Not God Enough: Why Your Small God Leads to Big Problems

by J.D. Greear

The God I imagined in my heart was not the same God who reveals himself through the Scriptures. I had traded the true God for a much smaller version.

The God I imagined in my heart was not the same God who reveals himself through the Scriptures. I had traded the true God for a much smaller version.

Furthermore, my small view of God kept me from grasping how wicked my sin against him actually was and what an act of mercy it was for him to save me. I confessed, of course, that I was a sinner in need of grace, but I didn’t sense, deep in my heart, my desperate need for mercy. I raged against the concept of hell because I didn’t think I really deserved it—and if I didn’t really deserve it, why did anyone else? So, like the Pharisees who scoffed at the forgiven prostitute weeping with love at Jesus’s feet, I didn’t love God that much because—like them—deep down I didn’t think I had been forgiven of that much (Luke 7:47). Finally, because I thought of God as only a slightly bigger, slightly smarter version of me, I couldn’t accept that he might do things in ways I wouldn’t expect. Thus, I had a hard time believing that the love demonstrated at the cross was reflective of who he really was. If he really was loving, I surmised, there wouldn’t be Syrian refugees. His love at the cross didn’t move me because his magnificence in the heavens hadn’t humbled me. The book of Proverbs says that the fear of God is the “beginning of knowledge” (Prov 1:7). That means that without a trembling awe before God’s majesty, we’ll never develop the ability to know him, much less love him. In other words, if we want to think properly about God, we must first stand properly humbled before him. The posture of humility is a prerequisite for faith. Until we have a sense of his magnitude, we won’t e...

True worship is intimacy grounded in awe. Awe, which Solomon says must come first, stands silent before the awesomeness of God’s majesty. Only then can worship move to intimacy, which grows out of embracing how close this infinite God has brought himself to us in the cross. Only the two together, in the right order, lead to biblical faith. Only the two together will yield the emotion that fulfills the Great Commandment and fuel the passion that pursues the Great Commission. As Tim Keller says, “If our prayer life discerns God only as lofty, it will be cold and fearful; if it discerns God only as a spirit of love, it will be sentimental.”3 However, when we behold God as he really is—the Creator greater than the cosmos and the Savior of the cross—we become trusting, passionate, confident, zealous worshipers.

My favorite account of doubt in the Bible is Matthew’s description of the disciples as they watched Jesus ascend back to heaven: “And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matt 28:17 ESV). Think about this: Jesus is floating in the air, and some are still saying, “I don’t know. I’m still undecided.”

Doubt happens when the superficialities of your faith meet the realities of this world. Many of us inherited our faith—from our parents, friends, or even the surrounding culture. But God doesn’t want secondhand faith. Each of us has to learn to trust God on our own. At some point, you must choose to step out of the boat like Peter, trusting Jesus to hold you up. You can’t ride piggyback on someone else’s shoulders.

What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. . . . No religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. . . . We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

The most [determining] fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart conceives God to be like.4

What we think about God determines everything else in our lives: what we value, what we pursue, and how we pursue it.

Our vision of God also determines whether our beliefs will make it through the inevitable storms of doubt, temptation...

The real God is not a god who simply completes us and makes us feel sentimental during worship; he is a God who humbles us and transforms us from the inside out. When you really see him, you’ll either love ...

“And we all, who with unveiled faces [in contrast to Moses] contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory” (2 Cor 3:18). When we see God like Moses saw him, our hearts will glow like Moses’s face did.

Spiritual life does not come from discipline or mastery of doctrine. It comes from divine vision.

we get to see something even greater than Moses did! Moses only got to see the back parts of God’s glory, but in the life of Jesus we behold God’s very face. The apostle John writes that in Jesus “we have seen [God’s] glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. . . . No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who i...

We see a God of infinite majesty willing to humble himself to die a traitor’s death to save those who betrayed him.

When God opens our eyes to see the beauty of Jesus, his glory bursts through the cloud of our questions.

When we truly behold his glory, we won’t need to be compelled to trust or love God; we just will. In the depth of our hearts, we will be convinced that he’s a God worth living and dying for. Others will see in our demeanor a confidence that goes far beyond personality, charisma, or dogma. They will sense in our hearts a burning passion fueled by a genuine encounter with a glorious and living God. If that’s the kind of encounter you want to have, keep reading.

Miles away from the nearest electric light, with no light pollution to obstruct our vision, it felt like we were seeing millions of stars. Astronomers tell us, however, that it’s only 9,096. That’s how many stars are visible to the naked eye—about 1/100,000,000,000,000,000,000 of what’s actually out there. They estimate the number of stars right now to be about three septilion, and that number is constantly expanding. That’s a three with twenty-four zeros after it, or a number that looks like this: 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 If you’re like me, numbers like million, billion, trillion, or a septillion tend to sound all the same after a while. Most of us are satisfied if we open our bank account and see a number with two digits. The magnitude of a number followed by twenty-four zeros exceeds our comprehension. It’s what I experience when I hear someone talk about the national debt, or when I look at the amount my mortgage statement says I will actually pay on my house over thirty years. See if this helps: one million seconds ago takes you back about eleven days. Can you remember what you were doing eleven days ago? What about a billion seconds ago? Do you remember what you were doing a billion seconds ago? That’s thirty-one years and eight months ago.1 Sometime in the 1980s. The compact disc player had just been released. Rambo was saving our world from certain destruction. The Jedi were returning for the first time. Some of you, of course, can’t remember what you were...

God calls each of these three septillion stars by name (Isa 40:26). That idea alone overwhelms me. We can’t even come up with distinctive names for the 9,096 stars we see in the night sky! We’ve given a few of them cool “star-sounding” names like Beta Draconis or Betelgeuse, but the vast majority have names like SAO-067173. Yet God has a special name for each of those three septillion.

He’s bigger than big. He’s bigger than all the words we use to say “big.” He is not just “huge,” “gigantic,” “humongous,” or “gargantuan.” We have no words or measurements to express his magnitude or power.

And see, here’s the thing: the universe, as expansive as it is, still has its limits. It is finite. God is eternal. He exists outside the farthest expanses of our universe, holding it all, as Isaiah says, in the palm of his hand. He palms the universe like Jordan palms a basketball. The reality of God’s immensity must shape the way we approach him and how we respond to him when he speaks to us. Moses thought he knew who God was. As a kid, he’d heard the stories about the God who chose his ancestor Abraham and promised to make his family into a great nation. But when Moses encountered that God at the burning bush, he experienced a God far beyond anything he had imagined.

By asking God for his name, Moses was not simply trying to figure out what to call God. In those days, names conveyed important information about you: where you came from, whom you belonged to, or your status. Moses was asking God for his credentials: “What are you in charge of?” God didn’t respond with a name Moses expected, and certainly not with the list of credentials Moses was asking for. He simply replied with “I AM.” “I am” is a verb phrase, of course, not a name. By answering this way God is saying, “Moses, you can’t relate to me like anything or anyone else. I am beyond categories, descriptions, and words. You can’t grasp where I came from or how I came to be. I just am. Are you willing to accept that?”

Think about it: What kind of being is so magnificent, holy, and good that merely seeing his face would kill you?

It isn’t God’s anger or even his wrath. Nor is it some physiological component of God that would blind him—some kind of effervescent, radioactive energy that would melt Moses’s face off. It was God’s goodness that would kill him.

Have you ever been around someone whose kindness and love was so great that it made you feel ashamed of yourself?

She seemed so heroic, so selfless that I didn’t even know what to say. Standing before her, I just felt ashamed. All I could think about was how selfish and petty I was.

To be in his presence is to come face to face with a greatness so immense that the human mind implodes trying to think about it

a goodness so good that sin simply dies in its presence.

We want a God who will restore us to peaceful equilibrium, take away our stress, and promise us a blissful afterlife. Most Christians haven’t rejected God; they have just reduced him.

