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chapter_four.docxChapter Four
The High Cost of Walls
I have to be honest with you: if it were up to me, this chapter would be full of simple ideas on how to overcome the wall you’re facing. But if I did that now, you would not appreciate just how significant a step it’s going to be to experience the breakthrough in store for you.
I recently purchased a book that promised to lead to a flat stomach with a few simple changes to my eating habits. On the other hand, it also promised that I could eat all the fast food I wanted! Now that sounded too good to be true . . . and it was. Two weeks later I was off the diet after gaining a few pounds. In its place, I simply started to eat smarter and make sacrifices. Only then did the pounds come off. The truth is I prefer to eat whatever has the most flavor—and to eat lots of it. But even more important was my desire to avoid the consequences that come with poor choices. I didn’t want to deal with all the health factors that often accompany overeating. I had too much to live for.
Think of this book like a nutritional plan for your mind and spirit. There will be no progress without right choices, and those right choices rarely come until you fully comprehend the danger of the alternative.
Poisonous Walls
My family moved to Central Texas when I was five years old. I remember becoming fast friends with Brian, the boy next door. We spent hours outside playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, and every other game that comes naturally to little boys. One day soon after my family had settled into our new home, we were playing in the front yard when Brian noticed a snake in the bushes. Of course, avid hunters as we were, we immediately determined that the snake must be captured. We found an old pickle jar in Brian’s garage and were ready to go.
The plan was simple: I would distract the snake from the front, and Brian would sneak up behind and grab it. Once he threw it in the jar, I would quickly screw on the lid. Within five minutes, we had corralled the snake into its new home without incident.
o our surprise, however, when the snake was caught in the jar, it didn’t go down easily. It began frantically striking at the glass. It was such a curious thing that I went into the house to show my father. But when he saw our trophy, he turned white as a sheet and quickly grabbed the jar. What’s the big deal, Dad? It’s just a snake!
coming from out of state, I was unfamiliar with the wildlife of the region. It turns out that every poisonous snake found in North America resides in Texas—including the western diamondback rattlesnake. And my buddy Brian and I had captured one for our very own, one of the deadliest snakes in the world!
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had been playing with my life. And my dad made sure I never forgot that the threat doesn’t diminish just because you’re unaware of the danger. Snakes kill unsuspecting five-year-olds, too.
When it comes to the spiritual walls that every person confronts, there is a danger that is often overlooked, and the threat of walls in our lives is either ignored or greatly underestimated. In fact, walls can be even worse than snakebites, because when someone is bitten, at least he or she knows it right away and can seek medical attention. Spiritual walls creep in slowly. They masquerade as reasonable structures. And then, while we don’t even realize it, they grow so high that they rob us of the life that God intends us to live, a life of faith in him.
There is a treasure of joy awaiting us on the other side of our walls—the rewarding lives for which we were created. And if walls can keep us from those blessings, then that’s just fine to the enemy of the breakthrough. After all, his primary goal is not only to keep us from blessings. It is to keep us from the God of those blessings. Our enemy knows that the privilege of knowing God and walking with him is the greatest blessing of all, but he’d love to keep us distracted from that wonderful truth.
i’ve seen too many people fall for the con of the wall-defined life: the lie that there’s nothing for us beyond where we find ourselves now.
A member of my church who grew up behind the Iron Curtain in Germany shared a story with me about what life was like in the former Soviet Union. He said that the government was constantly putting out propaganda to the people behind the Berlin Wall to lie about life on the other side, creating the illusion of devastation, corruption, and even torture. Most of the people in Berlin, however, knew the truth anyway because of a secret source: many of them kept in touch with the West through radio and television channels that were accessible on their side. But there were some who missed out on the truthful broadcasts.
My friend Ulrich related to me that there was a certain region down in a valley whose geography kept its inhabitants from picking up the promises and hopes of a better life awaiting them on the other side of the Wall. He said that this area became known as “The Valley of the Clueless.”
How many people are living in the spiritual equivalent of this valley today, having totally forgotten, or missed, the promise of something better? My friend, I wish I could look you in the eye as I tell you that I’ve personally seen what happens when the walls come down. Walls have been broken for others, and they can be broken for you!
