Your God is Too Small - Part 2

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips

Your God is too small if He's your Parental Hangover -

There are 5 ways to know about something, maybe 6. You see it, hear it, taste it, smell it or touch it. The 6th I would say is sometimes called The Sixth Sense. It's a spiritual knowing that's outside of provable, sensory knowledge.

On this earth plane we're faced with a quandry - how to know an invisible divinity when It doesn't show up in the 5 usual ways. Two ways to do that - we can sense It through spiritual sensitivity which doesn't give our human minds the photo file we need to make sense of It. Or we can use human world examples to form the images that we need.

The idea of the Parent is one of those. We assume God is bigger, stronger and smarter than we are. It follows that God is our authority figure. Who is our earthly authority figure? Our parents. Kids come to know who and what this thing called "God" is by making the connection between the heavenly and earthly parent.

That's an awesome responsibility, and I mean that contructively as well as negatively. A child is going to form their opinions about God, life, the afterlife, spiritual sensitivity - from experiencing life with Mom and Dad. The father who drinks, displays a violent temper, a cold, formal relationship with his children - will show by example that God is out of control, angry, prone to vengeance, and distant. A mother who is black and white, judgmental, and careless with the health of her children, teaches them by example that God doesn't tolerate mistakes, He's only concerned with the big events of their lives, and guilt is the best response to mistakes.

But God isn't the judgmental, cold, black and white, vengful, punishing, prioritzing parent. He's parenthood as it was meant to be in the best of all worlds.

If your God is a left over of your own parents' mistakes, He's too small.

Your God is Too Small - book report - Part 1

This comes from the book Your God is Too Small by J.B. Phillips.

I don't often read books that someone tells me I HAVE TO READ!! Usually, they aren't interesting to me at all. The Shack was one of those. I almost made a point of not reading it because friends pushed it so hard. Then I gave in and read the thing - and it changed my life - and now I'm the one who pushes it on others!

This book, Your God is Too Small was recommended over and over. So I wouldn't read it. Then, at the used bookstore, there it was in the dollar bin. Hey, for a buck I got it and kept it in the bathroom for short burst reading. And was captivated. It's one of the most touching, cogent, life changing books I've ever read.

So here I am, blogging it for you, in hopes that you'll hop on amazon and get it for yourself.

Our view of God tends to be that of a super human. He's like us, only really good at it. He's perfected our foibles. We tend to want a God based on childhood traumas and joys. If our own childhood was grim, or happy, or quiet, or isolated, that's how we relate to an invisible God.

But He is none of those. Basically, He is unknowable because He's outside of the reaches of our mental equipment. However, it benefits us to keep trying to understand Him. It nurtures the spirit to stretch our skills of perception. This then, is the God that most of us see at some point in our lives.

1. The Resident Policeman - A child who has grown up under the constant judgment of an authority figure spends his adult life looking over his shoulder for the handcuffs to clink on and the bars to slam shut. In every life situation they think they hear the whine of sirens, the authorities coming to get him and punish him for the wrong he has done. God is FAIR - He is JUST. You do wrong, you're going to be found out and punished, no exceptions. Any negative thing that happens to such a person is evidence of God's judgment and justice.

Except that God is not our judge, policeman, father with a strap or teacher with a birch rod. His justice is loving, his plan is for reconciliation. He doesn't use life's tragedies to test or punish us, He uses them to reconcile us back to himself.

He's not the one who says, "License and registration please. Step out of the car and spread em." He's the one who says, "This activity is going to hurt you and the last thing I want is for you to be harmed. If you choose to do it anyway and harm comes to you, I'll still look for you and bring you home and tend to the wounds."

People who see God as a policeman have made God over into their own image. Arresting and punishing wrong doers is what's been done to them and what they'd do to someone else. But God isn't us. He's quite outside of our retributory responses.