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

by J.D. Greear

I acknowledged the truthfulness of every sentence of Scripture. But in my heart I assumed the God behind it all was only a slightly bigger, slightly smarter, slightly better version of me.

These shallow glimpses of God are fine as long as our faith remains untested, but they are utterly insufficient in the midst of serious questioning or intense suffering.

“A god small enough to be understood,” the British philosopher Evelyn Underhill observed, will never be “big enough to be worshipped.”2

“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.

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. Tozer added, 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

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

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.

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.

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

We don’t know if Moses was even interested in God on the day that God spoke to him. We do know that Moses was a discouraged and defeated fugitive, probably in his sixties, leading a flock of his father-in-law’s sheep in the desert—which sounds to me like the ultimate life-fail.

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

We imagine a God of omnipotent power but with a brain no bigger than ours—a God with huge, universe-moving muscles and a little itty-bitty, teeny-tiny head.

God uses pain to prepare his people for that future, like a doctor who gives shots to improve your quality of life or a coach who presses you to the point of exhaustion to strengthen your endurance.

That means if we make our faith contingent on being able to figure everything out, we’ll never believe.

At the cross, we see God willingly enter into our suffering. There he did more than promise to fix our pain; he immersed himself in it. And there we see that even when things looked like they were out of control, they really weren’t. If there ever were a time when it looked like God had lost control, it was on the day Jesus was crucified! Evil, it seemed, had triumphed at last. Now, however, we realize that there had never been a time when God was more in control. In the cross, he took the worst atrocity in human history—the murder of his Son—and turned it for his glory and our good.

God is too big for me to base my trust in him on my ability to figure him out. I trust him because I know that my Redeemer lives.

Saturday morning rolled around, he and

The writer of Hebrews tells us that one day every thought, word, and deed will be laid bare, naked, and exposed before God (Heb 4:13). What will that moment be like?

When Isaiah had his vision of encountering the presence of God, he didn’t find himself in a lineup with other sinners. He found himself face to face with God. His conclusion was not “I am above average.” It was “I am lost.” Ruined. Doomed.

Coming into his presence with even a single sin is like a piece of wax paper touching the surface of the sun.

It’s my heart that is the problem. I need more than instructions on how to be righteous. I need a heart change.

In at least 322 places, Jewish prophets, who wrote hundreds of years before Jesus’s birth, predicted details about the coming Messiah’s life: he would be born in Bethlehem, from the tribe of Judah and the lineage of David, flee to Egypt as a kid, begin his ministry in Galilee, perform many miracles, enter as King into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey, be betrayed by a friend for thirty pieces of silver, die by crucifixion between thieves, and then be resurrected and ascend to heaven—just to name a few.5

God will not answer all those questions before he calls you to follow him. He didn’t for Moses or the prophets or his disciples. He simply speaks—in an undeniable way, through burning bushes and empty tombs—and invites you to believe. If understanding everything is a prerequisite to belief, you’ll never believe.

Our culture’s problem is not with Jesus as a good man, a prophet, a teacher, or even as a deity. It’s with Jesus’s primary claim, that he is Lord.

God is not “ours.” He is his own. He’s not a salad bar where we take the items we have an appetite for and leave the others. He’s not the Burger King God, where you “have him your way,” or a Build-A-Bear God, where you assemble the deity you like best.

They might sound similar, but they are different. The first is about worshiping the wrong gods. The second is about worshiping the right God in the wrong way.

Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD’” (Exod 32:5–6). “LORD” in all caps indicates God’s covenant name given specially to Israel. For the Israelites, this golden image became the one true God “as-we-would-like-him-to-be.”

Do we approach God listening for his “I am,” or do we quickly declare to him, “You should be . . .”?

If our God only affirms what we already think, we’re probably not listening to him and instead deifying our own convictions.

