My Own Personal God

Did you hear about the guy who found a genie in a bottle. The genie told him that he could have any wish he wanted but the one thing he couldn’t ask for was more wishes. He asked for more genies!

Sometimes we treat God as if He were a ‘genie in a bottle’. He is there when we need Him and otherwise He can just sit on the shelf like an idol. God becomes very convenient when we make him out to be a genie or an idol and we are in fact tempted to think of God in these terms.

In the Bible it is quite interesting how idols have a way of just ‘popping up’ in unexpected places; like in the lives of believers. Like when Jacob was fleeing from his father in law Laban. Rachael stole her father’s ‘household gods’ and hid them in her tent!? (You can read about it in Genesis 31) Or early on in David’s life how his wife Michal helped him to flee the wrath of her father, king Saul. She ‘took an idol and laid it on the bed, covering it with a garment’ so David could make good his escape (See 1Sam 19). 

There are different ways that we can fall into idolatry as believers. The New Testament tells us that greed is idolatry (Col 3:5). We also commit idolatry when our view of God is anything other than who He really is. And perhaps one of the most common ways we commit idolatry as believers is when we make Him all about us. Too convenient!

Several years ago I heard someone share about a person who had been a believer but had thrown in the towel on their faith as a Christian. Someone close to them was stricken with a horrible disease and God didn’t heal them. They died. And so the person concluded from the experience that they just couldn’t have faith in God anymore because God hadn’t come through for them.

I remember hearing this and thinking of all the people that die every day. Here is a reality check for us. If God allowing us, or our loved ones, to suffer, or to get sick, or even to die, somehow negates our faith in Him, then don’t wait to walk away. Walk away right now because there are people suffering and dying all around us every day. The ability to maintain some kind of faith in God just because it isn’t happening to us or to someone we love and care about is to think of God in a way that is idolatrous. It is like having our own personal God who is there for us when we need Him but we don’t need to share Him with anyone else. It doesn’t matter if He is there for anyone else as long as He is there for me!!!

Is that our view of God? And if so, then what are we really saying? What kind of a faith do we have? Is it really about God at all or is it all in the end only about us? Just something to think about.