this one is for the churchgoers
Because I love you.
I grew up in the church. So like most, I went to retreats. And every year I felt this thrill—this “mountain high”—and would come down saying that I’d “met God.”
Yet when I look back I see that I had little understanding of who he really is. I “accepted Christ into my heart”/”re-dedicated my life to him” a million times. I didn’t quite know why I was doing any of the stuff I did, but I felt good and happy and that was the goal.
See, it’s very easy for us to make God in our own image. Three examples, directly from my own life:
1) We think of certain attributes that we would like him to display, and then tack them on. For instance, I might think that a loving God shouldn’t send people to hell. Or that a good God should give people total free will. Those might sound right to me, so I believe them.
2) We take small parts of the Bible, and then create a perception of God. It’s like listening to a person talk for three minutes and then claiming to know the person.
3) We attribute intense emotional moments that we have to the Holy Spirit and then call them spiritual encounters. And we base our relationship with God on experiences like these.
And the list goes on.
We all do this, to an extent (myself included). Look, if you’re incorrectly convinced on the matter of Santa Claus’s existence, the worst you’ll have is no explanation for the milk and cookies remaining in the morning. But an incorrect understanding of who God is? Then we get incorrect living, wrong worship, terrible “evangelism,” lack of clarity, and even false assurances of salvation.
Unlike Santa, however, God has a book that reveals his character and stands as the standard of truth. It’s called the Bible. It’s the Bible.
That means that 1) he actually has attributes that we can know truly (though not exhaustively) and doesn’t need or want us making stuff up about him, 2) he is a Person we can know and we ought to keep searching for more to know about him, and 3) experience is not the basis for the Christian life. (By the way, not every emotional experience we have is attributable to the Holy Spirit. Just because we feel like something was really special doesn’t mean that it was the Spirit. Something to keep in mind.)
No more “waiting for God to speak to me.” No more “hoping to meet God.” It’s already happened. Read deeply, get help, and think hard. And by the grace of God, we will know—truly—who he is. What a joy! Soli Deo gloria.
And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. 1 Thessalonians 2:13
