God as the all you can eat buffet...

At the church where I serve, we are in the middle of a sermon series entitled Distorted. During this series, we are spending our time together addressing six distorted views of God that flow from a distorted perception and assumption about God and that can result in us shaping and molding God into our image. During this series, we are striving to replace those distorted perceptions and assumptions about God with six accurate views of God that were given by us by Jesus Himself. And as we go through this series, our hope and our prayer is that God would move by the power of the Holy Spirit in our heads, hearts, and hands to enable us to rid ourselves of any distorted views that we have of God and replace them with an accurate view of God so that we would be able to experience a growing and maturing relationship with God.

This week, I would like for us to spend our time together addressing another distorted view of God that flows from a distorted perception and assumption about God and that can result in us shaping and molding God into our image. And the distorted view of God that I would like us to address is the view of God as the all you can eat buffet. Like so many of the distorted views that we can have about God, this view is reinforced by the current of the culture we live in.

You see, in Western American culture, we take pride in reinforcing the reality that everything is about us. And because we repeatedly reinforce the reality that everything is about us, we create environments, products and services that are customized to meet our wants and desires. I mean, we just don’t want any car; we want to make sure that we have a customized car with the features and accessories that we want. We don’t want just any home; we want a custom built home that has the look and feel that we want. We see this especially in the food industry. For example, one fast food chain’s slogan for hamburgers was “Have it your way.” So we have custom coffee, custom burgers, custom fro you sites where you can add your own toppings.

And perhaps the pinnacle of customization in our culture is the all you can eat buffet. You see, the all you can eat buffet sends a crystal clear message, you can eat all you want of what you want.  You can customize your meal to avoid what you do not like so that you can double up on the things that you do like.

And as a result of living in a culture that makes everything about our preferences, our wants, our desires, we can find ourselves finding ways to customize God around our preferences, our wants, our desires. We find ways to double up our God around all the things we like about God while avoiding all of the things we don’t like and don’t want in or from God.  Could it be that the reason that 90 percent of Americans claim to believe in God is due to the fact that they only believe in about 10 percent of God?

However, when we see God as the all you can eat buffet, we end up creating a faith that is centered around ourselves. And just like continually eating at an all you can eat buffet, we can end up spending our whole lives filling our plates with our favorite parts about God, while our soul slowly starves from a lack of the Divine malnourishment that is necessary, but that we continually avoid, about God.

You see, the problem with viewing God as the all you can eat buffet is that God is inseparably whole. God cannot be divided and portioned out into the parts we find most palatable. We see this reality revealed in a section of an account of Jesus life that is recorded for us in the Bible called the gospel of John.

And it is in this section of this account of Jesus life that we discover a timeless and true view of God that can help us rid ourselves of the distorted view of God as the all you can eat buffet and replace it with an accurate view of God.

Tomorrow we will jump into this section of the gospel of John…