Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (8 page)

Since I know who I am …

may it be to me as You have said.

The more deeply we reinforce our identity in Christ, the more fortified we will be against the onslaught of opposing voices in our lives. Although the chatter is never going to stop, we can learn to accept that it doesn’t have the power to stop us from fulfilling God’s purpose in the world. I can’t imagine what it was like for Mary to press past her private self-doubt and public humiliation in order to fulfill God’s destiny for her life, but that’s exactly what she did. She accepted the chatter that came along with her situation—within and without—as part of the price for accomplishing God’s great purpose in the earth.

But it went beyond obligatory acceptance. A few verses later here’s what Mary says about her newly discovered destiny:

It takes great faith—and a strongly rooted, regularly rehearsed grasp of the favor of God in your life—to call yourself
blessed
after you’ve just been told you’ve been chosen for the most unlikely (make that most impossible) assignment in the history of humanity. But that’s the perspective that favor enables.

God likes me. He is with me to accomplish His special purpose in and through my life.

Even in a situation that was laden with uncertainty, rife with ridicule, and incomprehensibly complicated, Mary lived by a continual assurance. She knew she was favored. She believed God had chosen her for a task that was beyond her human ability. And she demonstrated how an understanding of God’s favor makes God’s children unstoppable in the face of situations that seem impossible and obstacles that seem immovable.

I believe we need to emulate the pattern of Mary’s affirmation in order to move ahead in the things God has planned for us.

I am …

May it be to me …

I am blessed.

I am highly favored.

I am a friend of God.

And because all of this is true, whatever may be happening to me right now cannot disfigure God’s view of me. In fact, the things that may be happening to me will only serve to drive my stakes down deeper. The less I can depend on circumstances to define my identity, the more I must look to the Lord to reinforce His thoughts concerning me and to impress them into my heart until I respond as if it’s second nature:

I know who I am.

And as my friend Pastor Craig Groeschel says, “When you know who you are, you will know what to do.”

Obviously, Jesus was born of a virgin only once. So don’t try this at home, Crazy Mary. We don’t have to worry much about being called upon to conceive and carry a child born of the Holy Spirit.

Still, we should be intentional about learning how to flow in the favor of God because God has placed significant callings inside each of us. If we can’t push past the opposing voices that undermine His authority and disconnect us from our intimacy with Him, these callings are likely to become, as Manning says, the “great deeds [that will] remain undone.”

How many cycles of predictable yet completely avoidable defeat will we have to face before we get serious about replacing our faulty understandings with a foundation of God’s favor? When we neglect this process—out of ignorance or out of habit or because it’s easier to live in the predictability of slavery than the responsibility of true freedom—we sabotage ourselves. We forfeit good things that God wants us to have. We no longer receive His words like promises. They begin to feel more like duties and unreasonable requirements.

Isn’t this exactly what happened in the Garden of Eden? That’s where the chatterbox (in the form of a serpent) dared to speak to the first humans for the
first time. He’s the same serpent who’s speaking today, using the same old tricks, trying to keep us from the victory that rightfully belongs to us in Christ.

But as we track down that serpent and locate his patterns of speech, we become less and less ignorant of his schemes.

Furthermore, we realize that the One we’re with is much bigger than he is.

Few things frustrate me more than having my words taken out of context. And since I preach multiple hourlong sermons every week, there are plenty of opportunities for that to happen.

The truth is, some of the things I say are sufficiently stupid on their own without being twisted or manipulated. I have no one to blame but myself for these moments, and now, thanks to YouTube, they can be instantly immortalized.

But it’s different when someone intentionally misrepresents what I’m saying. I’ve had people chop up my sermon into sound bites, using my own words to express the opposite of what I meant. This violates my sense of justice, and I feel like filing a lawsuit almost every time. But at the end of the day, I’m just a preacher who often makes mistakes, sometimes out of motives that are pure and other times maybe not so pure. I should probably just get over it.

What’s infinitely worse is when the very words of the God of the universe, who never makes mistakes and only speaks from the purest motives, are taken out of context.

This, of course, is the strategy of the serpent, and it’s one of the most effective devices of the chatterbox. We see it from the very beginning.

When the devil wanted to lure Adam and Eve away from their true identity in God, he did it through the power of insinuation. It was the only way his plan would work. Had the serpent approached Adam and Eve with the offer “Hey, abandon all the promises God has made you, and betray the very nature of the One who gave you life,” we’d all still be partying in the garden. Even Adam would have seen straight through, and walked away from, this blatant temptation to disobey God.

