimes warning. Sometimes affirming. But we hear so little of what He says because our consciousness of His voice is obscured by our mental static.

What guidance was God trying to give you today that you didn’t hear because it was buried by negative noise?

What wisdom did God want to share about your future that you missed because the logorrhea was too loud in the background?

You see, when we learn how to crash the chatterbox—to overpower the Enemy’s lies with God’s truths—we’re not simply learning to think more cheerful thoughts or adopt a more pleasant disposition or find our happy place or improve our lot in life. There’s much more at stake than that.

Brennan Manning wrote a line that perfectly describes what happens when the chatter gets the best of us: “Great deeds remain undone and the possibility of growth into greatness of soul is aborted.”
³

Think with me about the two parts of this double-edged warning.

When lies are not confronted, callings are not fulfilled.

I’m not going to give you the “Don’t die with your music in you” speech
(at least not this early on), but I do want to ask a few reflective questions as we get started.

The saddest part is, we’ll never know all the great deeds that remain undone as a result of the undetected and unchecked lies in our lives. Most of us die with our music still in us. (Now look what you’ve made me do.)

My previous book,
Greater
, issued a call to an understanding that God is ready and willing to achieve a kind of greatness through our lives that is beyond human reach.
Crash the Chatterbox
is about using that understanding to short-circuit the thoughts and patterns that the Enemy employs to disrupt the greatness God has initiated.

God is the only person who can be simultaneously 100 percent task driven and 100 percent relationally focused. That means He is equally concerned about what He’s doing in me and what He’s doing through me. In fact, it’s the work He does in me that prepares and empowers me for the work He desires to do through me.

Through Jesus, God has gone to the most extravagant lengths possible so
that He might know you and make Himself progressively and vividly known to you. He wants to show you things about who He is and who you are that flesh and blood cannot reveal and that trials and tribulations cannot diminish. He longs to communicate with you in tones, pitches, and frequencies that this world is not wired for, to fill you with affirmation that your soul has been thirsting for.

The chatterbox is the part of you that jams these signals, often in a way that’s hard to pinpoint.

In his book
The War of Art
, Steven Pressfield writes about overcoming the battles that block creativity. He gives a systematic breakdown of what he calls “the Resistance”—the force that prevents us from getting the things done we’re meant to do. He describes the effects like this:

This may be an extreme description, but I’m sure you’ve felt this way, or close to it, before. We all have.

When our minds and hearts are being assaulted by the suggestions and lies of the Enemy, we often don’t even know what’s causing our funk or what’s behind our frustration. We just know we’re stuck in a cycle of spiritual self-sabotage.

One day I was trying to make a mental list of the lies that were driving some of the dysfunction in my life. The exercise turned out to be much more complicated than I had anticipated. And I’ll tell you one reason why: the thing that makes deception so effective is that you can’t detect it.

The chatterbox doesn’t preface its lies with an announcement:
Attention! The thought you’re about to think is absolutely toxic, designed to lead you away from the good and perfect will of your loving heavenly Father
.

Instead, like a distortion pedal, the chatterbox manipulates the truth.

So it won’t sound like this:
Perhaps you should take steps toward spending more focused time reading your Bible, because God has so many promises and truths He wants to reveal to you today
.

More likely it will sound like this:
If you really loved God, you’d spend more time reading your Bible, like people do who have their priorities in order
.

Both of these statements contain a seed of truth. The seed is
I’m not reading my Bible enough. I should read it more
. Yet the essential messages couldn’t be more opposite.

Listen to the undertones of the second statement compared to the first.

The first statement is rooted in a spirit of affirmation:
God desires to speak to you
. And it is presented in the form of an invitation—to come into His presence and receive the good things He has to offer. It suggests a realistic course of action: you don’t have to reinvent your life overnight—just make some
steps toward
your destination.

The second statement is rooted in the spirit of condemnation:
You don’t really love God
. This is a gross exaggeration and misinterpretation of the motivations of your heart. And it’s followed by an accusation:
Other people love God more than you do. You don’t measure up; you never have, and you never will
.

Why do we let ourselves talk to ourselves this way? Maybe because the internal dialogue is happening much faster than our current level of training has enabled us to defend against. The Enemy has quick hands that land swift, accurate blows.

Also, sometimes perhaps we stand by passively, waiting for God to fix the issues that He’s called us to fight in His strength. If we’re going to overcome the thoughts that hold us back, first we have to give up the hope that they’ll ever go away. Every second you spend wishing God would take away a struggle is a forfeited opportunity to overcome.

And even though the fight against chatter is guaranteed to be a grueling one, with no end in sight, you have to fight back. Your spiritual life depends on it.

Because the voice you believe will determine the future you experience.

Now, when I start talking about voices like this, you might think I’m slipping into some pseudopsychoanalytical mode. But isn’t this how the scriptural story
begins—with conflicting voices? The rhythm of Creation is marked by call and response.

As we read in Genesis, it started with light:

The very first chapter of the Bible establishes a cadence of communication that declares the creative potential of the voice of God. The illumination of everything we see started with something God
said
.

On the other extreme, an altogether different voice—the voice of the serpent in the garden—introduced temptation and sin into the world. A Puritan named Thomas Watson put it this way: “It was by the ear, by our first parents listening to the serpent, that we lost paradise; and it is by the ear, by hearing of the word, that we get to heaven.”
⁶

This juxtaposition of truth with lies is front and center throughout Scripture:

The Enemy’s goal is to lure us into accepting his lies and limitations at face value. When we do, our faith will only work in fits and starts. The lion’s share of the good things that God has planned for us will remain out of reach. And the fruit we bear for God’s glory will be minimal.

The prophet Isaiah issued an invitation that still stands today: “Hear, and your soul shall live.”
⁷
That is the invitation I believe God is issuing to us in the pages ahead.

And I declare: the lies of the chatterbox are about to meet a fifteen-million megawatt surge of God’s power. If that sounds a little violent for your taste, consider these words from the apostle Paul, who gave us permission to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and … take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.”
⁸

Because, thankfully, spiritual warfare isn’t hand-to-hand combat. God has given us supernatural weapons that have “divine power to demolish strong-holds.”
⁹
We crash the chatterbox by launching a counterattack through which we leverage the advantage we have as God’s children: heaven’s perspective.