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

by J.D. Greear

We all need someone to look at our lives and declare, “Not guilty!” If we kick God out of the courtroom, we’ll just replace him with some other judge. No other judge, however, has the same authority or willingness to forgive.

The beauty of the gospel is that the One who has the right to condemn us has also made provision for our forgiveness. Even though we stand condemned before God, he tells us not to fear because he has taken our judgment onto himself. As Martin Luther put it, the voice of condemnation declares to our hearts, You are guilty, but God speaks with a louder voice in the gospel, I have taken your sin. So, when condemnation whispers, You are finished, we need only look to the cross to hear Jesus’s triumphant answer: No! It is finished.

God is righteously angry at sin, but he’s not short-tempered. He doesn’t want to pour out his wrath. He waits patiently, heartbroken and longing for our repentance.8

Peter goes on to explain that throughout human history, people have mistaken God’s slowness to anger for its absence. Noah’s generation assumed the flood wouldn’t come, but it did. Today, people assume that Jesus’s two-thousand-year absence means he’s never coming back. But he is.

God speaks to every one of us, pleading with us to flee to him from judgment. Maybe he’s doing that with you right now. Maybe he’s whispering to you through pain in your life, a troubled conscience, or fear about the future. These are all God’s messengers of mercy to wake you up. Don’t ignore them.

God didn’t create you for wrath. He created you for relationship. He didn’t design hell for you (Matt 25:41).

God threatens terrible things for those who refuse to be happy in him. The tragedy of the human race is that many will die and go to hell with their pardon sitting on heaven’s desk.

God is not enamored with our greatness, nor is he desperate for our attention. He does not marvel at our brilliance, nor is he taken in by our beauty. We are sinners who do not deserve his tolerance, much less his affection! Yet, from the first pages of Genesis to the last chapters of Revelation, we see God reaching out to people who pay him no attention.

We are like Nineveh, the forgiven unforgivable. We are also like Gomer, the loved unlovable. God was well within his legal rights to walk away from us. The price required to get us back would cost Jesus his very life.

Theologian J. I. Packer summarizes that truth this way: “By his own free voluntary choice, God will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of his children to heaven.”3

As Tim Keller points out, the most reckless character in this story is not the son blowing his inheritance; it’s the Father with his forgiveness.

New Testament scholar William L. Lane describes this moment in Gethsemane as “the horror of one who lived wholly for the Father, who came to be with his Father for a brief interlude before his death and found hell rather than heaven open before him.”1

the eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards asked: Why did the Father show all this to Jesus before he actually went to the cross? What if this vision had horrified Jesus to the point he couldn’t go through with his sacrifice? The only answer is that God was letting us see Jesus go to the cross voluntarily, knowing full well what he was about to experience.

We can be confident that if Jesus did not leave us in his darkest hour, he won’t leave us in our darkest hours either.

Many times we base our understanding of how God feels about us on how we are feeling. If we do that, we’ll never feel secure. If we base it on how well our life is going, we’ll feel loved when things are going well and forsaken when they’re not. But if we base our confidence on what we see at the cross, we stand on a secure foundation. Even in our darkest moments, we’ll know that his love supports us, weaving everything together for good.

Either he is the Savior to whom we owe everything, or someone has told us a stupendous lie. It has to be one or the other. We must either reject him as a delusion or worship him as our Savior. There is no third alternative.

Jesus didn’t die so we could play church. He didn’t die to be our source of serenity in a busy life. He didn’t endure the cross so we could huddle together in small groups and bemoan the deterioration of our culture.

He died to turn us into white-hot worshipers and world-transformers. Jesus is not a safety net, a relief valve, an assistant, or a divine butler. He’s a God whose glory and love deserve our utmost allegiance. The cross demands that we either offer our lives to him totally, without restrictions, or that we walk away from him in disgust, dismissing him as history’s biggest fool.

God is not just after obedience, but a whole new kind of obedience, an obedience fueled by desire. He is not content to compel our behavior with threats of punishment or promises of blessing. He wants people who seek him because they love him, who do righteousness because they delight in it. But how can he create these kinds of desires in our hearts?

You can’t experience God that closely and not show the effects. In Moses’s case, his face actually radiated—as if lit by some inner fire.

