Whisper Page 2

  More than two decades of ministry have come and gone since that prayer walk through a cow pasture. National Community has grown into one church with eight campuses over the past twenty years, but each campus was once a whisper. I’ve written fifteen books over the past ten years, but each book was once a whisper. Every sermon I preach and every book I write are echoes of that one whisper in the middle of a cow pasture in the middle of nowhere.

  Nothing has the potential to change your life like the whisper of God. Nothing will determine your destiny more than your ability to hear His still small voice.

  That’s how you discern the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

  That’s how you see and seize divine appointments.

  That’s how God-sized dreams are birthed.

  That’s how miracles happen.

  The Bravest Prayer

  There are days, and then there are days that alter every day thereafter. For me, one of those life-altering days is July 2, 2016. Next to the day I was married, the days my kids were born, and the day I almost died, no day is more sacred. In fact, I can tell you exactly how many days it’s been from that day to this day.

  I was kicking off a series of sermons titled “Mountains Move” and challenged our church to pray the bravest prayer they could pray. By bravest prayer I mean the prayer you can barely believe God for because it seems impossible. It’s often the prayer you’ve prayed a hundred times that hasn’t been answered, but you pray it one more time anyway. For me the bravest prayer was that He would heal my asthma. And it was brave because asthma is all I had ever known.

  My very first childhood memory is of a middle-of-the-night asthma attack followed by a frantic trip to the emergency room for a shot of epinephrine. That routine was repeated more times than I can remember. There weren’t forty days in forty years that I did not need to take a puff of my albuterol inhaler, and I never went anywhere without it. Never ever. Then I prayed my bravest prayer, and I haven’t taken a single puff of an inhaler from that day to this day. That’s why I literally count the days, because each day is more miraculous than the last.

  Over the span of forty years, I must have prayed hundreds of times that God would heal my asthma. But for reasons known only to Him, those prayers went unanswered.

  Why did I keep praying?

  The short answer is one whisper.

  Right before my freshman year of high school, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that landed me in the intensive care unit. It was one of a dozen such hospitalizations during my younger years. When I was released from Edward’s Hospital a week later, Pastor Paul McGarvey and a prayer team from Calvary Church in Naperville, Illinois, came over to our house, laid hands on me, and prayed that God would heal my asthma.

  God answered that prayer for healing but not in the way I expected.

  When I woke up the next morning, I still had asthma, but all the warts on my feet had mysteriously disappeared. I’m not kidding! At first I wondered if God had made a mistake. Maybe the signals between here and heaven were mixed. I couldn’t help but wonder if someone somewhere was breathing great but still had warts on his or her feet. I was a little confused, but that’s when I heard the still small voice. It wasn’t an audible voice; it was Spirit to spirit. And it was loud and clear: Mark, I just wanted you to know that I’m able!

  All these decades later it still sends a chill down my spine. I was fourteen years old, and it was the first time I heard God’s whisper. Was I disappointed that He hadn’t answered my prayer the way I wanted Him to? Of course I was. But those two words echoed for three decades: I’m able. And He’s not just able; He’s “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.”15

  Let me connect the dots.

  Without that whisper I’m not sure I would have had the faith to pray the bravest prayer. And if I hadn’t prayed that prayer, how could God answer it? After all, God doesn’t answer 100 percent of the prayers we don’t pray! You can guess where this is going, can’t you? My miracle was once a whisper. And that’s true of every miracle. As I survey my life, I realize that the genesis of every blessing, every breakthrough is the breath of God. It started out as nothing more than a still small voice.

  Ebenezers, the coffeehouse on Capitol Hill that our church owns and operates, is a perfect example. When people walk by Ebenezers, they see a coffeehouse, but when I walk by it, I hear a whisper. That’s all it was two decades ago. Actually, it was a graffiti-covered building with cinder blocks in the doorframes. Then one day I walked by and a Spirit-inspired thought fired across my synapses: This crack house would make a great coffeehouse.

  That thought came out of nowhere, which sometimes indicates something supernatural. I call it a God idea, and I’d rather have one God idea than a thousand good ideas. Good ideas are good, but God ideas change the course of history.

  That God idea turned into a brave prayer, which turned into a coffeehouse that has been voted the number-one coffeehouse in DC more than once. Since opening the doors a decade ago, we’ve given more than a million dollars to kingdom causes from its net profits. But every shot we pull and every dollar we give was once a whisper.

  The Think Tank of the Soul

  For the past thirty-plus years, an acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton has compiled what he calls “The List of the Last Great Quiet Places.” It consists of places with at least fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quiet during daylight hours. At last count there were only twelve quiet places in the entire United States!16 And we wonder why the soul suffers. As Hempton noted, “Quiet is a think tank of the soul.”17

  Simply put, God often speaks loudest when we’re quietest.

  Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”18

  That’s quite a statement, but it’s not an overstatement. If our problems are hearing problems—the spiritual Tomatis effect—then the solution to those problems is a prescription that is as old as the psalms. It’s so critical to our spiritual vitality that it’s worth meditating on one word or phrase at a time:

  Be.

  Be still.

  Be still, and know.

  Be still, and know that I am God.19

  Have you ever tried to quiet a loud room? Attempting to yell above the crowd usually doesn’t work, does it? It’s far more effective to shush the crowd with a shhh. That’s the method God employs. His whisper quiets us, calms us, stills us.

  By definition, white noise is a sound that contains every frequency a human can hear.20 And because it contains every frequency, it’s very difficult to hear any frequency, especially the still small voice of God. As such, chronic noise may be the greatest impediment to our spiritual growth. And it’s not just spirituality that suffers.

  In a study of elementary-age students at a grade school in Manhattan, psychologist Arlene Bronzaft found that children assigned to classrooms on the side of the school facing the elevated train tracks were eleven months behind their counterparts on the quieter side of the building. After New York City Transit installed noise-abatement equipment on the tracks, a follow-up study found no difference between the groups.21

  When our lives get loud, with noise filling every frequency, we lose our sense of being. We run the risk of turning into human doings rather than human beings. And when our schedules get busy, we lose our sense of balance, which is a function of the inner ear.

  Can I go out on a limb?

  Your life is too loud.

  Your schedule is too busy.

  That’s how and why and when we forget that God is God. And it takes very little to distract us. “I neglect God and his angels, for the noise of a fly,” said the English poet John Donne.22 The solution? Stillness. Or more specifically, His still small voice.

 
Silence is anything but passive waiting. It’s proactive listening. The noted author and professor Henri Nouwen believed that silence was an act of war against the competing voices within us. And that war isn’t easily won, because it’s a daily battle. But each day God’s voice gets a little louder in our lives until He’s all we can hear. “Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the Beloved,” said Nouwen, “you will discover within yourself a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply.”23

  Songs of Deliverance

  Over the past decade I’ve recorded a dozen audiobooks with a brilliant sound engineer named Brad Smiley. During our last recording session, Brad told me about standard operating procedure for sound mixers in the film and music industries. Before going into the studio, they let their ears relax and recalibrate through absolute silence. Only then are they ready to listen, really listen. Acoustic ecologists call the process ear cleaning.

  The quietest room in the world is the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis. One-foot-thick concrete walls and three-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges absorb 99.99 percent of sound. Background noise measures −9.4 decibels.24 All you hear in an anechoic chamber is the sound of your heart beating, blood circulating, and lungs breathing. That’s the sound of silence, and it reminds us that it’s in God that “we live and move and have our being.”25

  If you want to hear the heart of God, silence is key.

  If you want the Spirit of God to fill you, be still.

  The psalmists didn’t have an anechoic chamber to retreat to, so they retreated to God. They referred to Him as their refuge, their fortress, and their ever-present help in time of need. They spoke of the “shelter of the Most High” and the “shadow of the Almighty.”26 But my favorite descriptor might be the “hiding place.”

  You are my hiding place;

  you will protect me from trouble

  and surround me with songs of deliverance.27

  Did you know that God is singing songs of deliverance all around you all the time? You can’t hear them because they’re outside your range of hearing, but you’re surrounded by a sonic shield. Those songs of deliverance are powerful enough to break any bondage, overcome any addiction, and solve any problem. Those songs are the reason no weapon formed against you will prosper.28

  Remember, the voice can reproduce only what the ear can hear. I’m not sure what problem you need to solve or what issue you need to resolve, but my prayer is that you’ll learn to discern His voice. When you do, His songs of deliverance can set you free!

  Quit hiding from God.

  Hide yourself in Him.

  An Eighth Rest

  One of the most played pieces of classical music is Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor. It’s immediately recognizable because of its iconic opening, a four-note motif that is among the most famous in Western music. But did you know that it actually begins with silence? Beethoven inserted an eighth rest before the first note.29

  Beethoven’s Fifth is so familiar to us that it’s difficult to re-create the full effect it had when it debuted at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien on December 22, 1808. And although it’s difficult to discern Beethoven’s original intent, that eighth rest served as a sonic buffer. At the beginning of a concert there is ambient noise: conversations between concertgoers, a few stragglers finding their seats, the rustling of programs. A bit of silence at the beginning of a symphony is ear cleaning, even if it’s only an eighth rest. It was silence that set up that symphony, and the same is true of our lives.

  We need more eighth rests, don’t we? Especially if we want our lives to be symphonies of God’s grace. I would recommend an eighth rest at the beginning and end of the day—a few moments to collect our thoughts, count our blessings, and pray our prayers. We also need a day of rest one day a week. Rest is so important that the Sabbath is one of God’s Ten Commandments. And if you can afford the time, I would recommend a two-day silent retreat once a year. In my opinion you can’t afford not to. Make sure you tell someone where you’re going and how long you’ll be gone, but cut off all communication for two days. Get alone with God and His Word. And although prayer is an important part of a silent retreat, do more listening than talking.

