Whisper Page 19
Contending for what you believe in is harder than conceding to what you’re afraid of, but it’s the only option if you want to live by faith.
Where have you given up on God?
Where has hope been reduced to nothing?
That’s where you need to pitch your tent in the land of hope.
That’s where you need to pray the bravest prayer.
It’s time to contend.
Contend for your marriage.
Contend for your children.
Contend for your health.
Contend for your dream.
Contend for your faith.
Contend for that lost friend.
Contend for that mission field.
Contending isn’t easy, but here’s some good news: God is contending for you! Long before you woke up this morning, the Holy Spirit was interceding for you, and long after you go to sleep tonight, He’ll still be interceding for you. He contends with those who contend against us.26 And if you are contending for a righteous cause, I promise you, God is contending for you! By faith, He fights our battles for us.
Remember the sonic shield I referenced in the very first chapter? According to the psalmist, God is singing songs of deliverance all around us all the time.27 Think of those surround-sound songs as our first line of defense. The intercession of the Holy Spirit is the second line of defense. And there is a third line of defense: Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding on our behalf.28
Quit living as if Jesus is still nailed on the cross.
The only thing nailed to the cross is our sin.29
Did you know that God never takes His eyes off you? Do you know why? Because you’re the apple of His eye!30 Not only that, His ear is tuned to your voice, so tuned that He hears more than words.
Listen to my words, LORD;
consider my sighing.31
A sigh is a long, deep breath. It’s a physiological response to sadness. And it’s very similar to the gentle whisper of the still small voice. Sighing is what we do when we don’t know what to say. But according to the psalmist, it’s more than a low-frequency distress signal; it’s a wordless prayer.
The death of my father-in-law, Bob Schmidgall, might rank as the greatest shock of my life. At fifty-five years of age, he was in the prime of life. He had even been given a clean bill of health by his doctor two days before the heart attack that took him home. During those days of intense grieving, I found myself sighing incessantly. That’s when I happened upon three words that are some of the most comforting in all Scripture: “Consider my sighing.”32
Even in our most profound pain, God hears us. He is so intimately tuned to us that He hears our wordless sighs. Not only that, He intercedes for us with wordless groans.33 And that’s precisely what we would hear if we could hear a little better. We’d also hear those surround-sound songs of deliverance. Just as His mercies are new every morning,34 His loving intercessions never cease.
The Sacrifice of Praise
How did Job survive hell on earth? “He fell to the ground in worship.”35
If you want to make it through the tough times, you have to give God the sacrifice of praise. I know that’s easier said than done, but there’s no other way. And the hardest praise is often the highest praise.
That’s how Job survived his dark night of the soul.
That’s how David survived the wilderness years.
That’s what got Paul and Silas out of prison.
I have a mantra that is repeated at our church all the time: don’t let what’s wrong with you keep you from worshipping what’s right with God. Don’t let the voice of condemnation keep you from worshipping God; sing over it. If your worship is based on your performance, you’re not really worshipping God anyway. That kind of worship is a form of self-worship because it’s based on what you do rather than who God is.
The only way to drown out the pain is to sing over it. Remember the Tomatis effect? In order to sing over it, you have to hear God’s whisper.
During the long recuperation after my intestines ruptured, I learned to worship God by putting a song on repeat and singing it until I believed it. There is a Darrell Evans song that I played hundreds of times. It was my soundtrack, and it eventually became my reality:
I’m trading my sickness.
I’m trading my pain.36
Let me make a few observations about worship.
First, the hardest praise is the highest praise. God loves us when we least expect it and least deserve it, but we have a hard time returning the favor. If you worship Him only when you feel like worshipping, you’ll worship less and less. If you learn to praise Him in the toughest of times, the best is yet to come. And don’t forget, you are His joy. Is He yours?
Second, whatever you don’t turn into praise turns into pain. If you internalize pain, it only gets worse. A little offense can turn into a ton of bitterness over time, and before you know it, you’re in a world of hurt. And if you complain about it, it turns into a compound fracture. The Enemy of your soul wants to keep you so bottled up that you alienate yourself from God and others. The best way to deal with pain is to verbalize it to the Lord. How? Sing over it. Sing through it.
Let me double all the way back to where we started. If your life is off-key, maybe it’s because you’ve been deafened by the negative self-talk that doesn’t let God get a word in edgewise. Maybe you’ve listened to the voice of shame so long that you can’t believe anything else about yourself. Or maybe it’s the Enemy’s voice of condemnation that speaks lies about who you really are.
It’s hard to hear God’s voice when pain is screaming in your ear. The way you silence those voices is by singing over them.
Finally, sing it like you believe it. Do we really believe what we’re singing? Then perhaps we should notify our faces. While we’re at it, let’s notify our hands and our feet too. When you’re excited about something, it’s not easy to stand still. I don’t think you have to dance in a grove of trees like my friend Dick Eastman. But if you believe it, don’t just sing it. Declare it.
