Archive: Healing Our Feelings About God

Why people feel bad about a God who is good

The young theological student was having a difficult time describing his relationship with God. So, I asked the young man to draw a picture that would illustrate how he viewed God. The student said he couldn’t draw very well but, next time we met, he would bring a picture.

It happened to be the Christmas season and, when the young man returned, he brought a magazine with an artist’s drawing of an extra-large, angry, and demanding Scrooge. He was sitting behind a desk, quill pen in hand, with his debit-credit ledger before him.

Standing in front of the desk, facing Scrooge, was a small, terror-stricken Bob Cratchett. Pointing to Scrooge, the young seminarian explained, “That’s God,” and then to Cratchett, “That’s me.”

And just think, the young man made A’s in theology!

Inside every one of us is a mental picture of God. We often speak of this as our concept of God and talk about it as if it were something solely in our minds. We forget that, along with what we have been taught about God, our experiences, memories, and feelings also play a large part in forming this picture. In fact, the most determinative factor is our ‘feltness” of who God is and what He is really like.

It is surprising the number of genuine Christians who are caught in an inner conflict between what they think about God and what they feel about God (and how He feels toward them). Their head theology is excellent but their gut-level knee-ology (what they feel when they pray) is terrible. This is the source of many emotional hangups in Christians. Years of experience have taught me that regardless of how much correct doctrine Christians may know, until they have a true picture of God and a felt sense that He is really good and gracious, there can be no lasting spiritual victory in their lives.

The Good News and the Bad News

How is it that the Gospel which we proclaim as Good News so often becomes bad news at the level of our feelings?

To understand this, let’s borrow a concept from foreign missions—cross-cultural evangelism. In a short time, a missionary becomes aware of the fact that what the people hear him say can be very different from what he has actually said. He proclaims (encodes) something, but the listener hears (decodes) something else.

While working in India, I soon learned to be very careful about preaching on the text “You must be born again” (John 3:7). The Hindu decodes those words through his belief system of reincarnation and a cycle of rebirths. So he hears it as, “You must be born again and again,” going through many reincarnations until one finds salvation (release) from the cycle.

Or, let’s bring it closer to home—literally. Imagine how two different groups of people might respond when I say the word “home.” To some the word means heaven, and their mental images and feelings correspond to that. To others it means hell, and they see and feel correspondingly.

Likewise in our concept of God, what we have been taught is extremely important, but what we have caught is equally so. In fact, our feelings about God can drastically affect our ideas of God. This is because those feelings are part of the dynamics which determine the way we perceive the teachings given to us.

This crucial fact is overlooked by so many Christians, including pastors and Christian leaders. They assume that if Biblically correct doctrines and ideas are preached and taught, they will automatically clear up a person’s concept of God and enable him to believe in God and trust Him. They imagine that the Holy Spirit, as it were, somehow drills a hole in the top of the hearer’s head and pours the pure truth into him.

With many people, however, such an approach is guaranteed to fail. For although the Holy Spirit is the One who reveals the truth, what the listener hears and pictures and feels still has to be filtered through the listener. The Holy Spirit Himself does not bypass the personality equipment by which a person perceives things. And when those perceiving receptors have been severely damaged, the Biblical truths get distorted.

In this sense the facetious remark, “Man creates God in his own image,’ contains an element of truth. Even for the most healthy and normal Christians, clarifying their concept of God is a lifelong task and a central part of reaching maturity in Christ.

