To many, the America God has failed. They practice a watered down, cultural, feel-good spirituality with no set rules or forms save those they set themselves. The atheists proclaim this faith to be false, flimsy, and worthless. The disenchanted say if God exists, He is weak and useless for He did nothing in their hour of need. They would be right. For this is not God but a god of our own imagining. This so-called 'pop machine' god is powerless because he is not. We think of God as some sort of beneficent fairy godmother who grants our dearest wishes for health, happiness, and riches and then complain when things do not turn out happily ever after. Wishing upon a star has similar results. The problem is not with God but with our perception of Him. He is not a vending machine whose sole purpose is to fulfill all our cravings, whatever they might be. He is not our servant, but we are His (if we so choose). We did not make Him, but He us. Seldom do we consider these minor details in our dealings with the Almighty! If your vision of God is small, so too must your god be.
The 'Prosperity Gospel' has it all backwards but panders specifically to the American thirst for such a God. We are told by such theology that if we are 'good' people, God will bless us with material riches and then when this does not happen, people become disappointed and flee the 'faith,' angry with a god that does not exist. This is not God as He has revealed Himself to us, but rather God as we wish Him to be. We do not want moral responsibility, we do not want to look like fools to our worldly friends, we do not want to be uncool, we do not want to forgo some pleasure forbidden by an overbearing deity. Like Peter Pan, we do not want to grow up. God tells us who He is, how to find Him, what He wishes of us, but like naughty children, we pretend not to hear or creatively reinterpret that which was told us. He has promised times of embarrassment, suffering, tedium, and perhaps even death to His faithful (is that a great recruit slogan or what?), thus we should not be surprised when they come. Yet He has also promised never to leave us, to give us a way out, to bear our sorrows, to give us His joy and peace, to add to our virtue and wisdom, to draw us closer to Himself. Materially we may never prosper. Fame may always forsake us. Our relations may think us mad and our friends think us boors or fools. But it matters little, for we can know He who made Everything and knows All, the Author of Life, Himself. All else pales in comparison to that! 'For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? (Matthew 16:26 (ESV)).
God is not small, neither does He call us to a life of smallness. Each of us has something unique within ourselves that in God's hands can bless the whole world. It is not an easy life and perhaps not a comfortable one, but since when has anything worth doing been either? We are called to something greater than ourselves, greater than this drab, selfish existence we call life. Are you ready for an adventure? One that will last not a lifetime, but all Eternity? I think we can rightly trust the Author of all stories to provide a most interesting quest, but we must first be willing to get off the couch. We look within to find god, finding it small and dark and cramped. We look without and behold, the heavens are ablaze with stars and their Maker waits only for us to truly seek Him. Forget the tiny god, embrace Him as He is, or forget Him altogether.
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