You Didn't Find God. You Built One.

The First Step👣

There is an old joke that has been circling Christian circles for decades.

God made man in His image. And man has been returning the favor ever since.

We laugh when we hear it. And then we go back to our phones and our news feeds and our carefully curated spiritual lives and we keep doing exactly what the joke describes. We keep chipping away at the original. We keep sanding down the edges that make us uncomfortable. We keep building a version of God that is a little more reasonable, a little more agreeable, a little more aligned with what we already believed before we ever opened the Bible.

And here is the thing about that process that should genuinely stop us cold.

It never feels like idolatry when you are doing it. It feels like wisdom. It feels like discernment. It feels like finally understanding what the Bible really means once you strip away all the parts that were clearly cultural, or historical, or misinterpreted, or just a little too inconvenient for the life you are trying to build.

The most dangerous god is not the one we deny. It is the one we redesigned.

The Pebble in My Path🚶🏽‍➡️

Here is what I keep noticing and cannot stop noticing.

The same people who will passionately defend the authority of Scripture on Sunday morning will spend the rest of the week treating God like a campaign surrogate. They will invoke His name to justify policies He never endorsed, bless agendas He never authored, and condemn people He died for. They will hold the Bible in one hand and a political platform in the other and somehow never notice that the two documents are not saying the same thing.

And I want to be careful here because this is not about left or right. It is not about one party or another. The Barefoot Gospel does not have a political home and it never will. This is about something older and more universal than any election cycle.

It is about the quiet, almost invisible process by which a living God gets replaced by a useful one.

C.S. Lewis saw it coming decades ago. He warned that what we really want is not a Father in Heaven but a grandfather in Heaven. A comfortable, non-threatening presence who enjoys watching us do whatever we enjoy doing and asks very little in return. A divine figure who agrees with our politics, blesses our ambitions, stays silent about our compromises, and shows up at the right moments to validate what we had already decided.

That is not God. That is a mascot.

And the pebble in my path this week is the uncomfortable realization that most of us are carrying one without knowing it. We have been so busy deciding which side God is on that we never stopped to ask whether we are on His.

Tim Keller said it plainly and I have never been able to shake it. If your God never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.

Sit with that for a moment. Let it breathe.

The Compass 🧭

Here is where it gets both harder and more hopeful at the same time.

There is a throne inside your chest. You cannot see it. You cannot touch it. But it is there and it is real and it is the most consequential piece of real estate in your entire life. Because everything flows from it. Every decision, every loyalty, every definition of what is true and what is right and what is worth protecting originates on that throne.

And that throne is never empty.

If God is not sitting on it something else is. And whatever else is sitting there will always be smaller than you because nothing larger than you would ever let you put it there. It might be your political identity which will eventually demand you defend things you know are wrong. It might be your need to belong to a tribe which will eventually require you to silence things you know are true. It might be your fear of being on the losing side which will eventually make you a stranger to your own conscience.

The prophet Hosea described God's people like this. Gray hairs are sprinkled on him but he does not know it. That is the terror of slow drift. Nobody becomes a stranger to themselves overnight. It happens in increments so small they feel like nothing. A verse skipped. A conviction softened. A boundary moved by inches so gradual no one would call it movement at all. And then one morning you catch your reflection and you do not quite recognize the person looking back.

This is the arithmetic of drift. And it is the quiet crisis underneath all the loud religion we see today.

Because here is what we miss when we reduce God to a political ally. We have stopped letting Scripture read us and started reading ourselves into Scripture. We come to the text not to be challenged by it but to be confirmed by it. Verses that comfort us get highlighted and shared. Verses that confront us get contextualized into silence. We have become expert lawyers defending the client of the self before the bench of God's word.

But the God of Scripture does not work that way. He called Abram out of everything familiar. He called Moses out of comfort and obscurity. He called the rich young ruler out of his wealth right at the moment the young man thought he had everything figured out. He called Peter out of the boat.

The Gospel has never been come as you are and stay as you are. It has always been come as you are and you will not leave as you came.

The Open Road 🛣️

So how do we walk this out without it becoming just another thing to feel guilty about?

We start by asking an honest question that most of us have been quietly avoiding.

When did I last let God disagree with me?

Not in theory. Not in a general theological sense. But specifically and personally. When did a passage of Scripture land on your life and genuinely cost you something? When did your faith ask you to hold a position that made your political tribe uncomfortable? When did following Jesus require you to love someone your side had told you to resent?

If you cannot remember, that is worth sitting with.

The throne does not announce itself. It does not send a formal declaration when something new sits down. It just quietly begins to shape everything from the inside out. This is why the spiritual practices that look like inefficiency from the outside are actually the most urgent things we can do. Morning prayer before the phone. Scripture before the news feed. Sabbath before the calendar fills itself. Confession before the rationalizations calcify.

These are not religious rituals. They are the daily act of asking God back onto the throne before the day can crown something else.

And here is the most important thing I want to leave you with this week.

The God you cannot domesticate is also the God who will not abandon you. The fact that He refuses to be your mascot is not a threat. It is the best news you will hear all week. Because a God who simply agrees with everything you already believe has nothing to offer you that you do not already have. He cannot save you from yourself. He cannot show you what you cannot see. He cannot lead you anywhere you have not already decided to go.

But a God who is genuinely other, genuinely holy, genuinely beyond the reach of your politics and your preferences and your need for tribal validation, that God can actually do something with your life.

The useful god asks nothing of you and gives you back only your own reflection.

The true God asks everything of you and gives you Himself.

That is the only trade that has ever set anyone actually free.

This week, before the noise starts, before the feed loads, before the outrage finds you, ask yourself one quiet question.

Who is sitting on the throne today?

And is it really who you think it is?

Stay barefoot. Stay honest. Stay open to the God who refuses to be convenient.

— The Barefoot Gospel