Just as no amount of smacking can transform the air in the balloon into helium, no amount of smacking ourselves with rules and regulations will make us love God. Love for God grows in us, the apostle John said, as we behold the love of God toward us: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Beholding leads us to becoming.

No one wants to be loved out of obligation. For some reason, we think God is different. We assume he delights in our begrudging obedience and doesn’t care why we obey, so long as we do. Be serious! Dutiful, begrudging obedience is as distasteful to God as it is to us. A transformed heart can’t come from a list of commands. It takes something greater.

it’s not about you.

That’s why so many people—even though they are religiously busy—are joyless and unfulfilled. Even though God is a part of their lives, they still have something entirely too small at their center: themselves.

Why would God do that? Because God knows what every person who has ever been in love knows—that love is only genuine when the person you love freely chooses to love you back. God wanted a creation held together by love, which meant giving his loved ones the ability to choose what they cherished.

No, we interpreted his sacrifice as weakness and spat in his face. We took his voluntary weakness as further validation that we were in charge. But still, he wouldn’t be deterred. He pursued those he loved all the way to the cross, where he bought back those who had betrayed and stolen from him. Has any other ruler ever manifested his glory in such a way? We shoved God out of the picture, rebelled against his authority, and hijacked his creation.

Christianity, it’s been noted, makes for a terrible hobby. It’s inconvenient, costly, and cumbersome. If you’re going to walk with God, the only enjoyable way is to go all the way. Charles Spurgeon remarked that the most miserable person in the world is the half-committed Christian, just enough into God to be miserable in the world, but just enough into the world to be miserable in God.

We are to live in present awareness of eternal life.

It’s like John Piper says, at any given moment God is doing about ten thousand different things in your life, and you are probably aware of only three of them.2

But even more troubling, he said, was whether we who know the gospel and do nothing to bring it to the lost could actually be saved. He said, If Jesus is precious to you, you will not be able to keep your good news to yourself. You will be whispering it into your child’s ear; you will be telling it to your husband; you will be earnestly imparting it to your friend; without the charms of eloquence you will be more than eloquent; your heart will speak, and your eyes will flash as you talk of his sweet love. . . . Every Christian here is either a missionary or an impostor.1

If we really believe the gospel, simple compassion compels us to share it. How could we do otherwise?

I am not in a place to cast judgment on the ways of God. What I am responsible for, however, is his revelation that he desires all people to come to repentance and that the only way they will hear about it is through me (2 Pet 3:9; Rom 10:14–17). I literally owe the gospel to others.

Those who haven’t heard of Jesus, Paul says, are still under the judgment of God because they have a law written on their hearts. Each of us is without exception, having rebelled against this inward law and suppressed the truth about God written on our consciences. Our only hope, Paul concludes, is the undeserved second chance of the gospel (Rom 10:14–17).

We shouldn’t have to be “called” to engage in the Great Commission. The call to leverage our lives for the Great Commission was included in the gift of salvation. The question is no longer if you are called, only where and how. We are obligated by an inner gratitude for the gospel to look at whatever gifts and opportunities God has placed in our hands and ask how they can best be used to bring salvation to others.

To be honest, that’s what I wanted to do—to widen the gate to eternal life and pretend that Jesus hadn’t really said he was the only way, the truth, and the life. I wanted to deny that hell exists. But I knew I couldn’t do that, unless I was prepared to walk away from the faith altogether.

I could ignore these truths. I could put my head in the sand and live as if they weren’t true. This seems to be what most North American Christians do—to act like church is primarily about adding harmony and balance to their lives, providing their kids with a moral code, and enabling them to live a happy and fulfilled life.

I could embrace the truth and live accordingly. I could recognize that God, in grace, had revealed the truth about Jesus to me just like he had to Paul—not because I was worthier than others, but because God intended to use me also as a vessel to carry that message to others. I could embrace that the privilege of hearing the gospel came with the responsibility of spreading it. I could simply respond, “Here I am, Lord. Send me.” That’s what I did.

Bold prayer recognizes that we pray to a perfectly good, sovereign God. So when we pray, we submit our will to his. Jesus tells us that we should pray like children who trust their daddy.