“Will the Real God Please Stand Up” is the title of an exceptionally helpful article on clarifying our concepts/feelings about God (Joseph Sica, Marriage and Family Living, August 1983). Mr. Sica lists some of the faulty concepts/feelings about God which can develop:

• The Legal God “keeps an accounting of what we do. He waits for us to step out of line, to trip up, to falter, so He can marks us as losers.”
• The Gotcha God resembles Sherlock Holmes and wears a detective’s trench coat and dark glasses. Like a disguised private investigator, He is always following at a short distance. The moment we step out of line, He jumps out of the bushes and yells, “Gotcha!” He is much like the “corner policeman” God that J. B. Phillips writes about in his excellent book, Your God Is Too Small.
• The Sitting Bull God “relaxes in a yoga position on cotton candy clouds, expecting burnt offerings and homage all day.”
• The Philosopher’s God, Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” of the universe, is withdrawn, cold and distant. He is much too busy running the galaxies to get involved in our petty problems. As one man described Him, He is silently sitting in his office, studying the encyclopedia, His door closed with a “Do Not Disturb” sign on it.
• I have added another, The Pharaoh God. He is an unpleasable taskmaster who is ever increasing His demands, always upping the ante. Like Pharaoh of old, His commands move from “Make bricks” to “Make more bricks” to “Make bricks without straw.” He is the very opposite of the heavenly Father God whom Jesus revealed. He is more like the horrible godfather of the mafia who always says, “Measure up or else!”

This tendency to remake God in any number of distorted images is one of the main reasons why the Incarnation was so necessary. The Word had to become flesh. God had gone as far as He could in revealing Himself through words. For at their very best-as in the greatest prophets of the Old Testament—words are subject to the distortions of sinful and damaged hearers. Only when the Word became a human life was it possible for us to see a true picture of God, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

Even so, the problem of distortion is still partially with us. For the content of the words we read in the Bible which describe Jesus and the character of God is greatly influenced by our memories and relationships.

Wrong concepts/feelings about God lead to various kinds of spiritual problems. Some of the most common are: the inability to feel forgiven, the inability to trust and surrender to God, chronic doubt, and problems with neurotic perfectionism.

How the Good News Becomes Bad News

Because it is so important for us to understand the connection between what we hear about God and what we feel about Him, I have illustrated the process on the chart on page 12. Beginning at the top, you will see represented the Good News about God as revealed to us in Jesus Christ. If you have seen Jesus, you have seen the Father (John 14).

While this list of God’s characteristics is not complete, it is sufficient to give a true picture of the goodness of God. You will note that the lines coming down are straight. This represents their truthfulness—the truth and grace revealed in Christ.

As you continue reading downward, you will notice that the lines become jagged and twisted. This means something is happening to the Good News about God as it passes through unhealthy interpersonal relationships. In every case now, the Good News has become distorted into the Bad News, and the person perceives God as the opposite of who He really is.

Still looking at the chart, compare each truth about God with its distortion. As you’ll see, the loving, caring God has become hateful, or at least unconcerned.

Many times I ask counselees, who have already given me a theologically “correct” description of a loving God, how they think God feels about them? All too often they say, “I don’t think He really cares for me; I’m not sure He knows I exist. If He does, I’m not sure He’s concerned.” In contradiction to their theoretical ideas about God, they feel that God is mean and unforgiving, holds grudges against them, keeps accounts on them, and constantly reminds them of past sins. As in the song about Santa Claus, “He’s making a list and checking it twice!”

Sometimes I ask people who are having a difficult time describing their view of God to draw a picture of Him. As you might imagine, I have an interesting collection of drawings. Several depict a huge eye which covers a whole page—God watching everything the person does, waiting to catch him at some failure or wrongdoing. Others have drawn angry human faces, or birds of prey with sharp beaks and talons. And then there was the theological student’s portrait of God as Scrooge, mentioned earlier.

As the chart illustrates, instead of trusting a God who is predictable in His steadfastness and reliable in His faithfulness, many Christians are filled with fears and anxiety because, at a deep, gut level, they sense God to be untrustworthy. They sing about “amazing grace,” talk about it in Sunday school, and even witness about it to others. But on a performance level, they live fearful of a God who accepts and loves them only when they measure up.