You don’t have to settle for life as it has been, whether resentment, discouragement, shame, or something else holds you back. This book will lead you to everything you need to break through your walls, but first you must determine that you will no longer stand for the walls in your life—not a single day longer. You must see the walls for what they truly are.
Walls never satisfy.
We often get a false sense of security when Walls of Doubt or Fear go up in our lives—as if these walls were actually protecting us from something we could not handle. However, no matter how much comfort they may bring, the walls are a poor substitute for what can be—the freedom in which we are intended to live.
When I was in college, a group of guys I was traveling with came through Chicago. We knew we needed to stop for the night somewhere, but as only a carefree single student could appreciate, we showed up with no hotel reservations and very little funding. Thinking we could just talk our way into getting a room on a busy weekend, we walked into the lobby of the Westin, one of the finest hotels in downtown Chicago. Of course, the first thing the clerk at the reservation desk told us was that they were all booked up. But as we persisted and used all our charm, she finally relented and said that—amazingly—she had found something for us. In fact, she had found a suite large enough for all of us to stay in one room, and at an incredibly low price!
Almost swaggering with our ability to negotiate a great room and rate, my friends and I walked through the expensive lobby, piled into the impressive brass-and-wood-lined elevator, and off we went to one of the highest floors. When we arrived at the door to our room, just above the number were the words Presidential Suite. And just when things couldn’t have gotten any better, we opened the door to our room. Not only was the suite huge, with an incredible view of downtown Chicago, there was a grand piano, a pool table, and two huge televisions.
What wasn’t to love about all the games and distractions around us? Except, of course, one thing . . .
The reason we were given the room, and at such a discount, was that our suite had no bedrooms. It was actually the huge main room in between two sets of bedrooms, one on each side. However, those bedrooms had been locked off and were rented to other guests.
It really was fine by us for the first few hours. We had a huge room with plenty of distractions, electronics, and games. That is, no one cared until we finally grew tired of playing pool and using all the other amenities and wanted to lie down and rest. That is when it really sank in that there was no place to truly rest in that room.
In many ways, that is a clear picture of what walls do in our lives. We were just one wall away from a room designed specifically for the rest and refreshment we so desperately wanted. But those beds might as well have been miles from where we were standing. As the night wore on, it made less and less difference that we were on a high floor, or in a suite, or surrounded by expensive toys. There was no rest.
When we keep walls up in our lives, we can distract ourselves with all the toys and gadgets we want, but we are blocking ourselves from ever being able to truly lay our hurt and pain down and find God’s rest.
If you’re worn out, body and soul; if you go to work in the morning and all you can think about is making it through the day; if you lie down at night thinking that life has left you behind, chances are good that you’re living behind a wall, a wall that needs to come down today. But a lack of genuine rest is not the only problem with leaving walls standing in your life.
Walls always get worse.
You may already have a wall in mind that has become part of your everyday existence. And you may already have convinced yourself that this wall is really not so bad. Before you decide that the process of getting past the wall is just too much trouble, keep this in mind: your wall will not stay the same. The truth is, walls always get worse.
Every family should have the opportunity to visit our nation’s capital. While on my family’s first visit to Washington, DC, I took our girls to see my favorite monument. I’ve always been impressed with the beautiful architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial and with Jefferson’s legacy of achievements. Since our oldest daughter, Ryley, was about five at the time, I felt like she was old enough to truly appreciate this glorious structure with me for the first time, and so we went on ahead of the rest of the family.As we walked inside, we took in the massive, nineteen-foot-tall statue of our third president and the ornate writings surrounding the rotunda. Ryley was totally transfixed by the size of the sculpture itself, but I went around the room surrounding Jefferson’s likeness, pointing out key phrases carved in stone and doing my best to impart to her the importance of what those words mean to our country. After all, this was the man who had written the Declaration of Independence!
When I had finally finished my enthusiastic and motivating speech on Jefferson, I could tell by the look on Ryley’s face that she was less than impressed with everything I had said.
“And besides that, Dad,” she proclaimed, “he was really big!”
The entire time I was walking her around the memorial, talking about all of Jefferson’s achievements, Ryley was mesmerized by only one thing: the size of this man!
I was wrapped up in all that Jefferson had done. She was wrapped up in staring at the huge statue in front of her.
