Speak Life

Restoring Healthy Communication in How You Think, Talk, and Pray

Brady Boyd

• Publisher: David C Cook
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781434710932
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Why do so many of our conversations with one another lead to misunderstanding and hurt feelings? Brady Boyd turns to the example of Jesus Christ to show that the health of our conversations can be only as vibrant as the health of our interactions with God.
 
In Speak Life, Boyd explores:

• How to tune into God in order to tune up your relationships
• How to listen to the Holy Spirit’s guidance in conversation
• Why healthier self-talk leads to better communication
• The biblical truths about your identity in Christ
• How to recognize and overcome the lies of the Enemy

 
Written by a self-proclaimed former “gunslinger” of painful words, Speak Life will help you speak words not of recklessness but of restoration to God, yourself, and those you love.
 

Part One

The Conversation between You and God

1

The Speaking God

If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.

—Yo-Yo Ma

The most common question I get asked as a pastor—more frequently than why bad things happen to good people, why Christians are so hypocritical, and whether or not there will be sex in heaven—is this: Does God really speak? A full 100 percent of the time I’m asked this question, the inquirer isn’t launching a theological debate but is asking for personal reasons. What people are really asking is “Does God really speak to me?”

For anyone who has spent any time around a Bible, it’s pretty clear that God has spoken throughout history. He spoke through his Son, Jesus Christ—the “radiance of [God’s] glory and the exact representation of His nature,” the One who “upholds all things by the word of His power” (Heb. 1:3 NASB). Before that, God spoke through a parade of prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and more.

He spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exod. 33:11), to Abraham, exhorting him to walk faithfully and blamelessly before him (see Gen. 17:1), and to Noah, a total of five times over the nine hundred fifty years of Noah’s life (see Gen. 9:29). Chase communication all the way back to the beginning, in fact, and there you’ll find a speaking God. The creation account is riddled with evidence along these lines:

• “God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Gen. 1:3).
• “God said, ‘Let there be a vault between the waters’” (v. 6).
• “God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place’” (v. 9).
• “God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation’” (v. 11).
• “God said, ‘Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night’” (v. 14).
• “God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures’” (v. 20).
• “God saw that it was good. God blessed [his creation] and said, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number’” (vv. 21–22).
• “God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds’” (v. 24).
• “God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image’” (v. 26).
• “God blessed [Adam and Eve] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it’” (v. 28).
• “God said [to Adam and Eve], ‘I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it’” (v. 29).

From the start, it seems, God longed to be with his people, to commune with them and have conversations with those he created. And yet even on the heels of such a litany, we come away wondering, Is this still true today?

Yeah, God spoke to Moses, the thinking goes, but will he talk to someone like me?

God Is There

As I said, I get this “Does God really speak?” question a lot. I’ve heard it from professional women and devoted dads, from elderly widows and teenagers. The businessman who asked it with tears in his eyes—“Why won’t God speak to me?”—nearly left me speechless. I put my hand on his shoulder and said the same thing I always say in response to this question: “He will. He does. He has! God has spoken to you already. He is speaking to you today. And he will speak to you throughout the course of your life. All you have to do is tune in and listen to what he has to say.”

If you’re older than twenty-five or thirty, you probably remember the car radios of old that could only be tuned manually. There was no digital tuner back then that would take you with precision to 102.7 or 99.1 or whichever radio station you were hunting for, and so you’d have to sit there for what felt like an eternity turning the little knob in microscopic increments until you hit broadcasting gold. You’d hear static, static, static, and more static, and then bam! “Song of the South” by Alabama would warble itself into clarity, and you’d grin, throw the truck into gear, and head off down the road.

The reason we were willing to go to such lengths to locate our favorite radio station was because we knew without a doubt that it was there; we just had to find it. As it relates to God speaking, we can have that same confidence—he is there and just needs to be found. On one hand, this ought to be very good news, for God says that whenever we come looking for him, we will find him; that when we get serious about finding him and want it more than anything else, he will make sure we won’t be disappointed (see Jer. 29:13).

