Thinking Rightly About God
Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.
- 2 Timothy 4:2
A. W. Tozer once wrote, “We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.” In other words, we slowly become what we believe about God. This makes what you think about God perhaps one of the most important things about you. The most revealing thing about a church is her idea of God.
It seems terribly important that our idea of God as accurately as possible, matches the truth about who God is. In fact, if we think about it hard enough we might find that every single lapse in morality can be traced back to a false or imperfect belief about God. What is more, is there a sin more hateful to God than idolatry? It is the first of His commandments on Sinai! Yet the most dangerous idol is not the one made of stone or wood, or the pursuit of a life apart from following God. “The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him” (Tozer). Idolatry begins in the mind. As the Apostle Paul wrote “they glorified him not as God… but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” The idolater imagines things about God that are not true, and then acts as if they were true.
A church begins to go astray when it fails to answer the most basic of questions: “What is God like?” The greatest tragedy is when church members begin to believe wrong ideas of who God is. And once that has begun, the church’s witness to the world is askew, and evangelism peters out.
Perhaps the Christian’s greatest obligation and the Church’s most vital role today is to elevate our concepts of God until they are worthy of who God is. This is the greatest gift the church can give to our next generation and to the community in which we live: that they might know the truth of God.
This is why Paul challenges Timothy, a young pastor of a new church in a hostile world “preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke, and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. The time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from truth and turn aside to myths.”
Let’s all ask ourselves, how might our idea of God need a recalibration? How might we become ready in and out of season to give a reason of the faith we profess?