An Underwhelming God
Feb 28 2023 - Amy Raby
How big is your God? If His name is Jesus, Yahweh, Emmanuel, Holy Spirit, Jehovah, God the Father, Adonai…there is no measure to Him! There’s no grabbing on to Him and trying to make Him fit into a mold. He cannot be contained. He cannot be shrunk to anything less than He is!
So many of us are experiencing the famine of an underwhelming God. For many, I truly believe, it is unintentional, yet it is happening nonetheless. We build our boxes, put up our walls and parameters, and tell ourselves, “this is God.” The God we try to label, place in a system, a process, or define inside our finite understanding is always going to leave us underwhelmed.
Imagine with me a giant whiteboard. Picture several small boxes drawn on the board. One box is called Experience—How I’ve known God. One is called Tradition—What’s been passed on to me. One is called Doctrine—What I’ve believed so far. And perhaps one is called That-Could-Never-Happen—What I don’t believe. Now, imagine someone drawing a huge circle, all the way to the edges of the white board. That circle represents God. So many of us are trying to fit that giant circle into the small boxes. The boxes are IN God, not the other way around!
God is infinite. He is endless, eternal, the Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End, Everlasting Father. He is the Ancient of days, existing before and beyond time. He created the universe with His very words! What have you ever created simply by speaking? He is otherworldly, transcendent, beyond comprehension and comparison.
Church, I deeply desire for us to have faith in the TRUE God, not solely in the God we have experienced, understood, or believed in for all our lives. He is bigger than any experience you may have had with Him. He is more mysterious than anything you’ve understood of Him, and He is more comprehensive than anything you have believed about Him. If we are going to shift from being a people underwhelmed by God to a church in awe of the vastness and never-ending wonder of Him, we have to see Him outside of the box we’ve potentially tried to know Him in.
If you desire this too, would you pray this with me?
God, make us a church that is left in awe of you every time we talk about you, sing about you, pray to you and encounter you. Make us hungry for more of your surprises. Your unending love is full of wonder. Your salvation, we will never fully comprehend. Thank you for being so much greater, so much better, and so much more powerful than we know! Humble us so we can say we don’t have you figured out. Give us faith to see you as you are and to be okay with the mysteries. May we be stunned and overwhelmed because we see you rightly—Redeemer, Destroyer of Death, Creator of the Heavens, Friend of Sinners, God our Healer, God our Provider, God our Savior, God our Comfort, God our Hope, God Almighty!
To see this concept in Scripture, read, Job 38 HERE