Thomas Jefferson was actually very tall. At six-foot-two, he was considered way above average height, which was five-foot-six at the time. But while Jefferson was tall, every description of him says “tall and thin.” That’s not how his statue is carved. It’s a bronze behemoth. It’s designed to be larger than life. And so, too, are the walls that remain in our lives. They will inevitably grow higher and wider and heavier every day, taking up more and more of our emotional and spiritual breathing space, commanding more and more of our focus in the process.
Perhaps one way to understand the dynamic, rather than static, nature of walls is to switch the metaphor for a moment and put them in the context of a cancer. I have a friend who runs one of the top genetics institutes focused on curing cancer. One day I asked him for information on a person I knew who had been told he had a fast-growing cancer. The cancer expert gently explained that the term fast-growing was not technically accurate. He went on to say that when cancerous masses seem to grow quickly, it is not because the cells themselves speed up and divide more quickly than other cells; it’s just that cancer cells never stop dividing. Healthy cells have special instructions in their DNA that tell them when to quit multiplying. Cancer cells have lost or, for whatever reason (still unknown), chosen to ignore those “stop dividing” instructions. So a fast-spreading cancer is one that just keeps on dividing and refuses to stop pushing important things out of the way as it grows.
What’s true with cancer is also true with walls. They continue to grow. And at the same time these unhealthy mind-sets grow worse, they decrease our willingness to admit they are there.
Walls cause us to fake fulfillment.
Walls can separate us from lots of blessings that God has in store, but perhaps none of the blockades are felt more universally than the separations felt at home. Regardless of which wall you’re facing, there is a strong possibility that it has impacted your family life. That’s because walls keep genuine faith from playing its rightful role in the most personal of our priorities.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, we witnessed an alarming exodus of Americans from churches nationwide. People are frustrated with the disconnect they see between their faith and their real lives. A significantly decreasing number of Americans are participating in the most basic Christian practice: the weekly gathering for worship, teaching, prayer, and fellowship. 3 Adults of all ages are finding that their faith traditions have failed them, or at least have left them bored and uninterested. It might simply be a trend if we could also state that these de-churched masses were headed home to carry out their faith walks on a more personal level, that the only thing that was failing was the formality of meeting together in large gatherings. But faith isn’t going home! Few would argue with the fact that the American family is also reaching all-time lows in many categories.
Broken relationships.
Severed generations.
Rampant immorality.
It’s a troubling cycle: Faith becomes too formalized and less personal; the church looks—and we feel—hypocritical for faking it week after week; we slowly drift away from church attendance, or we get better at shielding our authentic lives (the ones lived out at home) from the lives we reveal to others on Sunday. Our faith at home erodes as we try to balance these two selves, so we construct a set of false realities (mind-sets) that will shield us from admitting that things aren’t working. These false realities can sound innocent enough:
• “God helps those who help themselves.” If I keep working hard and trying to do what’s right, my marriage and my children will turn out okay.
• In the real world, there’s no time to invest in spiritual things. I’ll deal with that stuff when I’m older.
And worse, our children can’t help but notice the hypocrisy, and their walls go up as well:
I hear about God at church, but I don’t see God really changing my family.
• If that’s what faith is, then you can have it, Mom and Dad.
We try to compensate by making church life more formulaic and less personal—as if all God has offered us is a list of instructions rather than the gift of his presence and participation in our lives.
The cycle continues until we’re left with defeated lives, broken homes, and empty faith. After two decades of ministry, I believe this is the heart of the problem: there is a disconnect—a wall—between what many people know of Jesus at church and the Jesus they really know at home.
This separation affects everyone, whether home is in a college dormitory or a nursing facility. And I am absolutely convinced that until these walls come down in our lives, and at home, the church doesn’t have a chance at turning the tide.
We hear much today about the “missional church.” It’s an exploding movement that urges people to move their faith outside of the church building and into their communities. That is an important cause, but if we ignore the walls standing in our own homes, our testimonies will be artificial and contrived. Eventually, the people around us will question our words as they see that huge gap between faith and home. We must understand and break down the walls we face by allowing Faith Breakthroughs to permeate every aspect of our lives.
Walls teach us to settle for less than God’s best.
The longer we let walls stand, the more likely we are to focus on what led to the wall in the first place and to forget all about what we’re missing on the other side. The longer we let walls stand, the more they will erase our belief in things miraculous, which is never a good thing to do with a miracle-working God.
You begin to doubt that the wall can ever come down.