They do not see God as a nurturing and affirming parent who is always encouraging His children in their development; or as a good father or mother, pleased with every step of growth. Instead, His face seems critical and unpleasable. He is indeed the inner voice that always says, “That’s not quite good enough.”

So, they feel rejected by God, unaccepted by Him, and thus caught in the vicious circle of trying to please an unpleasable God. They become POWs—not prisoners of war but Performance Oriented Workers.

The final distortion is yet to come, for these Christians usually have hidden anger against God. Therefore, they come to feel He is unfair and partial in His judgments. He is an unjust God to them, but treats everyone else fairly. That is why they may freely tell others about a loving God and explain the plan of salvation by grace, but are unable to apply it to themselves.

I can understand—I’ve been there. I had been a missionary in India for ten years when, at age 34, the Holy Spirit began to deal with me about some deeply buried resentments against my mother. They were specifics I had not dealt with. In fact, I had not even really remembered them for years.

The Spirit also showed me that I had not faced some of my true feelings toward God. You see, I had been separated from my parents when they got stuck in India during the early years of World War II. They had left me at age 12 and I did not see them again until the morning of my 20th birthday. And after all, it was God who had called them to be missionaries in the first place.

Oh, I had spiritualized it all, basking in the glow when people would say, “Isn’t it wonderful, your parents are missionaries!” But the gut-level truth was that I felt angry about those years of separation. All my friends had their parents with them and places to go on holidays. But God had taken my mom and dad away!

Like so many people I would counsel in later years, my theology of God and my feelings about Him were at odds.

Now we’ve come to the crux of the whole matter. Notice on the chart what brings about the twisting of the lines and the distorting of God’s character—unhealthy interpersonal relationships, especially those which occurred during the early developmental years of childhood and adolescence. More than any other factor, these faulty relationships cause the emotional damages which distort spiritual perceptions.

You will notice on the chart that the twisted lines actually go in both directions. They proceed down from the bad experiences and relationships and also come up out of the person. This means that what began from outside sources gradually has become internalized, affecting the way the person actually perceives other people, himself, and God. It has become a way of life.

We could liken such a condition to a kind of spiritual paranoia. Paranoid persons can take the most loving, affirming statements and twist them into insults, rejections, and even threats. In the same way, Christians with damaged love receptors can take the Good News and turn it into Bad News. This is why so many of them have an uncanny knack of missing the wonderful promises of God’s mercy, love, and grace, and consistently dwelling on Bible passages which emphasize wrath, punishment, judgment, and “the unpardonable sin.”

Finally, look at the columns on either side of the person in the drawing. The fact that we may have been victims of painful experiences and hurtful relationships does not excuse us from responsibility. Yet, there are many unchosen factors of life, including our fallen natures, which in themselves tend to produce distorted pictures of God.

There are also other factors over which we have neither choice nor control: our biological and psychological inheritance; our geographical and cultural environment; and the accidents, tragedies, and traumas of life. These make up our unchosens which, in many cases, have caused what Scripture would term our infirmities.

Infirmities are the weaknesses, the cripplings, the inborn and ingrown defects of body, mind, or spirit. They are not in themselves sins but are, rather, those aspects of our personalities which predispose us and incline us toward certain sins. They are the weakened places in our defenses which undermine our resistance to temptation and sin.

On the opposite side of the figure are the Chosens—the points at which we are responsible. We have chosen to make wrong responses to God and to other people. We have held onto our resentments and bitterness and have deliberately decided to disobey God. This has brought us fear and guilt, and has further reinforced our warped perceptions and feelings about God.

So, however much we have been victims of the sins and evil of others, we have also sinned, and we must accept our share of responsibility for our problems.

Yes, it is a complex picture; but its purpose is not to confuse but to clarify, to help us discover and be healed of those images and feelings which distort our concepts of God. For in spite of all our commitment to the most rigorous Christian disciplines, we will never find lasting “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Romans 14:17) until we find a Christlike God.

