Your Image of God – Is it an Illusion?

The God of my imagination is so small and finite.

I’ve spent too many years with the “God give me…Grant me…Bless me” relationship with my Beloved. How have I imagined HIM?

·         A task master unhappy with me if I don’t measure up.

·         The areas of darkness in me displease Him.

·         The same grace a new believer gets for their immature sanctification is not available to me.

·         The phrase “I should know better”, drums in my head following a fleshly or selfish thought for misdeed.

I imagine God drumming His fingers on throne’s armrest waiting for me to grow up.

For the last four decades, I’ve been led to believe that “feelings are not to be trusted”, or “You don’t really feel that way, do you?” as if my feelings are tainted, jaded, or just plain wrong.

After three years of therapy it is liberating to conclude that this is untrue! How glorious and liberating to be able to name and FEEL emotions!

When we deny our feelings year after year we become less and less human. I became a slave. A slave to other’s opinions, feelings, approval or disapproval because I was under the impression feelings should be placed under my feet and trampled; or better yet, just ignore them.

It is hard for me to imagine the Lord angry, happy, joyful, sorrowful, etc. I’ve always had “stern” as the emotional descriptive.

Brennan Manning summarizes the Love of God so beautifully:

“It is always true to some extent that we make our images of God. It is even truer that our image of God makes us. Eventually we become like the God we imagine. One of the most beautiful fruits of knowing the God of Jesus is a compassionate attitude towards ourselves…This is why Scripture attaches such importance to knowing God. Healing our image of God heals our image of ourselves.” Lion and Lamb: The Relentless Tenderness of Jesus.

Oh Jesus, show us who you really are…not who we made you to be.

Starving Writer's Imagination Seeks Audience of One

Is your imagination starved? I know mine is. Does your imagination look towards the heavens or at an idol? By idol, I mean work, leisure time, your spouse, yourself.

I’ve come to the harsh reality that my imagination is starving to death. Oh it is active enough! The writer’s imagination is never silent or stoic. It skips rapidly from one creative rock to another along the stream of life.

That isn’t my problem. My starvation comes from what the said stream retains.

The children of Israel starved their imagination by looking upon the face of idols. Isaiah, in his wisdom, reminded them to look to the heavens. Nature is God’s creative autograph of His Glory and Power.

"Lift up your eyes and look to the heavens:
    Who created all these?
He who brings out the starry host one by one
    and calls forth each of them by name.
Because of his great power and mighty strength,
    not one of them is missing." Isaiah 40:26 NIV

Our ability to imagine is limitless. Why then - and I speak to myself – do we limit God?

Oswald Chambers wrote, “Imagination is the power God gives a saint to position himself out of himself into relationships he never was in.” 1

With recent fussing and fidgeting before God, it came to me with surprising clarity how small I have made my Lord. I minimize my creator in so many ways. Doubting His love, doubting His presence, worrying about that medical bill and how it will get paid, choosing to act without clear direction because I think He’s late, or… helping my sacrifice off the alter because I don’t see it’s replacement in a thicket.

Since childhood my imagination has been my friend, confidant, therapist, and cheap entertainment. Upon a moment’s notice from boredom, stress, or trauma, my imagination has been at the ready and available. It is infinitely easier to slay imaginary dragons, take down enemies, and fall in love in my imagination.

But it has also been my undoing. A two-edged sword.

Like the Israelites, I have let my perception of God and His attentiveness in my life be dictated by what I imagine Him to be – not experiencing who He is.

As I shed what this world has taught me about myself, I long to see my creator and myself not through the eyes of my imagination, but through the eyes of Truth and clarity.

^“And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate^[a] the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” 2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV

¹ My Utmost for His Highest