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Why We Need a Bigger View of God

Our tendency is to put God at the center of our universe and treat Him as a sort of crystal ball or magic genie who is all about us and our happiness. The problem is, this makes for a much smaller God than the one represented in the Bible. The most powerful perspective change we can have is to echo the sentiments of John the Baptist who said of Jesus, “he must increase, and I must decrease.” (John 3:30)

The book of Acts says of the early church that “a deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders.” (Acts 2:43 NLT) I find it interesting that the order is the reverse of what we would assume. We would have written the story with great signs and wonders happening, resulting in our bigger view of God. But the Bible says the opposite – an increase and expanded understanding of God produces the fruit of a powerful experience of God.

In other words, life begins with worship, and worship is an enrichment of our understanding of God’s size and magnitude and power and majesty. And church begins there too – not with a sensational experience of the miraculous, but with a humbling before His Almighty being.

Remember that the early church was both poor and persecuted. They struggled daily with poverty among their members and with continual threats from the religious establishment of the time. This was no easy situation in which to proclaim the magic genie concept of God. They realized their need to understand God in much deeper, much larger terms.

Whatever problems you’re facing today, realize that it may not be a matter of having God fix them but rather a matter of enlarging your view of God and re-capturing your sense of awe at His power and presence. Only when we begin to see Him for who He truly is can we see Him at work doing what He really does.