What Is Your God Like?

Many years ago, J.B. Philips penned a book entitled, Your God Is Too Small: A Guide to Believers
and Skeptics Alike in which he contrasted the popular understandings of God that we carry around with us with the God that is revealed in Jesus. In other words, he contrasted unreal (even destructive) gods with the adequate (constructive) God revealed in Jesus. His point is that for many professing Christians, the god they profess or reflect or actually “know” is way too inadequate to provide strength and wisdom to tackle the complexities of everyday modern life. Philips writes: “Many men and women today are living, often with inner dissatisfaction, without any faith in God at all. This is not because they are particularly wicked or selfish…but because they have not found with their adult minds a God big enough…to command their highest admiration and respect, and consequently their willing co-operation.” 

Those inadequate understandings of God identified by Philips (e.g. a “resident policeman”, a “parental hangover”, the “grand old man” and others) come from somewhere. Often they are vestiges of a Sunday School faith or a tradition that fails to come to grips with the great God of the bible. For many, their god is not only too small, he is too conservative or too liberal, too cautious or too reckless, he is too much like them (in race, cultural and societal values and emphases) or he is unconcerned and disconnected from the reality of life in this world. And the tragedy is that most of the time we never stop to check our “god” against the understanding of God that is revealed in Jesus. And sometimes that is convenient, because if God is as Jesus says, than we have to deal with him and we come to realize that this God doesn’t like being marginalized. If I don’t allow the understanding of God that I see in Jesus to touch my life than I can see that my god is only concerned with parts of life – maybe my Sunday morning life, maybe just my “religious” life. Maybe we like a warm and fuzzy god who doesn’t ask much of us. This god isn’t concerned about how I use my money or what kind of career I pursue or how I act at school or work or relate to the members of my family or what I do with my time and possessions. My god may be concerned about things like social injustice, but certainly doesn’t expect us to engage in anything too radical.  A radical Christian, Dom Helder Camara once said: “When I feed the poor, everyone calls me a saint. But when I ask why the poor are hungry, everyone calls me a communist.” And maybe because we fear being labeled as an extremist, a radical, we settle for a tame god and a tame Jesus.

But the truth is that these inadequate views of God are hurting us, deceiving us, cheating us of the life that Jesus says is a full and abundant life. Jesus once described life/eternal life like this: “This is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3)

What about your God? How does that understanding of God and your relationship with him stack up with the God Jesus reveals? Are you growing in your relationship with that God? I didn’t ask if you were perfect, but are you really growing in your relationship with the God Jesus reveals? Of course, that means knowing what this God is like and that means spending time in the Bible and prayer, discussion and worship with others who also claim to know this God. Growth also means that I am constantly looking at the various areas of my life to see if there are some aspects that I have not allowed this relationship to impact.

I said above that the God Jesus reveals is a God who doesn’t like being marginalized. This isn’t because he is a petty, insecure, starving-for-attention deity. He doesn’t like being marginalized because God knows that unless you take him seriously and are working at making him the center and driving force of your life, life in all its fullness is not possible. And that inner dissatisfaction that you feel, that lack of peace and contentment, will not be satisfied. So, again, what about your God? Is he too small?