Not Forsaken

by Louie Giglio

It’s not what you own or don’t own.

  It’s not what you’ve done or haven’t done.

  It’s not your personality type.

  It’s not your looks, your smarts, your friends, or your clout.

  It’s not your wins or your losses.

  Nope. The most important thing about you is what you think about when you think about God .

  That may make total sense to you, or it may come as a bit of a surprise. I know it’s a big statement, but if you think about it carefully, you’ll see that nothing about you matters more than what you think about God. This is the most essential and defining thing about you.

  One of my mentors early in life, Dan DeHaan, painted this idea so vividly for my friends and me when we were teenagers. I can still hear him saying it in one of his talks at our summer camp: The most important thing about you is what you think about when you think about God. Dan’s eyes would light up when he said it. In fact, his eyes would light up any time and every time he started talking about God.

  I can remember the day in 1982 clearly, while Dan was flying solo in a small plane between speaking events, his plane went down in the night in the remote mountain hills of northern Alabama. At age thirty-three, Dan was gone.

  Yet his passion to know God—and this phrase of his—lived on in the hearts of many of the people he influenced: The most important thing about you is what you think about when you think about God.

  By and For

  I came to discover later that Dan was greatly influenced by another legendary voice from a previous generation, the theologian and pastor, A. W. Tozer. In his well-known book The Knowledge of the Holy , Tozer says it this way: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” 3

  Why did Tozer make such a blanket statement about all of us? Why would he write something so all-inclusive, so powerful and comprehensive, about you and me? Did he know us? Did he know anything about your life and your story or mine?

  Tozer didn’t need to know us individually, because he knew what God says about us in Colossians 1:16, where we find the cornerstone of this truth. This Scripture says, “All things were made by him and for him.”

  Did you catch the dual emphasis in that verse? First, you were made by God. He is your source of origin. You didn’t make yourself. You didn’t happen randomly or by some cosmic accident. And, since God made you, you are incredibly important, valuable, and prized. And second, you were made for God. That’s your central purpose on planet Earth now and into forever. When God made you, He didn’t just plunk you down on a rock in space and wave goodbye, never to have anything to do with you again. The reason He made you was so you could connect with Him in a vital relationship. Hardwired into your DNA is a response mechanism that enables you to do exactly that.

  Since we were made by God and for God, our heart searches for the God who we were made by and for . Our soul wants to respond to Him. Like a homing device, there’s something in all of us that draws us magnetically toward God.

  Yet, plenty of people fight this draw. They try to ignore the pull. They push the idea of God out of their worldview and try to pretend the draw doesn’t exist. But God can’t be ignored. Not ultimately. Eventually, everybody acquiesces to the draw and at least thinks about God, even if they never admit it out loud. That’s because the force that pulls us toward God is built directly into our souls. We were designed to sense this pull within us.

  Acts 17:25–28 talks about how God “gives everyone life and breath and everything else,” and that God did this so that we “would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him,” and how “he is not far from any one of us.” That’s a repeat of the same idea—that we were made by God and for God, and because of that, we are constantly drawn toward Him.

  If you’ve ever felt a tug in your heart toward God—that’s the hardwiring of the primary response mechanism at work. God placed the tug there. The nuance of the original language in Acts 17 means we “grope for Him” as if we’re in a darkened room with blinded eyes and a cluttered floor trying to feel our way forward. We know there’s something greater than us out there—stronger, bigger, and more important.

  The language of Acts 17 doesn’t portray God as some sinister being with a twisted sense of humor making us stumble through the night in search of Him. Rather, the picture is of what sin has done to you and me, blinding us from seeing the One who fashioned us by and for Himself as we grasp for lesser things that cannot ultimately satisfy the longing in our hearts.

  Who are we looking for? Where? Fortunately, Acts 17 says that God is “not far from any one of us.” And a little later in The Knowledge of the Holy , Tozer added this thought, which goes along with Acts 17: “We tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of God.” 4

  If we are all moving toward our mental images of God, then we certainly need to move toward the right mental image, the accurate idea about God, the true picture. We’ve established that at some point we all move toward our concept of who we think God is. But some of us might be moving toward a faulty or harmful image. Since this image is the most important thing about us—since it forms our identity and provides security and purpose and mission and governs our actions and heart attitudes—it needs to be correct!

  What’s Your View of God?

  “we tend, by a secret law of the soul, to move toward our mental image of god.” —A. W. Tozer

  If you had a sketchpad in front of you, and I said, Quick, draw a picture of God , what would you draw? I don’t mean a physical picture of skin and limbs and hair, but a picture of what God is like in His essence.

  Everybody has a picture of God in mind, and there are a ton of different viewpoints. Some of them good, but some of them not so accurate. Your concept of God could have come from a lot of places. Maybe your mom and dad told you at a young age what God was like, and you incorporated a lot of their ideas—some helpful, some harmful. Obviously, the religious culture and the part of the world you grew up in played a big part in shaping your image of God.

  Or maybe a professor shaped your mental image of God. You sat in a class where some highly intelligent person with a string of degrees after his name insisted that God is a myth, so that shaped how you view God.

