The view of God as the Talent Show Judge...

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. And 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.

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 talent show judge. This distorted view of God, in many ways, is revealed and reinforced by the culture that we live in today.

I mean, just think of the most popular television shows over the past several years: American Idol, The voice, and America’s Got Talent. What do all of these shows have in common? All of these shows are all about people performing before judges. And then there are television shows like the Bachelor and the Bachelorette, where people put on their best performances in front of someone, and in front of the cameras, in hopes of finding a lasting relationship.

And as a culture, we seem to eat it up, don’t we? If you don’t think that is the case, just look at social media on the evenings that one of these shows is on television. Everyone has a comment; everyone is judging the talent or whether or not person X is right for the bachelor.

However, as our culture reinforces life as one big performance that is being judged by those around us, this reality seeps into how we view God. And as a result, we can find ourselves in a place where we view God as the talent show judge and our day to day lives are driven by two questions.

The first question is basically, “If life was a talent show and God was the judge, God would rate my performance as a…” The second question, the deeper question that often drives our view of God as the talent show God is “If I do not do enough for God….”

And as a result of our lives being driven by these two questions that flow from viewing God as the talent show judge, we often choose to live a life that endlessly attempts to please a distant and difficult to please God. We choose to live a life of perpetual performance and we experience the feelings of regular rejection when we fail to perform well. A life that continually hears the whisper of the word “more, you need to do more” in our ears. And we end up in a place where we live a life that substitutes activity for God for intimacy with God.

When we view God as a talent show judge, we create of ourselves a God that we can never please. When we view God as a talent show judge, God becomes a nameless, faceless, unpleased being that is constantly evaluating our performance. And most importantly, when we view God as a talent show judge, we demand and expect ourselves to live up to, to impress, and to earn what God had already offered us long before we began to perform.

You see, to view God as the talent show judge who is constantly evaluating our performance and who we can never please and never do enough for is a distorted view of God. Because, as we will discover this week, the reality is that when it comes to God, God is in fact the one, and sometimes the only one, cheering us on.

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 Matthew. And it is in this section of this account of Jesus life that we discover a timeless truth that can enable us to rid ourselves of the distorted view of God as the talent show judge and replace it with an accurate view of God.

Tomorrow, we will jump into this section of the gospel of Matthew…