A god That Isn't GOD

It's said that you can tell so much about a person based on their bank account and calendar. For example, someone who says they are always too busy, but their days are filled with Facebook posts, Netflix binges and naps, is probably either lazy or disorganized - or both. If someone says 'they can't afford' healthy food, but have no trouble affording a fancy restaurant three times a week, then you know they just don't want to eat healthy.

This is some pretty straight foreword stuff right? Well, I want to take that train of thought and point out that you can tell a lot about someone's view of God by the attributes of His they always seem to focus on.

Let me explain: a person who always speaks of God's love, but never His justice, may not actually be worshipping God at all. Because if you believe that God is ONLY loving and never just, then you believe that God does not care when you sin. But 2 Corinthians 7:1 tells us that "Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God."

Or on the flip-side: if you only focus on God's holiness and never His love, you deny the truth of 1 John 4:8 - "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love."

We serve a God of numerous, glorious attributes. He is wonderfully complex and beautiful and incomprehensible. You cannot contain all that He is in a single blog post, Facebook status, sermon series, prayer or even a lifetime of knowledge. To only ever focus on his love causes you to miss out on the rest of who He is.

Romans 11:33 - "Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Job 11:7 - "Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?"

Psalm 145:3 - "Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable."

If you refuse to explore the depths of any of God's attributes, you may be worshipping a god that isn't really God. To put it a different way - if you believe God is loving towards sinners, but not Holy in Judgement toward sin, then you are believing in the wrong God.

I am not for one moment suggesting that we should know and understand everything about God. That's actually my point here: we serve a God so vast and eternal, that we could spend the rest of our lives teaching everything we can about Him, and still not even scratch the surface. We will simply miss out if we spend our lives ONLY ever looking into His grace, or ONLY His love, or ONLY His holiness, or ONLY His wisdom, etc.

Not only that, but in only looking at one of His attributes, we will have the tendency to exclude some of His other attributes in our worship of Him. In that case, we have begun to worship a one-dimensional God, and as a pastor friend of mine once said, "I serve a Baskin Robins type of God - all 31 flavors and more!"

Enjoy the journey of searching for a God who is unsearchable. Because the beauty of it all is that He has invited us to seek Him - Jeremiah 29:13 - "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart."