Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others by Steven Furtick Page A

41)
    What happened to the disciples through this event is a shift I believe God wants to set in motion in each of our hearts. You see, when the winds started, the disciples were afraid of the
storm
. But after they saw who Jesus was, their fear of the storm was replaced with the fear of the Lord.
    We don’t have to fear what we face when we know whom we’re trusting in. The only thing we ever have to be afraid of is that we would ever live one moment of one day outside the protection of the One who can command the wind and the waves to be still.
    The word of the Lord may be coming to still your storm in this moment.
    Maybe when you started reading this chapter, your boat was filling up withwhat-ifs. But as you’re reading, you’re hearing a voice that’s louder than the storm. And you’re starting to realize what the devil hoped you’d never discover: anytime Jesus is on board, the storm is outranked.
    Nevertheless, the storms rage on. No amount of spiritual training can keep the waves of what-ifs from coming or can decrease their velocity, at least not on our command.
    What, then, shall we do with the what-ifs?
    Here’s the mistake most people make: they entertain the what-if, but they don’t enter it deeply enough with the searchlight of truth.
    In the next chapter I will share the counterstrategy that has been very powerful for me at times when I’ve felt fear starting to stare me down. And I’m not just talking about the devastating fears of things like disaster and death. I’m talking about
daily
fears, fears of vulnerability, decisions that are beyond my depth of experience, interactions with people I’m unfamiliar with, stuff like that. Even though I speak forcefully every week about who God is and what He can do, I often find myself locked in cycles of very real fear. And I’ve found a way to escape those cycles that, although not a perfect formula, seems to work well every time I put it into practice.
    The strategy revolves around three phrases that unlock the cycle and show me a way out. They are
    What if …
    That would …
    God will
.
    So, instead of just wading into our what-ifs, it’s time to dive deep into them and find out what’s at the bottom.

6
At the Bottom
    It was not the cold that made you want to rush out as soon as you’d jumped in; it was the unmeasured depth—our fear of what was on the bottom, and how far below us the bottom was.
    –J OHN I RVING ,
A P RAYER FOR O WEN M EANY
    Tom and Lisa sit in the same seats every Sunday morning at the 9:30 service. Sometimes they take up the whole row with all the people they’ve brought to church with them.
    At the beginning of 2012, I had this crazy idea: What if … we had an old-school, twelve-night revival to kick off 2012? (Not all what-ifs come from the devil, you know.) We called the experience Code Orange Revival, and we brought in some of the greatest preachers in the world. Lines wrapped around the building each night, and you’d better believe Tom and Lisa were hanging tough, front of the line, hard-core, night after night.
    For six of those nights, their seventeen-year-old son, Riley, was by their side. But on the tenth night of the revival, Riley was fresh off final exams for the first semester of his junior year in high school. Tom and Lisa gave their son permission to take the night off.
    “Be safe,” Tom said as he and Lisa left for church.
    From the first time you release your child to waddle toward the playground until that gut-wrenching moment when you shut the car door and pull away from the freshman dorm, every parent clings to a variation of these two words: be safe.
    No parent, however, wants to dive into the underlying fear that drives those words.
    What if he’s not safe? What if the people he’s with aren’t safe?
    What if something happens and I’m not there to protect him?
    Four hours later, when Tom and Lisa turned their phones back on as they exited the building after the worship experience, it was