Do you remember some of the crazy things we believed when we were kids? I believed my mom when she said, “You keep crossing your eyes like that they’ll stay that way.” I believed my sister when she said, “You swallow watermelon seeds, you’ll grow watermelons out your ears.” I believed my brother that snakes would sometimes slither up the pipes, so I kept a close eye on the drain whenever I took a shower. You couldn’t be too careful.
I believed my teacher lived at school and my grandpa lived at the airport. I believed people on TV could see you. And when a friend told me that thunder was God moving his furniture, I believed him.
I don’t know about you, but we believe some crazy stuff about God too. One lady writes, “When I asked my mother what God looked like, she said, ‘nobody really knows, he is a giant being.’ So I thought she said he was a giant bean. For a few years I pictured God as an enormous white lima bean.”
How about you? Are there some wild things you’ve believed about God, about faith? Here are three myths I believed, even as an adult.
- God wants me miserable. I grew up around religious people who sang, “I’ve got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart,” but they had not informed their faces. I thought, if I take this Christian thing seriously, I’ll end up as grumpy as they are. God will make me marry a weepy girl with horn-rimmed glasses and send me to Borneo where cannibals will notice how skinny I am and fatten me up then finish me off. How wrong I was. A truly satisfying life is a life of purpose and hope. God is not the enemy of our joy—quite the opposite—he is the fulfillment of it. Only he can give us what our hearts really desire.
- God is watching us from a distance. It makes a nice Bette Midler tune, but God is not a distant figure on a throne way up there. “Where can I flee from your presence?” King David asks. “If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there” (Ps. 139:7-8, NIV). Wherever you find yourself today, God is right there with you. Every other religion tells us how to find God. Christianity tells us that God came to find us, through his son Jesus.
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The Bible is a rulebook. When we view it that way, we quickly lose interest. Yes, it contains rules. But they are for our joy, not our misery. The Bible isn’t about rules, but about relationship. It’s about Jesus, and the story of his great love for us. It’s the story of how God gets his kids back. As you read it, pray that you’ll encounter Jesus along the way. God loves to answer that prayer.
The theologian A.W. Tozer once wrote, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” So ask yourself two questions: have I believed any lies about God? And what does the Bible show me about him? Then go looking. Otherwise, you may find yourself believing all sorts of crazy things. Like the man who said, “When I was little, I believed God was an artist named Howard.” That’s why he prayed: “Our Father, who does art in heaven, Howard be thy name.”