  Or maybe your church formed your image of God. Whatever faith tradition you’re from, this tradition painted a picture for you—sometimes good, sometimes not.

  Or maybe your friends told you, by their actions or their words, Hey, this is what God is like , and that’s influenced your thinking.

  Or perhaps you have let your life experiences define God for you. Maybe in your mind God didn’t come through for you, or He didn’t hold up His side of a bargain you’d thought you’d made, or He disappointed you in some way—and that’s shaped what you think of God.

  I was reading recently about a pioneer in broadcast television who said he wanted nothing to do with God and considered himself an atheist because when he was younger and his father was dying he prayed for his healing to no avail. If God was supposedly so good, then why didn’t that good God save his dad? That one painful moment of confusion and disappointment shaped his view of God for the rest of his life.

  The same can be said of us all. Something we learned, heard, or experienced has created an image in our minds of what we think God is like. While there are a multitude of views that people think about when they think about God, there are a few you run into more often than others.

  A Motley Crew of Gods

  Some people hold a mental image of God that looks something like an Old Man Upstairs—the Grandpa God . I’m not poking fun at anyone’s concept of God. I’m just trying to be helpful by surfacing what some of us think and taking the masks off some of our lesser gods. Grandpa God has been around forever, so it’s no wonder he’s moving a bit slower these days. He has a white flowing beard and a soothing Morgan Freeman-esque voice. He walks around heaven with a twinkle in his eye and a handful of candy. He’s a little
hard of hearing, so please speak up when you’re trying to tell him something and, by all means, keep the racket down in the church.

  Grandpa God is a mostly out of touch with current culture and hasn’t figured out how to text just yet. When he gets around to upgrading from a flip-phone to a smart phone you can be sure he’ll be using that super large font setting that the grandkids can read from across the room. He’s gentle and kind, but certainly he’s not going to be able to help you figure out the TV remote or the complex issues of today. He’s a bit of a Santa, so be sure you leave some cookies out for him this year. Or, maybe not.

  Instead of a Grandpa God image, it could be that you see God as a rule-making, tally-keeping umpire in the sky. Scorekeeper God is all about the do’s and don’ts. If you go to church, you get one point. If you swear at the guy on the freeway who cuts you off, you lose two points. This god is always watching you, always evaluating, always judging, always working the numbers. He’s constantly scribbling things about you in his ledger. Have a good thought? So noted. Have a bad attitude? Points come off the board. You’ve got to toe the line to stay in this god’s good graces. You need to try hard if you want to stay on this god’s team. In the end, you stand outside the Pearly Gates, and this god hands you a computer-generated list of credits and debits. If you’re lucky you have more credits than not, and in you go. Hooray! With this god in mind, heaven’s for folks who aren’t in the red. You’re going to make it. If only you keep trying harder and you pile up enough good stuff to tip the scales in your favor in the end.

  Some see God as a nebulous force, some kind of positive energy or light. The Cosmic Force God is nameless and faceless, probably with no personhood or personality. This “force” is distant, abstract, and elusive. We might tap into it if all the variables are just so. It could be momentum. A feeling. A vibe. A harmonic convergence. When people have this image of God in mind they often talk about spirituality, yet they don’t describe a god you can know personally. The emphasis with this god-concept is simply that there’s something out there in the universe that’s greater than we are, and for the most part it feels right and good. It’s bright like light and quite mysterious, and larger than us. But it’s hard to be sure just what it is.

  Your view of God may be a picture of a reckless brawler who’s looking to pick a fight. Angry God loves to push people around, make them pay. Doling out punishment is his thing. Make no mistake, this god doesn’t like you much. He can’t wait to crush you with his thunderbolt of destruction. Bammm! Goodbye, you’re toast.

  If you’re smart, you avoid Angry God, because, frankly, who wouldn’t?! You went to this god’s church once and noticed there weren’t a lot of people there. Duh. This god isn’t anybody you’d want to worship week after week. Why keep coming back for more of what he dishes out? He’s just waiting for the perfect moment to smash you into smithereens.

  For others, their god is akin to “Alexa” or “Siri,” those electronic helpers that computer gurus have cleverly invented. This god is a personal butler in the sky. Concierge God is at your beck and call twenty-four/seven. Need directions? Just ask. Want to order some different weather? Done. Concierge God sends messages, checks your calendar, finds stuff, and gives you a funny answer to, What does the fox say?

  If you listen to the way some people talk about God, it’s as if He only exists to work through their to-do list for them. You push a button and poof , he appears with a smile. But this god is never in your life for long. This god is highly convenient. You call on him only when help is needed. When you don’t need him anymore, all you is push a button again and just like that, this god is gone.

  The list goes on and on.

  Stained-Glass God is high-browed and stoic. This god uses complex theological words and prefers things buttoned up and proper. None of that “new” music in his church. This god might be handy if the occasion is a royal wedding. He prefers the super-uncomfortable, unpadded pews, and he’s very concerned about the color of the carpet in the sanctuary. After all, it is his house. Some with this view think the church-house is where God actually lives.