On the other hand, the news that he is there for us to find can seem like a cruel game of cat and mouse. Our pursuit leaves us exhausted and disillusioned after so many near misses. We come across verses like Isaiah 43:12, which confirms that God spoke, that he saved, that he told us what existed “long before these upstart gods appeared on the scene” (THE MESSAGE), and Malachi 3:6, which assures us that God himself will never change. While the sum of those concepts ought to be as straightforward as two plus two equaling four, we can’t quite get our minds and hearts to concede that yes, God has spoken; yes, God still speaks; and yes, we serve a speaking God. We can’t, that is, until that speaking God actually speaks to us.

This Time It’s Personal

If you had visited First Assembly of God church in Jonesboro, Louisiana, on a Sunday morning, a Sunday evening, or a Wednesday evening anytime between, say, 1983 and 1989, you’d have found my mom, my brother, my sister, and me, four ducks in a row, always seated in the very same pew. Dad wouldn’t have been there, because somehow he always escaped Mom’s mandate that we go to church—a church that was, incidentally, a twenty-five-mile car ride away. The sole lucky duck in our family would instead stay home, put on comfortable clothes, and watch whatever sporting event happened to be on TV.

I didn’t dislike going to church; I just didn’t get all the hype about God. This was a Pentecostal church, which meant a lot of enthusiastic bouncing around, copious amounts of whooping and hollering, and an overemphasis on “experiencing God.” One woman, who often sat in front of my family, had a very large beehive hairdo that she kept in place with dozens of bobby pins. One Sunday I counted sixty-four. Anyway, she’d really get going during worship services, flailing her head around as if she were a heavy-metal guitarist, and those bobby pins would start flying toward my head like heat-seeking missiles.

Still, despite the craziness that sometimes characterized the ethos of the congregation of my youth, at fifteen years of age, I stood at the altar one Wednesday night and experienced firsthand what all the fuss was about. I’d never doubted that the congregants of the First Assembly of God church were sincere in their beliefs that God was near, that he was speaking, and that he wanted a close-knit relationship with them. What didn’t sit so easily was the idea that he wanted anything to do with me.

Lingering at the altar was a big deal in that church. People came forward after worship services to have leaders of the church pray for them—for healing, for protection, for provision, and more. Folks would hang out there for up to an hour, praying and talking and probably just basking in the afterglow of the emotionally stirring experience they’d just had. As I stood there that night receiving prayer, everyone around me faded out of view. I no longer saw my surroundings as they were. Instead, in my mind’s eye I saw the Trinity—God pointing me to his Spirit, the Spirit pointing me to Jesus, Jesus pointing me back to the Father.

God was conveying his nearness to me, his interest in me, his desire to stay in touch. For a fifteen-year-old, this was huge—but then I suspect it’s huge for us all, no matter how old we are, when such an awareness of God hits.

A few months ago at New Life, I met a woman named Anna and her three children. After exchanging pleasantries, she dove headlong into conversation about her spiritual journey and, specifically, about how, when she was about to enter the eighth grade, the Catholic priest at the church her family attended stood before a whole bunch of confirmation-class candidates—this woman included—and said, “Young men, young women, this choice to relate with God is yours to make. Nobody can make it for you.”

Anna said, “This was news to me. First of all, I didn’t know I had any say in my spiritual life. As far as I knew, religion got passed down to you from your parents, and I assumed that the obligations and regulations my parents abided by were going to be rails I’d have to run on too. But second, who knew a person could actually relate with God?”

I nodded. I’ve been there. We’ve all been there, I would guess, shocked by the realization that God has communicated with us, his most prized possessions, and that what he wants more than an...

Table of contents

• Introduction: The Four Conversations
• Part One: The Conversation between You and God
• 1. The Speaking God
• 2. Static
• 3. Tuned In
• Part Two: The Conversation between You and Yourself
• 4. Which Voice Wins?
• 5. Insidious Insecurity
• 6. Taking God at His Word
• Part Three: The Conversation between You and the Enemy
• 7. Division unto Destruction
• 8. Jumping the Fence
• 9. What Forgiveness Always Achieves
• Part Four: The Conversation between You and Me
• 10. It Sounds a Lot Like Love
• 11. Weird-Free Prophecy
• 12. Being Known for Weighty Words
• Acknowledgments
• Notes