Reading a tone of voice into printed words, especially the personal experience of an email or text, can disconnect two people, even friends. Having one friend reinterpret the way another "heard" the words with their own tone of voice may lead them into discovering how Jesus seems to hear God differently, even though he read the same Bible.

In Getting God Wrong, the reader is invited into a conversation on how they taught themselves to misunderstand the One who loves them best. "Instructions" is the same word that gets translated "commandments," and "guidance" is the same word sometimes translated "law." This shift of translations can affect one's emotional engagement with the ideas.

People have told themselves for centuries that God marched the people of Israel out of four hundred years of slavery, out into the desert, to tell them, "Now you'll be my slaves and live under my commandments!" What if God used a different tone of voice, and not the one people usually "hear" as they read? Getting God Wrong suggests that God wants people to hear his heart as clearly as Jesus lived it out in front of them. Jesus is God's tone of voice.