  Hipster God is super relevant—part Barista, part Bible scholar.

  Buddy God is on our level. We greet him with a casual, “What’s up, bro? High fives all around.” He’s chill and average and a good hang.

  The Me God is, well, me . Sure, we don’t overtly say, I’m God . But we act like it. Or think like it. We call the shots. When this image of God is in our minds, everything is all about Me. Me. Me. I’m in charge. I make all the decisions. I’m in control. I’m self-made. The world revolves around me, and I steer my ship of destiny. Nobody tells me what to do, thank you very much.

  Buffet God is a smorgasbord of all the above versions of god conveniently displayed so it’s easy for you to pick and choose as you desire. This god is non-offensive, nonabrasive, and non-absolute. Nothing is ever considered right or wrong with this god. When this image of God is in your mind, you figure you can just walk up to the Great Salad Bar in the sky and pick and choose what to plunk on your plate. I’ll take a little bit of this and put it with a little bit of that . This god might be everything, and this god might be nothing. You might be god, and I might be god, and all of us might be god, and nobody might be god.

  Then of course, there’s the No-God God . It’s actually hard to keep this image in mind because this image is actually a non-image. It’s something you’re trying to erase from your mind. You don’t believe in God, because you don’t believe there’s a God to believe in. I actually respect atheists quite a bit. I truly do. Every person on earth has to develop answers to the big questions of life—and then live by those answers. It takes real work and huge leaps of faith to answer those questions without God. But some try hard to do so, and frame their existence based on a negative that cannot be proved, declaring, “There is no God.”

  Checking the Fingerprints of Creation

  Granted, my descriptions of what people may think God might be like are a little tongue-in-cheek. But it’s likely you have a little bit of one of these views woven into your thinking. Or maybe your view of God is completely different. But whatever your answer is to the question What do you think about when you think about God? the encouraging news is that God, the true God, is not sitting idly by in this conversation.

  God wants you to know who He is. He’s not hiding like a needle in a haystack saying, Good luck figuring out who I really am. He’s not plunking you down in a spiritual corn maze, some kind of twisted game with eternal stakes. It’s quite the opposite. God has surrounded you with His own fingerprints on His creation and overcome every possible hurdle to show you who He is and what He’s like. More than you want to find God, God wants to be found by you. He wants you to know Him and know how much He loves you.

  That’s why God is constantly in the process of revealing Himself. Through His Word, through creation, through the Holy Spirit at work in our lives, and yes, through the influence of godly people around us, God is constantly showing us who He is. God knows the stakes are high because if we don’t know who He truly is, then we could spend our whole lives with the wrong idea of God in mind, living out our days on earth trying to respond to a flawed image of God.

  That can cause any number of problems. With a wrong view of God in mind, we can spend our lives running from the true God, or hiding from God, or angry at God, or disappointed with God, or feeling rejected by God, or ambivalent toward God, or worried we’re on the wrong side of God’s scorecard. That’s not what the abundant life that Jesus offers to us looks like. And that’s why we live in a universe that makes it impossible to miss Him.

  When I was in college, my friend Johnny and I traveled across the United States camping in some of America’s spectacular national parks. When we arrived at the Grand Canyon on a scorching July afternoon, we set our tent up in one of the campsites near the entrance to the national park. The view across the cavernous expanse was stunning, but what we really wanted to do was get to the
bottom.

  The problem was that reservations for the campsites down at the bottom of the canyon had to be booked months in advance. Sadly, we didn’t have a reservation, so our options were limited. Hiking down and back up during the daytime was highly discouraged given the well-above onehundred-degree temperatures. The park ranger we’d asked for advice took a look at us and offered, “I don’t think your odds are too good. You’ll bake going down and wilt coming back up.” But then she offered an intriguing possibility—we could hike down to the bottom during the night and then back out in the cooler morning hours.

  “Sounds a little crazy,” my buddy said, but after a few minutes he and I both arrived at the same conclusion and agreed we’d give it a shot.

  Just after midnight, we started our descent of the Bright Angel Trail, slowly dropping into the canyon, led by the glow from our flashlights down the switchbacks that would take us far below the rim to the river’s edge. Other than the few wild donkeys that startled us (I think they were more startled than we were), and what sounded like the rattle of a snake that definitely sped up our pace, things went according to plan, and we ended up on a little sandy beach by a bend in the Colorado River about four in the morning.

  When we stretched out to catch a short nap before sunrise I had no clue that my understanding of the majesty of God was about to change. As I looked up from the bottom of this mile-deep crevice in the earth (where there was no hint of man-made light), it was as if the stars were hanging so close you could pluck them out of the sky with your outstretched arm. They were like shimmering diamonds in the night sky, so brilliant against the black of space. I smiled. And laughed. And actually reached for a few of them just to make sure I couldn’t touch them. And I felt an overwhelming sense of awe and wonder that I had never known before. I believe that sense of mystery and greatness was the Creator blanketing the backdrop of the cosmos with the declaration, I am here . God certainly wasn’t hiding that night. His glory was on display for all to see.