Episode #380 When Your Picture of God Is Wrong – Practicing Conversations With God
From Today's Episode:
In today’s episode, we talk about the false assumptions fueling spiritual exhaustion.
If you've ever pictured God with His arms crossed or His back turned toward you, this episode is for you. Jen walks through the false assumptions so many of us carry about who God is — and gently leads you back to what He actually proclaimed about Himself in Exodus 34. A short, honest episode full of Christian encouragement and faith-based reflection to help you hear from God with fresh eyes.
Our Good God talks with us and we're created for life with Him, so let's experience more of it!
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Verse
Exodus 34:6
"The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
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Question
God, is there anything I've been wrongly assuming about you? And what truth do you offer me instead?
Here's the episode transcript
Hey, friend. Have you ever felt spiritual pressure as you want to grow in your walk with the Lord? “I should be doing better. God must be distant because I'm not doing as well. God is probably disappointed in me." I lived in that place for a lot of years, and so much of the spiritual pressure to perform or achieve for God is rooted in false assumptions that we have about who God is and His posture toward us. Even thinking about that, if you were to picture how you think God feels toward you right now, and you pictured Him in human form, what would His posture be like toward you?
For me, there have been seasons when I imagine God with His arms crossed, maybe turned the other way, maybe huge and towering over me or shaking His head. And these false assumptions distort intimacy because we put on God these things that are not true about Him.
I wanna read for us a way that God describes Himself in Exodus 34 verse 6.
This is God revealing Himself, showing Himself to Moses, and it says, "The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, 'The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
This is where pressure starts getting dismantled because God is merciful and gracious. Mercy, withholding from us the bad that we deserve, and gracious, giving to us the good that we could not earn or deserve. He is slow to anger. He abounds. He's not on short supply. He's not stingy with His steadfast love and faithfulness, but He abounds with it. This is what He is like. If this is hard for you to reconcile in your perspective or your experience of God, I'm gonna put a link here in the show notes where I talk more about this and ways you can dismantle these false beliefs, these false assumptions about who God is.
But for the purposes of our podcast episode today, we wanna take this conversation over to the Lord because we can put these assumptions on Him and not mean to. I'm still regularly finding ways that I assumed poorly of Him. I thought He was less than He actually is.
And so today, we get to go toward God and receive clarity. Ask Him this question, and then think again and choose differently as we embrace more truth about who God is and what He's like, and what He's like towards us, and so how we get to live as His kids.
And so here's that question:
God, is there anything I've been wrongly assuming about you? And what truth do you offer me instead?
Have a good talk.
And if you've been encouraged by this content, please share it with a friend and help them grow in their conversational relationship with God too!
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