3 Lies I Believed About God

Here are a few whoppers parents have told. One Dad admitted, “I told my kids that if they didn’t behave in the McDonald’s drive-thru they’d get a Sad Meal.” A mom told her kids that the TV didn’t work except when it rained.

My brothers told me whoppers, and I believed them: Chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Sharks swam around the deep end of our town’s swimming pool. And every song on the radio was being played live by little guys in there who were sound asleep until you turned it on.

Here are three whoppers I believed about God:

1: God would only be pleased with me if I was in full-time ministry.

When I was a kid I told my mom, “I wanna grow up and be a comedian.” She said, “Well, you can’t do both.” Mom encouraged me but I grew up with a gnawing sense that God would only be happy if I was a pastor, a missionary, or an evangelist. But the Bible is filled with people in ordinary jobs doing extraordinary things. Adam was a gardener, Paul a tentmaker, and Jesus was a carpenter. Whatever our work, it is a sacred assignment from God.

2. All good people go to heaven.

Follow the rules, you go up. Disobey? You go down. But listen to Titus 3:4-5 (NIV):

“…When the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of His mercy…”

This is quite simply the best news ever. Forgiveness and eternal life are gifts we can’t earn, we can only receive them by placing our faith in God’s son Jesus.

3. God Does Not Exist.

I tried believing this for a short angry four days of my life. But then I got looking at my hand or a tree, or a dog, or thinking about the atmosphere and the earth and the odds of this forming by chance. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

It sure beats trusting your brothers. I now know that when you see a deer head in a guy’s living room, the rest of the deer is not on the other side of the wall.