Crash the Chatterbox Participant’s Guide: Hearing God’s Voice Above All Others

  Session 1 Introduction The ChatterboxThis session’s key idea: We can never tune out all the chatter— the lies in our minds—but we can learn to tune in to God’s voice.                                           #### 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. 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 are also actively working 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 notices anyway?   Do you hear it loudest at the end of the day, when 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…   We all have a chatterbox. How we respond to it will make the difference between a life spent floundering around in lies and regrets or a life that’s making steady progress toward fulfilling God’s desires for us.