By Francis Frangipane
“Your view of God is the most important part of life. Everything you do will reflect, in one degree or another, how you perceive your Heavenly Father.”
Each of us has images in our minds of who we think God is. But, while we would not admit it to ourselves, some of us actually harbor thoughts that portray God as cruel. We have only one way to know who God is, and that is by studying the life of Christ. We have no reference, no other means of discerning the nature of God except through the life, teachings and behavior of Jesus.
We cannot form our view of who God is by what pastors and Christian authors have told us He is; nor can we trust our ideas and experiences. Again, the only way we know God is by studying the life of Jesus. Because we are disciples of Jesus, we have predetermined to learn from Him and Him only, concerning the nature of God. This doesn’t mean we don’t listen to pastors, read Christian writers, or forsake our experiences; it simply means that we are looking for the anointing of Christ upon all that we read or submit to. God can use people to teach us, but we must discern the voice of the Shepherd. For if we are truly His sheep, another voice we will not follow.
Seeing God as He is releases tremendous power. We understand He wants to heal our illnesses and forgive our sins. Studying how Jesus dealt with sinners gives God’s view of man. He doesn’t condemn us; rather He seeks to deliver us. And where and when we fail, He raises us up again and encourages us.
Jesus loved and exalted childlike honesty of heart, thereby revealing that we don’t have to hide our sins. All He asks is that we be honest. At the same time, the thing He hated most was hypocrisy and self-righteousness, for these attitudes keep us from the reality of His love.
Some of you have had bad experiences with your parents. Those experiences have put a filter between your heart and the reality of God. You think that God thinks like your parents did. You find it hard to trust God. You feel if your parents didn’t love you, how could God love you? Often you struggle with the fear of being rejected by God. You need to be delivered from those thoughts.
Your whole life, the condition of your life, the very meaning of your life is all based upon your concept of God. If you don’t believe God cares about your life, you are going to have a very unsatisfactory life. What a terrible shame it would be to live your life without the benefits of the love of your heavenly Father!
The Scriptures tell us that we have a High Priest who can be touched with the “feeling of our infirmities”, one who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin. Do you understand that? Jesus is touched by the pain of what we experience on earth. He participates in the life we live. He feels what we feel and hurts with our hurts. He is our head and we are His body.
You are not alone in your battles. But if you believe you are alone, if you accept the lie that God doesn’t care—you may as well be alone because your unbelief isolates you from the loving, powerful hands of God. Each of us needs to know that Jesus feels what we feel. He is the Living God. At Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus wept. He knew He was going to raise Lazarus. He knew it five days before. He wept simply because they were weeping. As He wept, those around Him remarked, “Behold how He loved him!” (John 11:36) Do you behold how He loves you? Do you rest in His faithfulness to provide for you? If you fail to see Jesus as He is, it is because you have a wrong image of God…and you are suffering needlessly because of it.
What You See is What You Get
How you perceive God determines how you receive Him. The quality of your life is based on your perception of God. Therefore, nothing is more important to you than having the right concepts of God.
It is amazing, but we can look at life with just the wrong angle and suddenly what we are viewing can become completely different. I was in Wisconsin last week, and the air seemed so clear and beautiful. I inhaled and then remembered that, floating in that “clean air”, were thousands of particles of dust with millions of little germs on them. I remember thinking once that the air was really clean in our home, only to see a block of sunlight through a window and floating in the sunlight were thousands of particles of dust. Just the wrong angle and things looked so different!
Did you know that there is an “invisible world” that exists on your skin? I watched a microscopic camera magnify the skin surface on a person’s face. There, on her cheek, were thousands of tiny, very ugly bugs crawling around, living their short, disgusting little lives. It took me a week before I could kiss my wife and kids again! Just the wrong angle and how what was once considered beautiful seemed so alarming!
Consider the sun. Even though the sun looks so beautiful to us from our perspective, if we could fly just three-quarters of the way to the sun, what we would see would not be something beautiful; it would be terrifying! We would behold a world of fire—a world so huge that as far as we could see would be a raging fire nine-hundred thousand meters wide in diameter, a fire bigger than the size of a million earths. Yet to us, the sun is almost tame; and the sunset, serene. Did the sun change? No. Just a perspective is different.
And this is the same thing with God. God is love. It is our perspective that makes us think of Him differently. When God is dealing with your heart, He hasn’t stopped loving you. God seeks to bring us into His Kingdom. Is the Kingdom something new? No! The Kingdom of God has always been the same. Again, it is our perspective which must change and God delivers us from sin, so we become more familiar with the reality of Himself and His Kingdom.
To See Him, He Must Clean Our Hearts
“We know that if He should appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him just as He is. And everyone who has this hope, purifies himself, just as He is pure.” (1 John 3:2–3) Why do we purify ourselves? So we can see Him as He is.
During a time of seeking the Lord, my wife was crying out that she wanted to see Him. The Lord immediately spoke to her of a particular sin that was in her heart. Why would He do such a thing? Because the heart is like a radar station and sin is like static in the air. This is why Jesus said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, they shall see God”. (Matt. 5:8) Since it is the pure in heart who see Him, He immediately directed her to that area of her “spiritual radar station” that was dirty and blocking His signal.
Do you want to see God as He is? Then begin to clean up your life. Turn the TV off and get into the word. Spend time in prayer, seeking those things which are above. Remember the day is coming, while the world is utter terror at what is coming upon it, the pure in heart shall be seeing God. Determine today to see God as He is.