FatherA Conversation About

david v. Smith

Theodyssey Group, San Jose, California

excurSionS 1.0/ ConCept of God..................9How we formed our image of God.

2.0/ beyond distortion...........19identifying and dismantling distorted images of God.

3.0/ wHat God is like.................35exploring God’s true character.

4.0/ blaminG God........................49where is God when it hurts?

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about father...

od is waiting to embarrass or punish me.”

“I can never do enough to please him.”

“He’s unpredictable and inconsistent; it’s hard to trust him.”

Those are the painful words of deeply committed Christ-followers.

While all three people have a theological belief that God loves them, their affective reality is quite different. Their hearts are out of synch with their heads.

It’s not at all uncommon.

We can congnitively affirm that God is love, while at the same time feel like he’s an abusive bully.

We form images of God from the time we are born. They are combinations of thoughts and feelings cobbled togeth-er, primarily, from our early life experiences.

These images that are deeply embedded in our thinking and emotions are difficult to dismantle. They don’t die easily.

Our images of God profoundly affect our spiritual well-be-ing. When our image of God is distorted, we may secretly spend our lives cringing, hiding and running from God—or anxiously performing to earn his approval.

Unpacking our beliefs about God and dealing with the distortions is a part of the process of “taking off the old nature” and “putting on the new.”

It’s an important next step in the journey toward whole-ness in Christ.

Exaudi, deus. vae peccatis hominum! et homo dicit haec, et misereris eius, quoniam tu fecisti eum et peccatum non fecisti in eo. quis me commemorat peccatum infan-tiae meae, quoniam nemo mundus a pecca-to coram te, nec infans, cuius est unius diei vita su per terram? quis me commemo-rat? an quilibet tantillus nunc pa vulus, in quo video quod

non memini de me?

quid ergo tunc peccabam? an quis uberi-bus inhiabam plorans? nam si nunc fa-

ciam, non quidem uberibus, sed escae cong ruenti annis meis ita inhians, deride-bor atque repreh-endar ius-tissime. tunc ergo repre-hendenda faciebam,

sed quia reprehendentem intellegere non poteram, nec mos reprehendi me nec ratio sinebat. nam extirpamus et eici-mus ista crescentes, nec vidi quemquam scientem, cum aliquid purgat, bona pro-icere. an pro tempore etiam illa bona erant, flendo petere etiam quod noxie

Concept of God

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ur experience of God is often like that of Dorothy and her friends with the Wizard of Oz.

They had been told that the wizard was kind and wonder-ful and would give them their wishes. Filled with hope, they sang and skipped down the yellow brick road to the Emerald City.

Like us, they all had needs. They were all in search of something that was missing: a farm in Kansas, a brain, a heart, and even, courage.

When the group arrived to meet the wizard, they were shocked by the horrifying monster seen on a huge screen, bellowing smoke and thundering angry threats.

The four seekers trembled in fear before the projected image. The word on the street was different from the wizard on the screen.

Harsh and cruel, the wizard dismissed them without thought or care. It wasn’t until the little dog, Toto, pulled back the curtain that they saw who they were really dealing with—a soft-hearted, benevolent soul.

As it turns out, the projected image had nothing to do with the real thing.

In the same way, it’s possible to spend a life-time relating to a negative, projected image of God, while he may be quite different from who we thought he was.

Our concept of God Our concept of God has to do with how we feel God feels about us, and it is rooted in our childhood and adolescent experiences.

You might think of your God image as your perception of God’s attitudes toward you or the way that you feel He relates with you.

These perceptions form a certain set of expectations about how God will treat you. Your God image is the picture of God you draw inside your heart with the different colored crayons of emotions. This perceptual concept of God is often very different than your professed beliefs about God.1

Our image of God influences us more powerfully than our doctrinal state-ments or theology. That’s because images are rooted in powerful emo-tional experiences.

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Excursion 1.0

Wrong concepts and feelings about God can lead us into various kinds of spiritual problems, including the inability to experience forgiveness, diffi-culty trusting God and surrendering control of our lives to him, intellectual questions, legalism, shame, doubts, and neurotic perfectionism.

Replacing distorted images of God with accurate ones can be hard work.

Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions that may require an intelligent and vigorous search before they are finally unearthed and exposed.2

Understanding our “Grid” If we slip on a pair of glasses with blue

tinted lenses, suddenly everything takes on a shade of blue—the grass, our car, even our own reflection in a mirror.

Everything we examine through this lens will appear to be the color of the lens.

As we have learned, we see and experience life—including God, ourselves, and others—through the lens of our cumulative life experience, and our responses to situations and people grow out of these assumptions.

Our relationship to God the Father can be highly in-fluenced by our experience of our earthly fathers, other

authority figures, distorted teaching, and a number of other factors we will explore just ahead.

• On a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 being high), estimate how much influence these beliefs have on your life.

������� i must meet certain standards in order to feel good about myself.

������� I must have the approval of certain people (boss, friends, parents, etc.) in order to feel good about myself.

������� People who fail (including me) are unworthy of love, and deserve to be blamed.

������� I am what I am. I cannot change. In other words, i’m the sum total of all my past successes and failures, and I’ll never be significantly different.

Gvox humana Most of us developed our concept/feeling about our heavenly Father from our earthly mothers and fathers, and these feelings become entwined and confused. But the guilty and contradictory feelings are not the voice of God.

They are often the continuing voice of Mother or Dad or Brother or Sister, or something internalized that puts pressure on us. Remember, most of our basic patterns for relating to other people come from the patterns of the relationships in our family.

B. Martin “Parent-child Relations”, Review of Child Development Research

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Family dynamics and our concept of God While growing up, we associate our ideas about God with the primary influencers in our lives. When the authorities in our lives are emotionally distant, unreliable, inattentive, abusive, abandoning, or unrealistic in their expectations, we often come to experience God in the same way.

When we have a distorted concept of God, our ability to trust him and form a relationship with him can be severely compromised.

A primary shaping influence in a child’s image of God is parental accep-tance. There is considerable cross-cultural evidence that parental accep-tance and affection are related to belief in a benevolent deity, whereas parental rejection is related to belief in a malevolent deity.

The results of one major study found that loving or affectionate parents nurture the development of a personal God image.3

This may result merely from the perception of parental love. However, it may also mean that affectionate parents are more effective in transmit-ting a belief in God to their children. Some evidence exists to support the interpretation that parents are more successful in transmitting their values when their children see them as loving.

Parental affection appears to reinforce belief in a kind and ap-proachable God.

Two other factors related to an adolescent’s image of a punish-ing God vs. a non-punishing God are parental education and parental control.

The higher the level of education attained by the parents, the less likely that their adolescent children will see God as punish-ing.

Again, the process appears to be one of socialization. Parents with low levels of education tend toward a view of life that is more harsh, and toward a concept of God as wrathful and judg-mental.4 The data suggest that this parental worldview is often transmitted to their children.

Parental control is also a significant factor that distinguishes between pun-ishing and non-punishing images of God. The more adolescents perceive parental control over their lives, the more they tend to see God as punish-ing.