In a group I led at church this week, we talked about some of the false things we believe about God. Those of us who grew up in church all acknowledged that we had the idea that God was a harsh judge, standing with a checklist waiting for us to do something wrong so that he could write it down and be mad at us.1 I knew I could never live up to God’s standards perfectly and that translated to my being a constant disappointment. I knew about Jesus but somehow I never realized that God loved me, actually even liked me. I never realized that God knew I wouldn’t be perfect and worked patiently toward my transformation to be like Jesus. Or that Jesus was compassionate with my shortcomings and inability to see myself and the world through His eyes.
It’s not shocking to imagine that I struggled to believe that God loved me. I could say it, yes. I could sing “Jesus Loves Me.” Intellectually I knew it was true: God is love and God loves me. Experientially I did not know it. Instead, strange bits of what I was told about how God felt about me as a woman (specifically from a certain sector of theology) planted themselves deep in the midst of this performance-based moralism and grew. Those distortions and lies malformed how I saw God and how I saw myself.2
There’s a reason the believers of the New Testament are admonished not to be deceived about a variety of topics. It’s because our enemy—God’s enemy—deals in lies. And we are so susceptible to lies. Sometimes Satan doesn’t have to tempt us to rebel against God. If He can get us to believe lies about God, that’s just as well. Even better perhaps, because we don’t know what’s happening in real time.3 Getting us to believe lies about God and about who we are and about the world is just as good as getting us to throw off God’s ways and reject Jesus. It will still keep us from knowing and experiencing God.
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