Most of our failure to love and trust God stems from our pictures of God as unlovable and untrustworthy. And most of our anger against Him is not really against the true God but against our unchristian or subchristian concepts of God.

The encouraging thing about all this is that God knows and understand us. He is not angry with us for our lack of trust or our anger toward Him. Rather, He is saddened that our false pictures of Him keep us from getting to know Him as He truly is. He is far more brokenhearted about it than we are. That’s why He longs to help us find healing from the hurts which have contributed to the distorted concepts/feelings about Him.

Some time ago a lady named Carrie came to counsel with me following a sermon I had preached on the need some Christians have for inner healing. She was a very intelligent, attractive, Spirit-filled Christian, and highly successful in her profession. During the sermon, the Holy Spirit had pulled back a veil, so that she became aware of a deep anger against God. Since Carrie was in her 50s and had been a diligent Christian almost all her life, this came as a great shock to her.

We counseled regularly for several months, slowly working through many layers of repressed emotions, until finally the Spirit led us to the place which needed healing. The memories returned slowly, going all the way back to when Carrie was about ten.

It was during World War II, and her favorite brother was in the army. One day an army officer came to the door and delivered the terrible news of the death of her brother.

Carrie’s parents were devastated, her mother retreating to her room to shut herself up for days. Carrie literally had to take over. She had to be the strong one and shoulder many of the household responsibilities. She never had a chance to express her grief over the loss. She loved that brother more than anyone else in the world, and although she was hurting no one cared enough to listen to her sorrow.

Into her crushed and overloaded heart crept an anger against her family for never allowing her to express her tears. She had been forced to become a ten-year-old superwoman whose own needs were totally unmet.

Now, with these painful memories, came a chance to express her grief. But there also came the realization that because of what had happened, she had become a closed person, perfectionistic and overly demanding in her outlook.

The core of her anger and pain was this: “I’ve always been forced to do and be some- one I’m really not.” And this had carried over to the way she perceived her superiors and God, who always seemed to be pressuring her into being more than she really was.

With Carrie’s permission, let me share her letter which describes the turning point in her healing:

“After talking with you yesterday, I came home for lunch and, as I usually do, reached for a book. I’ve been reading in Rabboni (by W. Phillip Keller) and had come to the chapter, “The Forgiveness of God.” Without really thinking, I started to read. Suddenly, it was not just a book, but God was using it to say, ‘You’re forgiven.’

“It seems incredible, but for the first time in my life the reality of being forgiven came home to me. I haven’t words to express the song that began inside—the wonder of feeling forgiven and free.

“The realization of forgiveness came as a result of thinking on your answer to my question, ‘What do I do now?’ Your reply, ‘Do nothing,’ seemed too simple; yet finally the truth came home that this was the exact answer I needed, for God had already done it. There may be lots of reprogramming ahead, but today I believe it will happen, for I’m finally on the road.’

This was indeed the beginning of a new road of grace and freedom in Carrie’s life. Like Mary in the greatest recognition story of the Bible (John 20:1-16), Carrie had found her Rabboni, her Master, in a new relationship, free from the distorted concepts/feelings about Him that had plagued her for years.

Perhaps it would be fitting to close this article with a prayer of St. Augustine, who early in his Christian life faced the problem of a wrong concept of God (from The Confessions of Augustine in Modern English by Sherwood E. Wirt):

“Should I call on You for help or should I praise You? Is it important to know You first before I call on You? If I don’t know who You are, how can I call? In my ignorance, I might be calling on some other object of worship. Do I call on You, then, in order to know You? … It’s settled: let me seek You, Lord, by asking for Your help in my life.”

David A. Seamands was born of missionary parents in India. He is professor of pastoral ministries at Asbury Theological Seminary and the author of three books, including the best-selling Healing For Damaged Emotions. This article is excerpted from his latest book Healing of Memories (Victor Books, © 1985, SP Publications, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois).