Whisper

by Mark Batterson

  Don’t just go out and do what Dick Eastman or your spiritual hero did. That’s a spiritual cop-out. Copycat spirituality is short lived. Learn to listen to God’s voice, and then do what He says. That might mean doing something different. Or it might mean doing exactly what you’re doing but with a different attitude. Either way, quit putting God in your box.

  I have a little formula that I’ve shared in other books, so I won’t completely unpack it here. But it bears repeating: change of pace + change of place = change of perspective. Sometimes a little change of scenery goes a long way in helping us hear God in new ways. So does doing something you’ve never done before.

  If you want God to do something new, you can’t keep doing the same old thing. You have to dare to be different, and that includes listening in a new way. That’s what learning these seven love languages of God is all about.

  Let the games begin!

  THE SEVEN LOVE LANGUAGES

  SIGN LANGUAGE

  God spoke to our ancestors…at many times and in various ways.

  —HEBREWS 1:1

  On August 10, 1874, twenty-seven-year-old Alexander Graham Bell sat on a blanket near a bluff overlooking the Grand River in Ontario, Canada. He called it his dreaming place. He had spent the morning tinkering with a phonautograph, an apparatus that mimicked the action of the human ear. His passion was deaf education, but in a stroke of genius, he began to wonder whether electric currents could be made to simulate sound waves and transmit voices electrically.1

  “The day is coming,” wrote Bell in a letter to his father, “when telegraph wires will be laid on to houses just like water or gas—and friends converse with each without leaving home.”2

  It was a bold vision for a brave new world.

  On the evening of March 10, 1876, Bell and his assistant, Thomas Watson, were up late trying to perfect the clarity of their sound transmission. That’s when Watson heard these immortal words: “Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.” The irony was the urgency with which Bell spoke them. He had just spilled battery acid on himself, so this could be considered the first 911 call too!3

  Later that same year the city of Philadelphia hosted the World’s Fair. Among the 22,742 exhibits were sewing machines, canned foods, bananas, and root beer. The exhibition opened with a speech by President Ulysses S. Grant, who had invited a distinguished guest, Pedro II, emperor of Brazil. Two weeks earlier the emperor just happened to visit Boston, where he just happened to meet Alexander Graham Bell. That one meeting would prove to be quite providential.

  On June 25 of that year, the Committee of Electrical Awards was scheduled to judge the World’s Fair entrants in this category. The guest judge? None other than Pedro II. The blazing sun almost cut the contest short, but that’s when the emperor spotted Bell. The entourage of judges, some of whom had stripped down to their undershirts, wanted to call it quits, but Pedro insisted that they examine Bell’s exhibit. He put the telephone receiver to his ear while Bell spoke into the mouthpiece some distance away, and the look on the emperor’s face was nothing short of pure astonishment as he exclaimed, “This thing speaks!”4

  Dr. Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and one of the judges that day, called it “the greatest marvel hitherto achieved by the telegraph.”5 The New York Herald called it “almost supernatural.”6

  Needless to say, Bell won the gold medal for electrical equipment. And the rest is history, thanks to Pedro II, emperor of Brazil.

  Various Ways

  If there is such a thing as a biblical understatement, “God spoke to our ancestors…at many times and in various ways”7 qualifies. God’s ability to speak in strange and mysterious ways is nothing short of astounding. He spoke to Moses via the burning bush. He spoke to Pharaoh through ten signs and wonders. He spoke to Hezekiah via illness. He spoke to Babylonian astrologers with the stars. He spoke to Belshazzar via a disembodied hand that inscribed “MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN”8 on the palace wall. And my personal favorite, He spoke to Balaam through a donkey!

  I bet the look on Balaam’s face was a little like Emperor Pedro’s expression. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Balaam said the same thing: “This thing speaks!” The implication? If God can speak through Balaam’s donkey,9 he can speak through anything!

  Let me be absolutely clear about one thing. After highlighting the various ways in which God speaks, the writer of Hebrews zeroes in on God’s greatest revelation: Jesus Christ. He is the full and final revelation of God. He is the Son of Man and the Son of God. He is the Creator of all things and the Heir of all things. He is “the way and the truth and the life.”10 And at His name, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess.11

  Does God still speak in “various ways”? I believe He does. I believe God speaks in the same ways now as He did then, but now we have the distinct advantage of having Scripture as our sounding board.

  To believe that God speaks only through the Bible is to handcuff the God of the Bible as the Bible has revealed Him to us. Yes, Scripture provides our checks and balances. And God will never say anything that is contrary to His good, pleasing, and perfect will as revealed in Scripture. But God still speaks in various ways, and we’ll explore seven of those languages in the pages that follow.

  Eight Kinds of Smart

  More than three decades ago, a Harvard professor named Dr. Howard Gardner wrote a groundbreaking book called Frames of Mind. Dr. Gardner popularized the theory of multiple intelligences. Simply put, different people are smart in different ways. His original categories had eight types of intelligence: word smart, number smart, picture smart, body smart, music smart, people smart, self smart, and nature smart.12

  Let me give you just a couple of examples.

  When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a boy, he visited the Sistine Chapel in Rome, where he was enchanted by a piece of music by Gregorio Allegri. Mozart asked for a copy of the music, but the Sistine Chapel had decreed that Miserere could be performed only inside the Sistine Chapel and couldn’t be copied under any circumstances. Mozart attended one more performance and then used his phonographic memory to write out the entire musical score from memory! I have no idea if Mozart was body smart or number smart, but he was definitely music smart.13

  A hundred years before the invention of calculators, Johann Martin Zacharias Dase calculated pi correctly to two hundred places in less than two months. He could multiply two eight-digit numbers in fifty-four seconds, two forty-digit numbers in forty minutes, and two hundred-digit numbers in eight and three-fourths hours. Dase could perform calculations for weeks on end. He’d stop calculating at bedtime, store everything in memory, and pick up the next morning right where he left off. He could even count the number of sheep in a flock after a single glance! I have no idea if Dase was music smart or people smart, but it’s safe to say he was number smart.14

  As a child, Bart Conner displayed an unusual talent: he could walk on his hands almost as well as his feet. He performed his signature move at parties quite frequently. He even figured out how to go up and down stairs on his hands! Walking on your hands isn’t exactly a marketable skill, unless, of course, you’re a gymnast. I have no idea if America’s most decorated male gymnast is picture smart or nature smart, but he’s definitely body smart.15

  We are smart in different ways, and that’s a testament to the God who created us. We also relate to God in different ways, and that’s a testament to a God who is big enough to be heard by anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. We’ll explore the way spirituality filters through personality when we get to the language of desires, but thinkers and feelers relate to God differently. So do introverts and extroverts. And that goes for all sixteen personality types in the Myers-Briggs matrix, all nine Enneagram types, and all four DISC profiles.

  What does that have to do with hearing the voice of God? First, we all hear Him a little differently.

  This i
s cause for humility, first and foremost. Can we admit a measure of subjectivity based on personality and prejudice? And while we’re at it, can we admit faulty assumptions and false motives? We usually hear what we want to hear and turn a deaf ear to everything else. But remember the package deal? If we don’t listen to everything God has to say, we eventually won’t hear anything He has to say. And we probably need to hear most what we want to hear least. But this I know for sure: His tone of voice is always loving. Sometimes it’s tough love in the form of rebuke or discipline, but it’s loving, nonetheless. In fact, it’s loving all the more!16

  Second, God speaks in different languages.

  God speaks to different personalities in different ways. The way Jesus related to His disciples was as different as Peter, James, and John. God is big enough to speak as many languages as there are people. In this section we’ll focus on seven love languages. We’ll start with Scripture, the first and final Word. Then we’ll explore six secondary languages: desires, doors, dreams, people, promptings, and pain.

  Silent Messages

  At nineteen months of age, Helen Keller lost her vision and hearing after a bout with meningitis. And because she couldn’t hear, she also lost her ability to speak. That left her blind, deaf, and mute. Of the three, Keller considered deafness her greatest incapacity. “The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex,” said Keller. “For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus—the sound of the voice that brings language, sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of man.”17

  Helen Keller famously said, “The only thing worse than blindness is having sight but no vision.” Perhaps the same could be said of those who have hearing but don’t really listen.

  Helen Keller could have given up on life, totally isolated from the outside world. Instead, she learned to listen in a different way. She learned to “listen” to music by literally laying hands on the radio. Her sense of touch became so finely tuned that she could hear the difference between horns and strings with her fingertips.18 She also learned to listen by feeling a person’s lips, face, and larynx, including the lips of the second-greatest influence in her life after Anne Sullivan: Alexander Graham Bell.

  We don’t just listen with our ears.

  We listen with our eyes, with our hearts.

  That’s how we discern promptings, people, and pain.

  We don’t just read Scripture.

  We read desires and doors and dreams.

  Here’s a helpful way of thinking about these six secondary languages.

  In 1971 psychologist Albert Mehrabian published Silent Messages, which included his pioneering research on nonverbal communication. When it comes to credibility, Mehrabian found that we assign 55 percent of the weight to body language, 38 percent to tone, and 7 percent to actual words.19

  Scripture is made up of actual words, and it certainly represents far more than 7 percent of God’s revelation. It “is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.”20 But God also speaks via body language: His body, the church. I call it the language of people. And God speaks through different tones of voice, including the language of desires and the language of pain. But when it comes to interpreting body language and tone, we desperately need the gift of discernment.

  It takes discernment to spot closed doors and open doors.

  It takes discernment to recognize God-given dreams.

  It takes discernment to know which desires are from God.

  It takes discernment to obey the promptings of God.

  It takes discernment to put pain into perspective.

  It takes discernment to read people.

  The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.21

  The English word discern comes from the Greek word epignosis, which means “knowledge gained by firsthand contact.” It’s experiential. In other words, it’s not book smarts as much as it’s street smarts. And it’s fine-tuned over time. But do you know the quickest way to learn a new language? It’s not sitting in a classroom or reading a book; it’s full immersion. You have to put yourself in the position where that’s all you can hear, all you can speak.

  The same is true of these seven languages. You have to jump into the deep end and start swimming.

  Cross-Check

  Our Capitol Hill campus is located just a few blocks from Gallaudet University, the first school in the world for the advanced education of the deaf. With our close proximity, we’ve had many members of the deaf community attend NCC since day one. And I’ve come to appreciate our interpreters, who preach my message using manual communication while I use verbal communication.

  Can God speak audibly? Absolutely! But more often than not, He speaks in “sign language.” I know this makes those who try to live by “the letter of the law” a little uncomfortable, and I understand why. Signs can be subjective. We’d rather rely on sola Scriptura. The problem with that limitation is that God speaks via sign language in Scripture. That’s our precedent. And it’s part and parcel of living a Spirit-led life.

  If we ignore the signs God sends our way, we miss the miracle. Or worse—like Pilate, who ignored the sign God gave his wife in a dream22—we become unwitting accomplices to the Enemy’s schemes.

  God’s ability to speak in signs is limitless. It can be as obvious as a burning bush, as strange as Balaam’s donkey, or as subtle as a whisper. But generally God speaks through divine appointments and divine timing. I call them supernatural synchronicities. And although it’s not easy to discern coincidence from providence, I make no apologies for believing that God is in the business of strategically positioning us in the right place at the right time with the right people. I stand by, stand on, His providential promises.

  God is preparing good works in advance.23

  God is ordering our footsteps.24

  God is working all things together for good for those who love Him.25

  Signs are as easy to misinterpret as they are to interpret, so here’s an important rule of thumb: cross-check your interpretation against Scripture. I know lots of people who have excused sinful behavior as God’s sovereignty because they confused temptation with opportunity. Just because sin knocks on the front door doesn’t mean God is giving you a green light. It’s not an “opportunity” if you have to compromise your integrity.

  If Jacob’s son Joseph had used that faulty logic, he would have slept with Potiphar’s wife.26 Sure, he would have avoided his prison sentence that was based on false accusations, but two nations would have been wiped off the face of the earth by famine because Joseph would have missed his divine appointment with a fellow prisoner that led to his divine appointment with Pharaoh. My point? The sovereignty of God is way past our pay grade. Instead of spending all our energy trying to figure out the future, we need to focus on doing the right thing, right here, right now.

  God will never lead us to do something that is contrary to His good, pleasing, and perfect will as revealed in Scripture. That said, Scripture doesn’t reveal the logistics. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit. Scripture doesn’t reveal whether we should go here or there. It doesn’t nuance whether we should do this, that, or the other thing. And although its truth is timeless, it doesn’t reveal now or later. Scripture gives us guidelines, but the Holy Spirit is our Guide.

  A New Language

  Remember Dr. Alfred Tomatis, the otolaryngologist who treated the opera singer who couldn’t hit the note he couldn’t hear? He encountered a very similar case involving Venetian opera singers who were unable to pronounce the letter r with the tips of their tongues.27 I appreciate that problem because even after four years of studying Spanish, I was unable to roll my r’s. That makes the Spanish word perro sound pretty pedestrian!

  The proble
m was particularly troublesome for these Venetian opera singers because Italian librettos are full of the r phoneme. Instead of saying the r sound, they substituted l, which sounds about as silly as my Spanglish. Why couldn’t they sing the r sound? Because it wasn’t part of their Venetian dialect. They couldn’t sing it because they weren’t used to hearing it.

  To remedy the situation, Dr. Tomatis did what any good teacher would do: he employed good old-fashioned repetition. With practice and patience, those opera singers learned to hear the r. And once they heard it, they could sing it.

  Linguists in the tradition of philosopher Noam Chomsky view language as not just an ancient instinct but a “special gift.”28 And I agree. Dogs bark, cows moo, and mockingbirds sing. But our ability to acquire language by speaking and listening is unique among God’s creation. As such, I believe it’s one dimension of the image of God. So to grow in the likeness of God is to steward language better, both in terms of speaking and listening. But listening comes first. And it might be twice as important, given that God has given each of us two ears and one larynx.

  These seven love languages are spiritual languages, but they are languages. What makes us think that they are any easier, any faster, to acquire than English or Arabic? Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Italian isn’t learned overnight.

  Babies have to hear their parents repeat sounds thousands of times before they are able to enunciate those same sounds. It takes them between nine and twelve months to voice the first intelligible word. On average, babies have only five words in their vocabulary on their first birthday.29 But that’s when the language explosion begins. By the age of six, the average child has accumulated fourteen thousand words!30

  Learning a new language can be a little frustrating at first, and it requires a willingness to sound a little foolish too. But if you keep listening, the language explosion will eventually happen.