Anytime you stop expecting something beyond your current situation, you begin to settle for far less than what could be. I’ve run into many people who have made the disappointing decision to simply set up camp on the wrong side of the wall and call it a life.
In his landmark book The Search for Significance, Robert S. McGee spoke of the false beliefs that can keep us from living an abundant life. One of those is the belief that “I am what I am. I cannot change. I am hopeless.” This is the belief that creeps in when we give up on our breakthroughs.
In his book, McGee tells about counseling a man named Jeff, who had given up hope of ever changing. McGee wrote, “I explained to Jeff that he needed a new perspective, not just new efforts based on his old, pessimistic attitude. He needed to develop a new self-concept based on the unconditional love and acceptance of God. Both Jeff’s past failures and God’s unconditional love were realities, but the question was which one Jeff would value more.”
It is easy to picture the man McGee was speaking to having settled for what he thought was the only life available, a life behind a Wall of Shame. And if we choose to dwell on the realities that built our walls in the first place, we will settle as well. Even worse, the longer we settle in, the more resigned we become to the idea that this must be our lot in life.
Walls can outlive our opportunities.
Contrary to prevailing sentiment, you don’t have an indefinite period of time to overcome your walls. Life is full of built-in deadlines, some of which are known and some that remain mysteries until it’s too late. That’s what makes addressing walls now so very important.
My wife’s grandparents were some of the most generous people I have ever known, but they also knew how to make a dollar last. Like many of the Greatest Generation, they grew up during the Great Depression.
People who grew up in the breadline days of the Great Depression learned to scrimp, save, water things down, and do all they could to make what little they had go as far as it could. Like many who came out of that experience of having so little, Lana’s grandparents were extremely frugal throughout the rest of their lives.
I came face-to-face with that hard-earned tendency to stretch things out as far as possible when Lana and I were staying at their house several years ago. I’m a breakfast eater, so when we all got up, I looked forward to a big bowl of cereal. While I love milk, I’ll admit—and my mother will testify—that I’m adamant (phobic?) about milk being ice-cold and fresh enough to not be even remotely close to the carton’s expiration date. Have you seen that guy at the grocery store who reaches to the very back of the milk cooler to get the milk that was just unloaded off the truck? That guy is me.
So of course, before putting the milk on my cereal, I stopped to examine the expiration date—and nearly dropped the carton!
The milk wasn’t just near the expiration date; it was three months past the date on the carton! To me, that put it in the nuclear waste category.
“PawPaw,” I said in shock, “do you realize that your milk is three months old?” And that’s when he told me how they liked to stock up on things when they found them at closeout prices at the store, a habit they’d formed in—you guessed it—the Great Depression.
It seems they’d loaded up on milk several months before when it was on sale, and thawed a carton for our breakfast. But there was a big problem. PawPaw wasn’t sure exactly when they’d thawed out the milk, nor was he sure how long frozen milk could last.
Meaning that there was an expiration date, but nobody knew when it was comin g!
As you might imagine, there was no cereal for me that morning. When there’s no knowledge of the expiration date, you can never be sure when everything will go sour.
And that’s why you cannot wait another day to start the journey beyond your wall.
Ephesians 5:16 puts it this way: “Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days.” The Bible is reminding us once again of this sobering principle that ought to demonstrate the urgency of each moment we are given: life is full of expiration dates.
We never know when the wall might become too exhausting or too overwhelming or simply too normal for us to care anymore. There is too much of life at stake to put off a breakthrough.
When Invisible Walls Held Back a Nation
Do you know anyone who has named a son Shaphat? What about Geue l? Most likely you don’t (that is, if you mostly hang around loving parents). But what about the names Joshua or Caleb? It’s very likely that there’s a Joshua or Caleb in your school or family. In fact, in a recent list of the top 100 boys’ names in the United States, Caleb was number 31 and Joshua came in at 6. Shaphat and Geuel apparently fell short of the list.
Why not Shaphat or Geuel? After all, these men, like Joshua and Caleb, were part of a handpicked group of spies sent out by Moses to peek into the Promised Land before God’s people moved in. They were part of an elite group of twelve spies, one man from each of the twelve tribes of Israel. But no one (unless they’re really good at Bible trivia) can name a single one of the ten besides Joshua and Caleb. Why? In part, because of walls.