Declaration of Faith
I’ll never forget the song we sang the week after I prayed the bravest prayer and God healed my asthma. It’s the chorus of “Great Are You, Lord” by All Sons & Daughters: “It’s Your breath in our lungs so we pour out our praise.”37 I almost lost it when I sang it. Why? Because I believed it.
We don’t make admissions of faith.
We make professions of it.
Steve Foster, the pitching coach for the Colorado Rockies, recently shared a story that made me laugh out loud. When he was called up to the major leagues by the Cincinnati Reds almost three decades ago, they were playing the Montreal Expos. Steve had to meet the team in Canada, but he’d never been out of the country. The customs agent asked the standard question: “Why are you here, Mr. Foster?” Steve said, “I’m here to play against the Montreal Expos.” The agent didn’t look convinced, because Steve was all by his lonesome. Then the agent said, “What do you have to declare?” If you’ve ever gone through customs, that’s par for the course. But Steve had no idea what he meant. Steve said, “Pardon me?” The agent asked again, “What do you have to declare?” Steve said, “I’m proud to be an American?” Wrong answer! He was actually handcuffed and questioned, making him late to his first major league game!
Can I make a few declarations?
You aren’t the mistakes you’ve made. You aren’t the labels that have been put on you. And you aren’t the lies the Enemy has tried to sell you.
You are who God says you are.
You are a child of God.
You are the apple of God’s eye.
You are sought after.
You are more than a conqueror.
You are a new creation in Christ.
You are the righteousness of Christ.
All our identity issues are fundamental misunderstandings of who God is.
Guilt issues are a misunderstanding of God’s grace.
Control issues are a misunderstanding of God’s sovereignty.
Anger issues are a misunderstanding of God’s mercy.
Pride issues are a misunderstanding of God’s greatness.
Trust issues are a misunderstanding of God’s goodness.
If you struggle with any of those issues, it’s time to let God be the loudest voice in your life!
THE WHISPER TEST
God is love.
—1 JOHN 4:16
On November 1, 1937, a $60,000 grant initiated a study at Harvard University that is still active eighty years later. Two hundred sixty-eight sophomores were selected for the study, among them a twenty-year-old John F. Kennedy. Those participants have been medically examined, psychologically tested, and personally interviewed every two years since the study commenced, producing case files that are as thick as unabridged dictionaries. Those files are stored in an office suite behind Fenway Park in Boston, and as the longest-running longitudinal study on human development in history, it’s the holy grail for researchers in that field.
For nearly four decades Dr. George Vaillant was the keeper of the grail. In his book Triumphs of Experience, he opens the vault and reveals some of the secrets. For example, the greatest predictor of happiness later in life is “warm relationships” as a child.1 Those who enjoyed warm childhood relationships also earned, on average, $141,000 per year more than those who lacked affection as children.2 But let me cut to the chase.
It’s Vaillant’s five-word summary of the study that I find most striking. He reduces that eighty-year, $20 million study down to these words: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”3 So really, it’s three words! In Vaillant’s words, “Happiness is only the cart; love is the horse.”4
Hold that thought.
The Bible is a big book—sixty-six books, in fact. And as I’ve already noted, it was written over a span of fifteen centuries. Simply put, it is an unparalleled longitudinal study with incomparable insights into human nature and the nature of God. And although I don’t want to oversimplify a very big book, I believe I can summarize the story line of Scripture in five words: God is love. Full stop.
The Truest Truth
There are more than four hundred names for God in Scripture. He is Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, and Prince of Peace. He is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He is the way and the truth and the life.5 He is all that and so much more than the human mind can comprehend. But if you asked me what I believe to be the truest thing about God, I would answer with the three words the apostle John used to encapsulate the Almighty: “God is love.”6
Yes, God is powerful. Yes, God is good. Yes, God is light. But above all, God is love. That is the truest truth.
The closest I can come to explaining the heavenly Father’s love for us is likening it to the love I have for my three children. I have a little saying that I’ve whispered in my daughter’s ear since she was a little girl: “If all the girls in the world were lined up, and I could choose only one to be my daughter, I would choose you.”
Is Summer perfect? About as perfect as her dad. But even on her worst day, I would take a bullet for her. Why? Because I’m her father and she’s my daughter. And the same goes for my two sons. That’s how I feel as an earthly father with finite love, but that isn’t even a fair comparison because the heavenly Father loves us infinitely. That’s a categorical difference!
In the chapter about the language of people, I prescribed the Enneagram as a way of getting to know our personality types a little better. For the record, I’m a Type Three Performer. As with every number on the Enneagram, there is an upside and a downside. My downside is that I have a difficult time comprehending that God’s love isn’t determined by my performance. Of course, if it were determined by my performance, that would make it about me, wouldn’t it?
