This Post comes from Chapter Twenty-one of my book Is There An Elephant In YOUR Church?

Confused Concepts About God

Tragically today, believers and unbelievers alike have very distorted opinions about who the God of the Bible really is. The Bible itself seems to paint different pictures of God according to how He interacted with different people groups and individuals under different covenants over the Bible’s 6000 year record of events. Is He an indifferent Creator who fashioned the universe for something to do and is now working on another project elsewhere in the universe? Or is He a cold and cranky taskmaster who just likes to boss people around for the fun of it? Or is He a perfectionist who won’t let anybody into His perfect space unless they somehow work to become as perfect as He is? Or is He someone who is warm and personal and welcoming toward everyone or to only a chosen few? Or is He a combination of all of these characteristics or someone else altogether?

Whether or not you have ever consciously thought about who God really is, you already have formed a set of assumptions about God which you routinely use to filter related ideas about Him. In fact, just now, you used that mental filter to decide which of the above statements about God you think are true and which are not. But are you sure your filter is accurate? That question suggests four other crucial questions:

1) From what sources have you assembled your set of assumptions – your mental picture of God?

2) How accurate are these assumptions that form your concept of God?

3) Is knowing who God really is all that important?

4) Is it possible and desirable to have a personal, interactive relationship with Him?

When Did The Answers To These Questions Hit Home To Me?

You now know from my testimony in Chapter Three of Is There An Elephant In YOUR Church? that I relied on many false assumptions about God over the first forty-seven years of my life. Only when I heard Dr. Robert Cornwall say in 1991 that “Your relationship with God is only as good as your concept of God” did I realize that my beliefs about God might not be very accurate. Furthermore, Christianity is relational and based on faith, not on physical sight. Therefore, to the degree that my beliefs are off, so is my relationship with God, with myself and with others. Why? Because only God has the correct perspective about everything and everybody – including you and me.

Wherever we think differently about something or someone than He does, we will relate to it “wrongly.” Wrong believing among humans got started with Adam and Eve. A believer’s rebirth in Christ does not automatically delete all wrong believing. That is why we need to have our minds bathed (renewed) in His truth in order to see everything the way He sees. There is no condemnation for “falling short” of totally right believing because Jesus paid the price for all of our sin. But we often still reap the consequences of our misguided thinking and actions in the Seen Realm – which keep us from enjoying Father-God and His best blessings.

Morality Is Not The Main Goal Of Christianity

I soon realized in 1991 that living “morally right” is not the primary goal and the basic issue in Christianity, even though it is central to most religions, including Judaism. Bathing your mind in “morality” is not the same thing as renewing it with the truth because Jesus has personally become our way, our truth, and our life, now that we are alive in Him. He did not come to bring us the Law to focus on. The Jews already had that and it was not life-giving but actually a great burden, as Peter correctly stated in Acts 15:10, because they could not keep it perfectly. He, who is grace and truth, replaced the Law for the Jews with the New Covenant which is based entirely on grace, not on keeping any part of the Mosaic law.

The Jerusalem church missed that revelation and hung on to the Law as a way to be more holy and righteous. The focus on morality (instead of on Jesus) is a carryover from Adam’s misguided choice to eat from the Tree of Law. It was reinforced by the Mosaic Law given to the Israelites. This focus is the smokescreen of law-based religion, the veil that blinded the law-based Pharisees and what I lived under for about fifty years. But Christianity is about having a personal relationship with our benevolent Father-God, now and forever. Thanks to Jesus, we can choose to receive or reject God’s gift of righteousness which Jesus, the Tree of Life, made possible again to mankind at Calvary.

My religious training caused me to blend God’s grace with my “right works” to hopefully earn heaven. But true Christianity is totally grace-based. This means that Jesus has already done everything required for in Adam sinners to become united with Father-God forever. Since He became the way back to God by what He did on Calvary, what is left to do? Simply believe and receive His offer of an everlasting relationship with God as now true for you. It is Father-God’s free gift that you don’t deserve and can’t earn. His amazing generosity reveals His true nature of unselfish love that the heresy of Galatianism hides from us.

Theologians call the miracle of union with God through rebirth “being justified by faith.” The basis of your acceptability to God is not your degree of moral “rightness” as religions teach. That false belief is the essence of self-righteousness. Oneness with God has nothing to do with your behavior and everything to do with your belief that Jesus is your righteousness because you are now united to Him who is the righteous Son of God. It is all based on God’s lavish grace through faith, not on your meager efforts to be good – however you or your church or your culture define “good.” The only way to manifest God’s good fruit is to be grafted onto the right tree – the Tree of Life.

Learning to believe and depend on God’s gift of right-standing through union with Jesus will produce the fruit of right-living, as God defines it. This fruit does not always agree with man’s view of “right-living.” The ultra-moral, self-righteous Pharisees had a negative view of the most righteous Man that ever walked on the planet. Obeying the Law did not change their basic, in Adam nature. Jesus produced the fruit of right living because He was in a dependent union with God as His Son. Reborn saints legally enjoy that same union with God as Jesus does through rebirth into a new nature. However, ignorance or wrong beliefs about who Father-God really is and what He has done for mankind through Jesus, can minimize (and even prevent) how much we benefit from His lavish goodness and victory here on earth, even as believers.