As the prophet Isaiah said, the first evidence of God working in your life is not a warm and fuzzy feeling of peace but a fear that makes us tremble: “This is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isa 66:2 ESV).

When you ask your questions of God, do you tremble? Do you approach him with a sense of how large, glorious, and wise he must be ...

Yes, the tenderness of Jesus is amazing, but I’ve got news for you: every single person who got a glimpse of Jesus’s glory in the New Testament responded in exactly the same way Moses did. When Peter first recognized Jesus for who he was, he fell on his face and begged to get away (Luke 5:8).

When Peter experienced Jesus’s glory again on the Mount of Transfiguration, he “fell facedown to the ground, terrified” (Matt 17:6).

Jesus stands up and rebukes the weather like it’s nothing more than an unruly adolescent. No incantations, no loud invectives or chants, no magic wands or expecto patronums.

In Greek he literally says, “Be quiet and stay quiet!” In other words, he put the storm in time out. The storm slunk away like a scolded puppy.

In other words, the rescue scared them more than the storm. Seeing Jesus’s power over the storm was more terrifying than thinking they were going to die in the storm.

I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone like a son of man, dressed in a robe reaching down to his feet and with a golden sash around his chest. The hair on his head was white like wool, as white as snow, and his eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In his right hand he held seven stars, and coming out of his mouth was a sharp, double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance. When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. (Rev 1:12–17)

When John saw Jesus in glory, John didn’t burst into a peppy chorus of “Friend of God.” He fell at Jesus’s feet as though he were dead. That’s not a figure of speech. He literally thought he was going to die.

They needed a Jesus who ruled the universe. Only a glorious and mighty Savior would give them confidence to face the horrors of the apocalypse.

Maybe the reason we have trouble boldly persevering in faith through pain and trial is because we’ve never seen Jesus this way. You see, when life caves in on you—whether that’s caused by the horsemen of the apocalypse or an unexpected cancer diagnosis—you need more than a sentimental Jesus sitting beside you stroking your hand, explaining that there’s a silver lining or spewing nonsensical platitudes about things that don’t kill you only making you stronger. You need a God of infinite glory who sits upon the throne of the universe, who has promised to marshal every molecule in the universe in pursuit of his plan and your good, who stands behind your salvation and will let nothing stand in his way (Eph 1:3–14).

Yes. But forgiveness like that should lead us to more fear, not less. The cross, which Jesus had to endure to obtain our forgiveness, first illustrates for us how terrifying it is to offend God’s justice.

The cross, Paul says, demonstrated God’s righteousness (Rom 3:25), that is, his rightful anger toward sin. There, we see the awful price our rebellion against God deserved. Beholding God from the safety of the cross is like watching a tornado pass in front of you from the safety of a cave. You may be safe, but you still tremble before the awesome power of the tornado, a power that could sweep you away if you stepped out of that cave for even a second.

Those who understand their forgiveness tremble more, not less, in God’s presence.

We need to behold the living God, whose greatness is so great that it makes our minds explode when we try to comprehend him and whose goodness is so good we can’t tell if we want to draw closer or run away.

God we can predict, instruct, and control is not a God who will captivate our affections or command our devotion. He’s not God enough.

Because we have made him small enough to be understood, he is no longer big enough to be worshiped.

In the chaos of life, we hear a voice whispering, or maybe shouting, at us. It may not answer all our questions, but it tells us that we are not alone and that help is coming for us.

Moses didn’t encounter God because he finally figured God out or because he finally looked behind the rock where God had been hiding. Moses encountered God because God came to where Moses was and called his name.

Perhaps he needed to lose what he thought was valuable so he could gain what is truly valuable. Perhaps God put him flat on his back so he would finally look in the right direction, so that he would lean in to hear the voice calling from the burning bush. C. S. Lewis called pain God’s “megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” He said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.”5

That’s because false gods—success, sexual pleasure, power, fame, or even family—always disappoint. The disillusionment on the other side of a fulfilled dream is an invitation to turn aside and hear the voice of the living God.