  Remember those voices that deafen us? It’s hard to tune them out and turn them down, especially the voices in our heads. But the payoff is exponential: “Better is one day in [the Lord’s] courts than a thousand elsewhere.”30 If we want to do more by doing less, we need to get into God’s presence. It’s our most efficient use of time, by a factor of a thousand. And quiet is the key. It’s silence that helps us hear God’s voice and sing His song.

  Silence is the difference between sight and insight.

  Silence is the difference between happiness and joy.

  Silence is the difference between fear and faith.

  According to interruption science, we’re interrupted every three minutes.31 And the very fact that we have a field of science dedicated to interruption is evidence of how bad it’s gotten. To find peace and quiet, we need to set some boundaries. For example, no e-mail before nine o’clock in the morning or after nine at night. And while we’re setting boundaries, we might want to delete a few apps, cancel some subscriptions, and take a break from social media every now and then.

  A few years ago I wrote a book titled The Circle Maker.32 It’s about the power of prayer, and the thousands of testimonies I’ve heard since the book was released is evidence to that fact. Prayer is the difference between the best we can do and the best God can do. But there is something even more important and powerful than talking to God. What is it? Listening to God. It turns a monologue into a dialogue, which is exactly what He wants.

  I have a simple rule of thumb when I meet with someone: do more listening than talking. The more I want to hear what the person has to say, the quieter I am. That’s a good rule of thumb with God.

  Lean into His whisper.

  Then pray the bravest prayer!

  THE VOICE

  God said, “Let there be light.”

  —GENESIS 1:3

  You may have no sensation of motion right now, but that is an illusion of miraculous proportions. The reality? You are on a planet that is spinning around its axis at a speed of approximately 1,000 miles per hour. And you don’t even get a little bit dizzy! Plus, planet Earth is speeding through space at approximately 67,000 miles per hour. So even on a day when you feel as if you didn’t get much done, you traveled 1,608,000,000 miles through space!

  Now let me ask: When was the last time you thanked God for keeping us in orbit? I’m guessing the answer is never. Why? Because God is so good at what He does that we take it for granted. Never once have I knelt and prayed, Lord, I wasn’t sure we’d make the full rotation today, but You did it again.

  There are people, and perhaps you are one of them, who would say they’ve never experienced a miracle. With all due respect, I beg to differ. We experience a miracle of astronomical proportions each and every day. The irony is that we already trust God for the big miracles, like keeping us in orbit. Now the trick is trusting Him for the little miracles: everything else.

  In order to fully appreciate the power of God’s voice, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. He speaks the universe into existence with, count them, four words:

  God said, “Let there be light.”1

  Here’s a paraphrase:

  Let there be electromagnetic radiation with varying wavelengths traveling at 186,282 miles per second. Let there be radio waves, microwaves, and X-rays. Let there be photosynthesis and fiber optics. Let there be LASIK surgery, satellite communication, and suntans. Oh, and let there be rainbows after rainstorms.

  “Let there be light.”

  These are God’s first recorded words.

  This is God’s first recorded miracle.

  Light is the
source of vision; without it we can’t see a thing. Light is the key to technology; it’s how we can talk to someone halfway around the world without so much as a second’s delay because light can circle the globe seven and a half times a second.2 Light is the first link in the food chain; no photosynthesis equals no food. Light is the basis of health; the absence of light causes everything from vitamin D deficiency to depression. Light is the origin of energy; in Einstein’s equation E = MC2, energy (E) is defined as mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared. The speed of light is the constant. And light is the measuring stick for space-time; a meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second.

  Light is the alpha and omega of everything, and that includes you.3

  Did you know that embryologists have recently captured the moment of conception via fluorescence microscopy? What they discovered is that at the exact moment a sperm penetrates an egg, the egg releases billions of zinc atoms that emit light.4 Sparks fly, literally! That miracle of conception is a microcosm that mirrors God’s first four words.

  Four Words

  On January 1, 1925, Edwin Hubble gave a presentation to the American Astronomical Society that proved to be a cosmological paradigm shift.5 At the time, the prevailing opinion was that the Milky Way galaxy might be the sum total of the cosmos. Hubble, a pioneer in extragalactic astronomy, argued otherwise. His key piece of evidence was the degree of redshift observed in light coming from distant stars that increased in proportion to their distance from planet Earth. In one fell swoop the size of the known universe was increased by a factor of one hundred thousand. Even more significant was this simple fact: the universe is still expanding. Nearly a century later the Hubble telescope has spied an estimated two hundred billion galaxies, and recent research indicates that this estimate may be at least ten times too low.6