What Is Your Picture of God?

            If you were asked to describe God to someone, what would your description be? What is your understanding of who God is, how God works, and how we interact with God? If you were to “paint a picture” of God, what would it look like?

            I ask this not just out of curiosity, but because of an understanding I have recently become convinced of. How we view God has huge implications in how we live our lives. William Temple, a twentieth century Anglican minister and leader, once made the provocative observation that if people live with a wrong view of God, the more religious they become, the worse the consequences will get, and eventually it would be better for them to be atheists!

            Hmm… Such a statement may shock our senses, but think about it. What if we do have a wrong perception of who God is, how God operates, and what God’s desires are for us as his followers?  If we start off in the wrong direction, the further we go in our spiritual walk, the more religious we become, the further we will stray from the path of God’s will for us. So who does more damage to the Kingdom of God? Someone who denies God’s existence, or a strongly religious person deeply convinced of, and living their lives by, the wrong truths.

            Trevor Hudson writes in Christ-Following, a book I am currently reading, that “In each of our hearts and minds there is drawn our picture of God. Formed over the years through interactions with parent figures, church representatives, and our surrounding culture, it significantly influences the way we live our daily lives.” This truth came to him through a mentor who asked him, during a time of weariness from stress, what his image of God was. While he at first didn’t see the connection, as the picture he was carrying deep inside emerged, he realized that his skewed picture of God had resulted in a skewed way of living. “Yes I did feel that I needed to earn God’s grace… Yes I did sense that God would withdraw his blessing if I did not measure up.” If that is the picture we carry inside us, our God becomes a passive spectator, giving a thumbs-up or thumbs-down depending on our performance.

            If we see God as impersonal and distant, we will only be able to have a cold, vague relationship with him. Or, if we see God as a taskmaster, demanding a certain performance standard to be pleased, we lose any sense of joyful abandon in serving him. If the picture of God we carry is that of a detailed bookkeeper, keeping an up-to-date account of our sins and failures, we won’t very readily be open and honest with our shortcomings and struggles with God or with each other. Without open honesty, we then never receive healing or help. If God is a divine candy store for us, where all our wishes are granted, we will quickly be crushed when things inevitably go wrong.

            Can we see how important a proper picture of God is for the way we live our lives? Let’s strive to learn together of God’s goodness and love, becoming shaped more and more into his image within us. Let’s acknowledge that we can never “nail down” or totally capture who God is with our finite minds, and admit that if we think we finally have, we likely have a wrong picture in mind. Let’s leave room for mystery because there is certainly plenty of that in God’s nature, and let’s learn to trust the God who is infinite and indescribable love.

            May our lives not cloud the picture of who God is for those looking on, but rather illuminate more clearly one aspect of his love for each and every one of us.

Pastor Carl