Your God Is Too Small

How big is God?? Is he as big as me? (or maybe as small as me) Is he as tall as brother Mathis? Or as wide as . . . ? [Just kidding. You know I’m not going to finish that sentence, and keep my job] What if we said that God was the size of this church building? That’s pretty big isn’t it?

We all know that it’s silly to try and limit God to a size. So, why is it that so many of us try to limit God when it comes to other things? It’s because your God is too small!!

I. God Isn’t Confined to a Building

A. Two ropes walk into a restaurant to get something to eat . The waiter leans over to address the first rope and asks, "Are you one of them ropes?"

"Why yes," quavers the rope.

"We don’t serve ropes here," growls the waiter, grabbing the rope, twirling him around his head, and throwing him out the door.

The second rope decides that he had best disguise himself, so he ruffles his threads and twists his two ends together.

Glaring, the waiter looks at the second rope and asks, "You one of them ropes?"

"No!" was the indignant reply. "I’m a frayed knot!"

B. First of all, God’s not the size of the church building, right? So why do we try to limit him to it? We often feel that God is only at the church building. We seem to think that he’s here when we’re here for church, and then when we leave he waives good-bye. I guess he sleeps here on one of these pews.

We’ll say things like, “You can’t do that at church” as though it would be o.k. to do it somewhere else, because God’s not really there to see it. We come to church and put on a disguise, much like the rope. Then we take off that mask once we leave and live a totally different life. We think that as long as we act right in church, then we’ll be o.k. because God will think that’s how we act all the time. That’s NOT Christianity. That’s having a God that is too small.

C. Acts 5:3,4 - We all know the story of Ananias and Sapphira. They intentionally attempted to deceive God, and those in the church. For some reason they thought that God only knew what went on inside the church. But, as we read here, that’s not how it was.

Your God is too small if he’s only as big as the church building.

II. God Will Take Care of You

A. Secondly, your God is too small if you are worried about the future, and what it may hold for you.

One of the biggest concerns every month is making ends meet. You know, you’ve got to pay all the bills, and buy groceries, and buy gas, and then hope that there’s enough left over for any unforeseen expenses.

And what about health? We may worry about our health, and how long it’s going to hold up, or maybe when we’re going to be totally well.

B. Our English word worry is equivalent to the Greek word merimnao. It is a combination of two words: merizo, meaning “to divide,” and nous, meaning “mind.” Worry literally means “to divide the mind.” In a way it means that we are double-minded. James warns us about this in James 1:8, “a double-minded man, [is] unstable in all he does.”

C. On August 14, 1989, Time reported the sad story of a man from East Detroit who died of fear. He had taken a number of fur-trapping expeditions over the years and had been bitten by his share of ticks. Then he heard about Lyme disease, which is carried by deer ticks. He became obsessed with the fear that he had been bitten in the past by a tick with the disease and that he had passed the disease to his wife.

Doctors tested him and assured him he didn’t have Lyme disease and that, even if he did, the disease was virtually impossible to transmit to his wife. But the man didn’t believe the doctors. Paranoid, because of the disease, the man killed his wife and then himself.

The police found the man’s mailbox jammed with material describing Lyme disease and a slip confirming a doctor’s appointment for yet another Lyme-disease test.

Worry can actually distort a person’s sense of reality. It can consume a person’s energy and thoughts.

D. When I’m really worried about something, it drives me crazy. I usually can’t sleep, because my stomach is in knots. And that usually ends up making things a lot worse, because not only do I have something to do the next day that I may be worried about, but I’m also exhausted from tossing and turning all night from worrying about it. Worry is such a useless habit. It never changes anything, except for the worse. When we worry, we’re not trusting God. We’re not giving God the chance to take care of us. Again, we’re confining God, making him smaller than he is, because we think he can’t do anything for us.