God doesn’t love us because of who we are. God loves us because of who He is.
When we succeed, God says, “I love you.”
When we fail, God says, “I love you.”
When we have faith, God says, “I love you.”
When we doubt, God says, “I love you.”
Love is His answer to everything. Why? Because He is love. There is nothing you can do to make Him love you any more or any less. God loves you perfectly. He loves you eternally.
A. W. Tozer said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”7 If love isn’t the first thing that comes to mind, we have the wrong impression of who God is. Listen closer. Sure, His love includes tough love. And we might not enjoy those “tough talks” at the time. But God always has our best interests at heart.
Remember the conference I spoke at in the UK, right after Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, spoke? After he finished speaking, Welby was asked what he believed to be the greatest challenge we face as Christ followers. Without a moment’s hesitation the archbishop said, “Every Christian I meet…cannot quite believe that they are loved by God.”8
Believe it or not, God loves you.
He actually likes you.
In fact, He’s especially fond of you.
And that’s why He whispers.
Why am I trying so hard to convince you of this fact? Because we have such a hard time believing it. Part of the problem is that God has been represented by so many people in ways that misrepresent who He really is. To those who have been on the wrong side of that situation, I’m so sorry. Please hear me: these seven languages are love languages!
God wants us to hear what He’s saying, and we must heed His voice. But much more than that, He wants us to hear His heart. So He whispers softer and softer so that we have to get closer and closer. And when we finally get close enough, He envelops us in His arms and tells us that He loves us.
Seven Words
Mary Ann Bird was born in Brooklyn, New York, in August 1928. A severe cleft palate required seventeen surgeries, but the psychological pain it caused was far worse. Mary Ann couldn’t do the simple things, such as blowing up a balloon or drinking from a water fountain. Worst of all, her classmates teased her mercilessly.9
Mary Ann was also deaf in one ear, so the day of the annual hearing test was her least favorite. But it was one of those least favorite days that turned into the defining day of her life. The whisper test isn’t done in schools any longer, so let me explain what it entailed. A teacher would call each child to her desk and ask him or her to cover one ear. Then the teacher would whisper something like “The sky is blue” or “You have new shoes.” If the student repeated the phrase successfully, he or she passed the test.
To avoid the humiliation of failing the test, Mary Ann would try to cheat by cupping her hand around her good ear so she could still hear what the teacher said. But she didn’t need to the year she had Miss Leonard, the most beloved teacher in her school.
“I waited for those words,” said Mary Ann, “which God must have put into her mouth, those seven words which changed my life.”10 Miss Leonard didn’t choose a random phrase. Instead, she leaned across the desk, got as close as she could to Mary Ann’s good ear, and whispered, “I wish you were my little girl.”11
The heavenly Father is whispering those very same words to you right now.
He’s been whispering those words since before you were born.
The Imprint
In 1973 an Austrian biologist named Konrad Lorenz won a Nobel Prize for his study of geese. In the first few days of life, goslings undergo a phenomenon called imprinting. During that process it’s imprinted upon their brain whom to follow. If a bond fails to form, then the gosling doesn’t know whom to follow. Worse yet, abnormal imprinting can
cause it to follow the wrong voice.
Not unlike goslings, babies are imprinted by their mother’s voice. The inner ear is the first sensory system to develop, becoming fully functional by the fifth month in utero. By the seventh month, a baby recognizes and responds with specific muscular movements to his or her mother’s voice. Amazingly, there is no time delay between the sensory input of the mother’s voice and the motor response of the baby. Neuroimaging has also shown that a mother’s voice exerts a unique influence, over and above a stranger’s voice, by activating the reward circuits in the brain, as well as the amygdalae, which regulate emotion.12 Simply put, a mother’s voiceprint leaves a neural fingerprint that imprints her baby’s brain.
I made a bold statement at the beginning of this book: what we perceive to be relational or emotional or spiritual problems are, in fact, hearing problems. It’s abnormal imprinting. We’ve been deafened by the voice of conformity, the voice of criticism, and the voice of condemnation, and the side effects include loneliness, shame, and anxiety.
The good news? You’re imprinted by God. You not only bear His image but you know His voice. It’s His voice that knit you together in your mother’s womb. It’s His voice that ordained all your days before one of them came to be. It’s His voice that began a good work and His voice that will carry it to completion.13
Whether you recognize it or not, God was the first voice in your life.
Is He the loudest voice in your life?
That’s the question.
The answer will determine your destiny!
Notes
Prologue: The Tomatis Effect
1. Alfred A. Tomatis, The Conscious Ear: My Life of Transformation Through Listening (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1991), 42.
2. Alfred A. Tomatis, quoted in Don Campbell, The Mozart Effect: Tapping the Power of Music to Heal the Body, Strengthen the Mind, and Unlock the Creative Spirit (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 18.