Man Becomes Like The God He Serves

I heard an interesting statement yesterday. "Man becomes like the God he serves." I had to think about that for a moment. I didn’t readily agree at first, but you know the more I thought about it, the more I agreed with it. I have said for years that we develop our earliest ideas about God from what we see in our fathers. If your father was a strong personality, a disciplinarian, chances are pretty good that you saw God this way early in your life. If he was patient, laid back and easy going, again chances are good that this is how you saw God. We also are influenced in this area by our preachers and church leaders as we listen to them and see them make application of scriptures. We inherit our initial concepts of God. If we then take those concepts of God to the scripture with us, and it would be almost impossible not to do this, we in turn interpret the scriptures through the filter of our picture of God. We even read them with the perceived inflection, tone and attitude we think "our" God would express. One can only wonder where guys like Fred Phelps, who preaches hate and his members picket funerals of our troops, got their initial impressions of God. But it does tell us much about how he views the God he serves. Through the years my concepts of God have changed, thankfully. The God that I initially served was not very appealing. He was very judgmental, quick to punish, and very intolerant. As a result my early years of preaching could be described as, "Hell Fire and Brimstone", "Repent or else". There was allot of fear motivation in those early years mainly because fear was my own personal motivation. The God I served caused me to have fear so I felt it my obligation to cause fear in the hearts of others. I had become like the God I was serving. What brought about the change from then until now? In short it was the development of my own personal faith. Spending time with God and His word. Spending time with older, mature Christians who had grown in their relationship with God through the years. All of these things began to challenge long held ideas about God. Slowly, but surely, the Father began to chip away at my heart and the transformation was begun. I say begun, because it will be a life long task. So what is the God you serve like? Chances are He looks at things allot like you do.