Instead, in Genesis 3:1 the craftiness of the chatterbox is fully manifested. The serpent poses a question to Eve: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

It’s not a direct temptation—it’s an invitation to a dialogue. The chatterbox loves to get you chatting. Once the conversation starts, you’ll find it difficult to leave the lot.

Most of the decisions that send our lives in the wrong direction are the result of our wrongly answering the question “Did God really say …?” Since the Enemy can’t take away the promises God has made you—about who you are in Him and who He desires to be to you—he hangs question marks over those promises.

In this case he forms a question mark (here I picture a snake curling up to form the actual shape of a question mark—do what works for you) over one of God’s instructions. His goal is to create doubt, but he’s done it in a way that is so devious it’s hard to detect. Here perhaps it would be helpful to take a look at the original, chatterbox-free instruction God gave Adam.

Is it just me, or is there an enormous discrepancy here?

The serpent’s question: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

What God
really
said: “You are free to eat from any tree—except this one, because it’s not good for you.”

Could the interpretation be any more twisted? This is an ideal case study of the basic way the chatterbox obscures our identity. He starts by confusing our understanding of God’s instructions and intentions.

The first command God gave to Adam and Eve was not of
limitation
but
liberation
. It’s so clear, evidenced in the way the statement begins: “You are
free
.” His motives are pure: to keep them from
dying
.

Yet somehow the Enemy spins it to suggest that God is holding out on you. That’s how the chatter starts.
God doesn’t want you to enjoy much, does He? He doesn’t want you to fully explore your identity. You need to free yourself. Christianity is so restrictive. Explore. Find yourself. Be yourself
.

Credit Eve with this: she didn’t fall for the first lie. In fact, she corrected the serpent by restating God’s initial instruction, getting it mostly right. But the critical mistake we make isn’t usually because we have the wrong information. It’s because we engage in the wrong conversation.

I like to say that doubt is like a telemarketer. The best strategy is never pick up the phone.

Once you allow the Enemy to hit you with “Did God really say …,” it’s unlikely you’ll make it out of there without sustaining some blows. Probably not to the extent that you get the entire human race kicked out of paradise. But that doesn’t mean the consequences aren’t serious.

I once asked a young lady in our church how her lifelong battle with eating disorders started. Was it all at once? Or did an event trigger it?

She didn’t quite know how to answer, she said, because my questions made it sound like the boundaries of the struggle were more clearly defined than they were in reality. She said she’d struggled with her weight all her life, but gradually the struggle shifted, becoming less about her weight and more about her worth. In her twenties, when her friends were getting married, she wasn’t. What was wrong with her?

Although she didn’t use these words, it was as if she was wrestling with the question “Did God really say I am fearfully and wonderfully made?”

One day she realized that she was no longer taking responsible steps to
improve her health and appearance. Insecurity had embedded itself into her self-perception. She no longer saw in herself the image of God. She noticed how she would feel a sort of disgust when she saw herself in pictures. So she set out to control and manipulate her body into a form that God never intended. This led her to places so dark emotionally that she eventually succumbed to other, more visible signs of dysfunction. That’s when her family and friends intervened. Gradually she started rebuilding her identity in the image of Christ. But the rebuilding came at a great cost to her and to many people she loved.

After she had outlined her journey for me, she offered this thought: “I guess I just let the lies overpower the truth. And slowly they became my truth.”

How are you defining the truth of who you are? By whose standards? What subtle lies has the serpent been weaving into your understanding of God’s intentions for you? How have they been corrupting your identity? What is that corruption costing you? Peace? Joy? The ability to connect with others who need you to be there for them? The ability to hear from God about His direction for your life?

Replacing the lies may take some time, but locating them is a much more immediate process. That’s because you’re not searching by yourself.

I love how the Scriptures describe the events following Adam and Eve’s sin. In the narrative we hear the first sounds of the redemptive heart of God toward those who have been taken captive by the Enemy’s lies.

Adam and Eve, freshly informed of their nakedness as a result of their sin against God, are in hiding. Hiding from, ironically, the God who has no doubt installed a tracking device on His original creation. But in compassion the Lord calls out to the man: “Where are you?”
¹

Yes, the serpent is a master of asking questions to insinuate things about God’s intentions: “Did God really say …” Thankfully, God counters those questions with a question of His own: “Where are you?”

God doesn’t ask because He needs the information. He knows His way around this garden. He asks so that Adam can locate himself in relation to his God. So the hiding can stop.

Adam’s answer is straightforward enough: “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
²

And God’s next question is my favorite of all. It is the ultimate counter-question,
and it’s the source of our separation from God: “Who told you that you were naked?”
³

Implicit in God’s question “Who told you that?” is at least part of the answer:

Because it sure wasn’t Me
.