What kind of god do you see?

Excellent post this weekend on Jesus Creed. It's actually a repost from another blog, but Scot posted it in full. I'll just pull out a snippet, but definitely read the whole thing.

God hates you. God’s fed up with you. God’s sick and tired of you. God’s suffered long enough with you.

God’s against you.

You would NEVER say that to someone else. Ever.

But here’s the thing- and maybe you do need to be a pastor know this:

There are plenty of you

who say things like that

to yourselves

all the time.

Not one of you would ever say things like that to someone else, but, consider it on the job knowledge, plenty of you say it to yourself every day...

But I wonder.

I wonder if we persist in imagining that God is angry and impatient and unforgiving and at the end of his rope- I wonder if we imagine God is like that because that’s what we’re like.

I wonder if we imagine God must be angry because we carry around so much anger with us?

I wonder if we imagine there are some things even God can’t forgive because there are things we won’t forgive?

I wonder if we imagine that God’s at the end of his rope because there are plenty of people with whom we’re at the end of ours?

<idle musing>
Go! Read the whole thing! And then revise your opinion of who God is. Let God be the Christian God, not a theological construct that reflects who you are.

I had a professor in seminary who said that we reason from the given to the divine. We look around us and figure God must just be a bigger version of what we see.

To an extent, that is true. But—and the but is huge—God is more than that. God revealed himself in Jesus. If your image of God is anything other than an image of Jesus, you've missed who God is...
</idle musing>