The view of God as a sweet old man...

Last week at the church where I serve we launched into a brand new sermon series entitled Distorted. During this series we are going to address an all too frequent reality that many of us can find ourselves facing. And that reality involves how we view and perceive God.

The reality is that, regardless of where we are at when it comes to a relationship with God, we can have a distorted view of God because we have a distorted perception about God. And it is those distorted perceptions about God that can lead us to make distorted assumptions about God.

And so often, just like C.S. Lewis, we can find ourselves in a place where we have made God into our image, based on our view of God that is the result of our distorted perceptions and our assumptions about God. And because of that reality, we are 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 going to strive 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. This distorted view of God is in many ways the exact opposite of the distorted view of God as being the cop around the corner. And the distorted view of God that I would like us to address is the view of God as a sweet old man.

This view of God was most clearly portrayed by George Burns in the movie "Oh God". Now while "Oh God" was a very popular and entertaining movie during the 1970's, here is my question: How often do we view God in the exact same way? How often do we view God as this sweet old man?

Maybe I have just described how you view God. Maybe you view God as some sweet old man sitting on a rocking chair in a retirement community waiting his turn to play shuffleboard. How often do we view God as old? After all, since we do not know what eternal looks like, we try to fill in the blanks with the picture that comes to mind. And that picture is of grandpa.

In addition, because God is old, it can lead us to a view of a God that is out of touch, over the hill, out dated, overrated, and unconnected to the world we live. Because God is old, we do not worry about the constant, daily, annoying presence of God; we can see Him like our grandparents, whenever we want to. We can go visit with sweet old God at Christmas or Easter. We can remember Him at our meals.

And because God is old, He may have created this world, but He certainly doesn’t understand it anymore. And since God is a sweet old man, we get our freedom and God gets to play shuffleboard. But how do we get to the place where we view God as this sweet old man?

You see, we get to the place where we view God as a sweet old man because we often view God as a being that lives and is confined to our concepts of time and space. However, this image of God as sweet, old, and weak damages our perceptions of who God is. And, to be honest, the church historically has not helped in this regard.

Church does not help our perception of God as a sweet old man when we talk about God in terms of remembering stories from thousands of years ago that are dominated by the use of past tense verbs. However, when we view God as a sweet old man, then that makes the Bible to be nothing more than a big old history book that has little or nothing to do with the world we live in. In addition, the longer we view God as a sweet old man, the longer we keep God confined to our concept of time, the older He gets.

However, to view God as a sweet old man who cannot relate to and who has little or nothing to do with the world we live in today is a distorted view of God. 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 Luke. And it is in this section of this account of Jesus life that we discover a timeless truth that can help us rid ourselves of the distorted view of God as a sweet old man and replace it with an accurate view of God that will enable us to experience a growing relationship with God.

Tomorrow, we will begin to look at this section…