As theologian Karl Barth said, “If God doesn’t make us mad, we’re not worshiping him, but ourselves.”3

In the same way, our reshaped God feels liberating at first. But inevitably, we become like what we worship. If our conception of God comes out of our hearts, which are by nature spiritually dark (Jer 17:9), rather than illuminate our darkness, our “God” makes it worse.

If you tend to be harsh and judgmental toward others, you have not experienced God as gracious. • If you find yourself rarely in conflict with society around you, your God is not transcendent. • If you worry a lot, your God is not the good, wise, and sovereign God of the Bible. • If you can’t shake the feeling that you are condemned, your God is not a faithful, redeeming Father. • If you argue all the time about theology but never tell anyone about Jesus, your God is not a savior but only a professor. • If you find yourself constantly jealous of what other people have, your God is not glorious and all-sufficient.

God created us for himself—gods of our own making will never do the job. They are not God enough. Like the children of Israel, we have to choose which god to pursue: an infinite God who will sometimes confuse us and contradict us, or a small god that neither satisfies nor saves us.

If you are searching for bold, world-transforming faith, a god of your own making simply will not do. Only by humbling yourself before God and receiving him on his terms will you encounter the God worth living for and a faith worth dying for. The God behind all of creation is the God that you crave—a God large enough to satisfy your deepest desires and wise enough to rule our universe. He is a God whose love, glory, and majesty you’ve always yearned for, even if you didn’t know how to express it. And he is unwaveringly good, even if we can’t always understand what he is doing.

The truth is, they had been naked since creation, but only after sinning did it bother them. What changed? Saint Augustine had a great answer: prior to their sin, Adam and Eve felt “clothed” in the love and acceptance of God.1 Having been stripped of that, they felt exposed. Something wasn’t right. Something was missing. They went from perfect security to “naked and afraid.”

All the things we try to replace God with—family, success, sex, friendships, travel, fame, drugs, pornography—leave us empty. They may make us feel, for a while, like we’re closing in on happiness.

Blessings like marriage, family, sex, money, and popularity are wonderful, but if you try to put them in the place of God, they will leave you thirsty. Attempting to replace God in your heart is what the Bible calls “idolatry.”

Modern society, after having ceased to believe in God . . . turned to the romantic partner as a replacement. The self-glorification that we need in our innermost being, we now look for in the love partner. The love partner becomes the divine ideal within which to fulfill one’s life.4

Knowing God in spirit means making him your primary life source. God does not merely want to be a part of your life; he wants to be the core of it. In that sense, God is not satisfied merely to be “number one” in our hearts, he wants to be the only one.

For many people, however, there’s something significant that stands in the way of releasing themselves to him. While they may be attracted to the love of an eternal God, they resent the idea of a God who would judge them for their sin.

But we can’t remove God’s wrath from the Bible. And I want to show you in this chapter that if we properly understood it, we wouldn’t want to remove it. It’s an essential part of God’s goodness.

The Pharisees didn’t hate Jesus because of his effusive talk about God as the missing piece in their lives. They killed him because he told them that God’s wrath was coming upon them (Matt 23:13–36).

Sin, like a cancer, ruins God’s good creation and destroys any chance of a relationship with him. So God hates it.

Our culture, of course, spins the opposite narrative: sin leads to life and freedom. Never mind God’s opinion; only you know what’s right for you.

The opposite of love, it’s said, is not hate, but apathy. Apathy means you don’t care. Hate is actually an evidence of love—we only hate something when it threatens something we love.

Without God’s wrath, his goodness would not be that good.

GOD’S WRATH IS FIRST EXPERIENCED IN THE NATURAL CONSEQUENCES OF OUR CHOICES

What it means is that a parent’s sin often has consequences in the lives of their children, sometimes for several generations into the future. Children’s lives are changed if their dad commits tax fraud and goes to prison. It’s not that God is actively punishing the child for the parent’s sin, just that sin has natural consequences that affect everyone close to the sinner. This is the passive wrath of God.

GOD CHOSE TO LET HIS LOVE OVERCOME HIS WRATH