The most important part of who we are is what we think when we think about God.
No matter what your view of God has been, is or will become, you are never beyond restoration. Our thoughts of God need to continue to grow, mature and evolve as we learn and experience more of Him in our lives.
Let me ask you this…when people walk away from Jesus (cause they do) are they walking away from God or are they rejecting their view of him?
Here is what I mean by asking this question. If our view of God is that He desires us to be good and then we make a mistake and are bad, and then we walk away from God as a result because we’re not good enough for Him…are we walking away from God or simply rejecting our view that says God’s primary goal for us is to be upright and moral?
Or, if our view of God suggests that His primary goal is for us to be happy, and then tragedy strikes and we are not happy and we walk away from God as a result, are we walking away from God or rejecting our view of Him that says God’s primary objective is for us to be happy?
Let’s clear up this distortion a little bit. God’s primary goal for our lives and for our world is to be God. So what does that mean?
Read Matthew 11:1-6.
God’s primary goal for our lives is to be God. In this story, Jesus responds to the inquiry of some of the disciples of John the Baptist, his cousin. He basically says this, “You need to see Me differently. Where you are now doesn’t change who I am, but your view of who I am does need to change.”
These followers of John the Baptist came to Jesus with their expectations, and Jesus asked them to expand their view of God. In learning to restore, reshape and re-align our view of God, we need to learn to follow a God that is bigger than our expectations.
Our view of God stems from our experience. Sometimes this experience has been created through what we observe in the lives of others…for example, our view of church might be that it is completely boring and irrelevant because we’ve witnessed people who come to a building and sit in pews and then go home and do nothing with what they’ve learned. We come to expect that church doesn’t matter, and our view of church is thusly informed.
But, when we can see church without expectations, when we can connect with the community of believers and respond to God’s leading and prompting and adopt the mindset of what I can do for God instead of what God or church can do for me, we are beginning to understand what it means to follow a God that is larger than our expectations.
Expectations aren’t a bad thing, but the issue with our expectations is that they are limited. We cannot comprehend the fullness of God, and this is way our view of Him needs to be constantly changing…what I mean is that it needs to grow and become larger!!
When life seems the most out of control, we have the greatest need for an accurate view of God…one that is not limited by our expectations. When we are faced with these situations, the focus of our prayers change…we become more desperate, and in our desperation we are more willing to surrender control to God…we are more willing to let God be God and to follow Him without our limiting expectations.
We can expect God to be God, because God doesn’t change, but our view of Him needs to.
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