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October 14, 2024

What Comes to Mind When You Think of God?
by Jason Neill

Scripture reading: Isaiah 6; Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John

 A.W. Tozer wrote in his book The Knowledge of the Holy, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us” (p. 1). This is the quote I shared a few weeks ago.

Isaiah chapter 6 is Isaiah’s experience of seeing God in all of His holiness. He responded, after seeing God, “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, The LORD of hosts” (Isaiah 6:5, NKJV). Isaiah immediately recognized that while God is holy, he was not. Isaiah got a true picture of himself. Isaiah realized that he was just as evil as the people he was to minister to.

How do you view yourself? Bill Thrasher wrote in his book God as He Wants You to Know Him, “Your perception of who you are affects your attitudes, thoughts, and actions around others. The greatest factor in how you view yourself is your perception of what the most important person in your life thinks of you. That person’s perception of you can be faulty, of course, but that doesn’t immediately change your response to their words. The only way to let truth liberate you from lies that can cripple you is to embrace God as the most important Person in your life and listen to Him. He knows the truth. He created you” (p. 21).

If you stop and think about it, we only esteem ourselves if our primary caregiver values us. How our parents evaluated us is how we tend to value ourselves. Unfortunately, I’ve worked with plenty of clients, as a mental health therapist, who had parents who didn’t value them. In fact, I’ve worked with several clients who had distorted concepts of themselves because of what they were told growing up. Things such as “you’ll never amount to anything good. You are fat, lazy, and no one is ever going to love you.”

By the time I see these clients, they are adults. Their parents may have even passed, yet they still have these toxic messages running through their mind. The messages they heard are on a continual loop repeating how “bad” they are, how they will never measure up, and their life is a waste. What isn’t surprising is these same clients think God thinks the same way about them as their parents did. They have a distorted image of God. This is why what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

Because of those experiences, some chose to be atheist or agnostic. Dr. Paul Vitz is a Clinical Psychologist, who was once an atheist but converted to Christianity, was interested in studying some of the most well-known atheists to see if their home life influenced their becoming atheist. In his book Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism he studied individuals such as Friderich Nietzsche, David Hume, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Ellis to name a few. He called his new theory of atheism The Defective Father Hypothesis.

Did these leading thinkers embrace atheism because of the negative influences of their biological fathers? Dr. Vitz’s evidence indicates “yes.” I think this is fascinating. Could a person’s lack of belief in God be attributed to more than simple intellectual factors? Yes, I think so. There seems to be a psychological component in whether a person believes in God or not. The home life of people like Freud, Nietzsche, Hume, and others drew upon their home of origin experiences and, therefore, had distortions of who God really is.

There’s a little exercise I will use with clients sometimes to gauge their view of God. I will ask them to take a piece of paper, draw a line down the middle, and create two columns. The first column, on the left side of the page, lists characteristics of their father. The second column, on the right side of the page, lists characteristics of how they perceive God. Not surprisingly, the lists are often the same.

If we were to press the pause button and consider our beliefs about God, we would probably discover we all have distortions regarding who God is. This is why it is so important that we get our understanding of who God is by reading the Bible. We need God to tell us what He is like. Isaiah had a rare privilege by seeing a clear vision of who God is. In that moment, he saw God and himself clearly.

Set aside some time this week and read a chapter or two from one of the four Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, & John). God revealed Himself most clearly in the person of Jesus of Nazareth (see Hebrews 1:1-4). As you read the Gospels, ponder the person of Jesus. How does He relate to others? What topics does He address? What do His actions reveal about His person? As the hymn writer wrote, “turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face.”

For more on this topic, I would encourage you to read The Knowledge of the Holy by A.W. Tozer and God as He Wants You to Know Him by Bill Thrasher.