Ten spies who went into the Promised Land saw walls, not an opportunity to trust God’s Word and provision. In fact, the more time they spent observing this land’s inhabitants, fortified dwelling places, and the giants who lived there, the more doubt, fear, and unbelief came into their hearts. And as we already know from our earlier definition of walls, the more we allow unhealthy mind-sets to direct our decisions, the higher our walls will grow.
Keep in mind, before the spies were sent out, each one of them knew that almighty God had said that this land was to be their land—hence the term Promised Land. But bad mind-sets have a terrible way of tearing down promises and raising up walls.
watch the way these walls grew when Moses called for the spies to make their report. Moses commanded each of the spies to “see what the land is like, and find out whether the people living there are strong or weak, few or many” (Numbers 13:18).
All twelve spies reported back accurately regarding the first part of Moses’ questions. Indeed, the Promised Land was “a land flowing with milk and honey” (Numbers 13:27). In other words, the land was incredible.
But so ended ten of the spies’ attempts at accuracy in reporting. For when it came to the state of the enemy they would face, the report that ten brought back was anything but reality based. Reality stopped when the ten started listing all the tribes they must face if they were to cross the Jordan River and claim their Land of Promise:
But the people living there are powerful, and their towns are large and fortified. We even saw giants there, the descendants of Anak! The Amalekites live in the Negev, and the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the hill country. The Canaanites live along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea and along the Jordan Valley. (Numbers 13:28-29)
That’s like going down the list of names on a visiting team’s program before the game starts and seeing stats like, “Mark Smith, 6’ 5”, 380 pounds; Bill Davis, 6’ 9”, 345 pounds”—and those are just the water boys! Most people know that there can be some inflation of actual players’ heights and weights in sports. But what the ten spies reported was like listing the opposing team as being so big and so terrifying it causes the whole team to break into near hysteria.
That’s when Caleb (number 31 on the Top 100 Names chart, number one in terms of trusting God’s promises) spoke up: “But Caleb tried to quiet the people as they stood before Moses. ‘Let’s go at once to take the land,’ he said. ‘We can certainly conquer it!’” (Numbers 13:30).
Caleb had seen the exact same challenges as the other ten spies, but he came back believing God’s promises, not seeing walls. As the story continued to unfold, it is amazing to see how fear and doubt started growing walls for ten of the other spies from life-size to “Dad . . . he was really big!” size. “But the other men who had explored the land with him disagreed. ‘We can’t go up against them! They are stronger than we are!’ So they spread this bad report about the land among the Israelites: ‘The land we traveled through and explored will devour anyone who goes to live there. All the people we saw were huge. We even saw giants there’” (Numbers 13:31-33).
Everyone is giant-size? Really? By forgetting God’s promise that the land was theirs, the Israelites failed to believe, and the wall before them kept growing higher. In the first report they testified that there were some giants. But by the second report, all the people were huge. And their Wall of Fear and Doubt continued growing ever higher: “Next to them we felt like grasshoppers, and that’s what they thought, too!” (Numbers 13:33).
Like grasshoppers. That’s looking at men who were life-size (even if they were big) and seeing instead a horde of nineteen-foot bronze Thomas Jefferson statues they would have to conquer. When I looked up the anatomy of a grasshopper, the most common Middle Eastern species grows to about two inches long. And by anybody’s standards, that is a tiny way to see yourself in the midst of tough challenges. It’s no wonder the Israelites didn’t have any confidence that the wall they were facing could ever come down. They had not only exaggerated the size of the enemy, they had completely minimized their own capabilities with God as their Conquerer. Now that is a serious attitude problem.
That is what mind-sets of fear, doubt, and unbelief do to walls. The walls lead us back into the wilderness, where life is never what it was meant to be. The walls don’t get smaller; they continue to grow until we feel like a grasshopper next to a nineteen-foot statue. The walls teach us to fake fulfillment, pretending that life outside of the Promised Land is all we ever hoped for in the first place. The walls eventually distract us from what could have been . . . until the opportunity expires.
That is, unless we follow the lead of Joshua and Caleb, choosing to look beyond the walls to God’s plan for our lives and living the victorious life that comes after a Faith Breakthrough.
I have yet to meet someone who didn’t struggle with these unseen walls. But I have met many who failed to admit which wall they were facing. . . .
