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.