Our Relational Father

God revealed in the Bible that He exists as Three Persons in One God. God enjoys an eternal love-based relationship among these three Persons. He came to the Garden daily to relate to Adam. Even after he rebelled, God still discussed the situation with him because He is a compassionate, relational God who created us as social beings in His image originally. He sent Jesus as the last Adam to make it possible for us to be united with the Trinity in an eternally blissful relationship. What an amazing privilege! It begins when an in Adam person is reborn of God. So, it seems to me that relating to Him personally throughout each day (which some label as “prayer”) is the most important thing we can do.

Who do you know that is more important than Father-God? Who has done more for you than He has? He caused your existence and sustains you. He has done everything that He can from His side to make relating with your outer man possible, by making you one with Him spiritually. Now your outer man is meant to benefit from this union by you choosing to focus on Him and to ask for, receive and walk in the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. He then inclines you toward praise and thanksgiving for all God now is toward you and who you now are in Him. That is what Paul learned to do even in the most appalling Seen Realm conditions of prison and shipwreck etc. He magnified God – “made God bigger in his sight” (rather than complain about the conditions around him) by worshipping and by praying in tongues. That didn’t always change the immediate conditions but he mentally triumphed over them nonetheless, much to the devil’s dismay. So did David when he told his soul (outer man) five times in Psalm 103 to “bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me praise His holy Name.”

However, your current concept of God is the filter that you use to judge and decide whether or not what you just read in the above two paragraphs about relating to Father-God is true and, therefore, possible, safe and desirable. If you are still law-minded, then the idea of relating intimately with God probably sounds impossible or feels awkward or threatening – or at least not always pleasant and positive. Why? Because you still wrongly think God’s acceptance and approval of you is based on your performance. The result is that your relationship with God seems to fluctuate like a yo-yo, even on your best days. That is why I have been emphasizing the importance of believing in Jesus’ Finished Work because it is the over-riding reality that placed you, believer, in a permanently righteous relationship with God, in spite of your day to day behavior and experiences. Because you are in Christ, Father-God sees you and treats you like He does Jesus, not according to your behavior. Sinful behavior might ruin your relationship with other people but not with God, from His perspective, because our New Covenant is based on faith in Jesus’ doing, not on our doing. That alone is what makes Christianity different from any other belief system.

As you become established in this grace-based revelation – the Fifth Gospel – and willingly yield to the Holy Spirit’s direction (instead of depending on law-based thinking for worldly or religious “wisdom” and direction), the behavior of your outer man will increasingly line up with God’s ways as you let Him live His life through you, as you. I know it seems counter-intuitive. That is because law-based thinking is more focused on God’s “justice” and on your “doing right” rather than on His Grace and Mercy and you “being in Christ” as your true, new identity. But Jesus justly paid for all of your wrong doing, forever, and now God looks favorably on you and every believer through His eyes of underserved favor – abundant grace. It is when we look to the law that we mentally “fall from Grace” – Galatians 5:1-6 – because we are depending on ourselves and our imperfect efforts to “stay-right” with God. That is the heresy common to world religions but that is not Christianity.

As a believer, your behavior only affects your external circumstances and relationships, not your intimate oneness with Father-God because the real spirit-you is permanently in Christ Jesus through the Divine Exchange with Him. Does improvement need to happen in the outer man so that things go better for you in the Seen Realm? Most likely. But that is the beauty of how God has arranged things. He sent the Holy Spirit inside of you to bring about the renewal of your mind through His doing. “… it is God who works in you (as a believer), both to choose and to work in accord with His delight,” according to Jesus’ word through Paul in Philippians 2:13. Again, it is about the “sanctification” of your outer self by yielding to the Holy Spirit’s promptings to increasingly conform it to your new, perfect, spirit-self, already seated in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus. Letting the Holy Spirit have His way in and through you yields the fruit of victory in the Seen Realm.

Do you see how loving Father-God really is? He thinks of everything for us, His holy children. The more you receive from the Holy Spirit the reality of all that Father-God did through Jesus, the better They like it. That is who They are. They want you to be totally free to enjoy relating to Them – abiding consciously in Them – 24/7. They are the only reliable source of true love and acceptance and approval and real life – which we all need and crave – in the whole universe. Only wrong believing stands in the way of living by biblical faith in God’s overwhelming love for you which produces true liberty. God’s view of you is the only one that really matters. Invite the Holy Spirit to show you what His view of you is by bathing your mind in the results of Jesus’ Finished Work of His Divine Exchange with you, presented in Chapters One and Two. It is written to you about you, dear believer and so why not start agreeing with God’s view of you. You can read and even listen to the whole book on Kindle for only $.99, found here. Bathing your mind in last week’s song Your Love For Me Is Higher will help you absorb how much Father-God really loves YOU!

Renewing Your Mind

I can clearly see now, in hindsight, just how right Dr. Cornwall was in emphasizing the importance of relating to God according to who He says He really is, especially as revealed through Jesus’ earthly life and in Jesus’ Gospel given to Paul. Jesus graphically demonstrated Father-God’s compassionate nature through His earthly life. So don’t rely on the hear-say of other people’s impressions and misgivings about God. They often come from the “traditions of men” who do not properly interpret the Bible (divide the Word rightly) according to the varied terms of the five main covenants. Consequently, people’s opinions about Father-God and Jesus vary over a wide spectrum, both positive and negative, just as even occurs within the Bible itself. That is why Jesus asked Peter: “So who do you say that I am?” … To be continued in Part Two next Sunday.