How Do

You

Perceive

God?

By

Okey L. King

How you perceive God determines the kind of Christian life

You have. If you have a wrong perception of God, you Christina live may be either absent or badly lacking. Satan knows this and he will do everything in his power to distort you perception of God. Satan has at least three main strategies to defeat you by causing you to wrongly see God.

One of Satan’s lies is, “God is a mean unloving God who watches your every move so that He can punish you every time you sin.” Scripture says that we are to fear only God. But, it is not to be that kind of fear.

This view of God leads to a negative life. It is the very basis of legalism. “I must toe the line and walk the straight and narrow or God will punish me with an awful punishment.” Knowing that there is no real chance of pleasing this God, we lose our understanding of faith and of the Grace of God. If we or our neighbor gets sick, it is because we sinned. When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer and she told here mother, the first thing here mother said was, “Well, Don’t tell no one!” A life with this negative view of God brings a belief that any misfortune is a stigma against the holy life that you are trying to live. The tragedy is that it is not a holy life at all. It is a life that is just filthy rags. Mankind has no holiness apart from God.

A second lie of Satan is, “God is a big old sugar daddy just waiting to cater to everything that you want and make you always prosperous and healthy. This view makes God something like Walmart without the checkout line. You just go in, pick out what you want, and take it without even saying thank you.

This view of God has produced the doctrine of Prosperity and healing which I believe may be one of the biggest heresies of modern times. It is a very dangerous doctrine. We are taught that, if we have a right relationship with God, we will never be sick and never be poor. If we do not have nice things or are sick, it is our fault because we do not have a right relationship with God. This only works in good times.

When a believer caught in this net gets up one morning and fines a lump and that lump is diagnosed as terminal cancer, That Christian life fan fall apart and that believe can be sucked back into an uncaring world. The same thing can result when a believer goes to work one day and finds a pink slip waiting for them. Now, they have no means of meeting their bills and the often lose their homes. We witnessed this in this past depression. Of course this is the result that Satan is aiming for.

A third lie of Satan is. “God just doesn’t care about anybody one way or another.” The lie says that God dose not answer prayer, He dose not heal, and he dose not think about us. He just leaves us here to make it on our own. In Jer. 29:11 we read, “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” This lie of Satan is a horrible lie. God loves you, he cares for you, and He thinks about you, and prepared the means that you might come to him (His son Jesus Christ) that you might spend eternity with Him.

Well then, how should we perceive God? I do not know very much about God. Because of my old sinful human nature, I know more about Satan than I know about God. Actually God is beyond human perception. Just think of Him boggles the mind. I know that he is pure love and that he is pure righteousness. That means righteousness is pure love and if we are to be righteous then we must love. I know that he created everything that was created including my soul and all things He created He created for a purpose. I know that he love me so much that, not only did He give His only begotten Son, he created in me a purpose and meaning for my life. I know that He is a god that, if I have no other god before Him, when I am in Him the gates of hell shall not prevail against me. I know that He loves me, he thinks about me, and he wants me to be the best child to Him that I can be.

How do we rightly perceive God? We perceive God by every guide and means that we find in the Scripture, We tell God and the world that we are blessed and thereby do not give Satan a toehold into our minds. Remember: Satan and his are the only ones that are negative. God is always positive even when He is chastising us. We are to be positive as well. The war against Satan for our loved ones is resting on it.

God bless you fully!