What size God do you have?

Hey everyone.  Haven't posted in a few years.  But I'm wanting to write again so here we go. 

God is big.  Bigger than my plans.  Bigger than my vision for ministry.  Bigger than every person I have the potential to impact for Christ in my entire lifetime.  God's vision encompasses the universe.  God's timeline encompasses all of history and eternity.  I am here for a moment, the blinking of an eye, and will occupy the space of a speck of sand on the ocean floor. 

I say all of this not to suggest that I don't matter to God.  If the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ means anything, it means that the breath of a moment that is my life has significance to God and it has God's attention and care.  Every life matters immensely to the infinite God.  The reason I bring up how big God is in comparison to my human cares and efforts is because it is so helpful when living my life to get perspective.  If faith is anything - it is positioning ourselves in the right divine, eternal, and ultimate perspective.

I spend a whole lot of time so focused on MY world, the world as I perceive and experience it, that I lose sight of God's vision of me, my neighbors, my ministry, and the world.  When I lose this perspective, the tendency is to make my god into someone who fits into my limited perspective.  Instead of allowing myself to be stretched into the eternal, I attempt to take the infinite and cram it into my finite time, space, and perspective.  This has huge ramifications for our daily walk of faith and can severely limit our experience of God.  Let me give you an example:

When it comes to my dreams for ministry - I often find myself praying that God will make my dreams come true.  I seem my dreams as being given to me by God, and I appeal to God to come and make them a reality...ASAP.  The way this feels is like getting a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  Getting God to back my energies and efforts is exhausting, frustrating and usually disappointing.  He makes for a horrible employee and even worse volunteer.  Do you ever feel these things in terms of your faith journey?  This is the result of being small, staying small and trying to making God small. 

If I were to allow God to be big - it may make me bigger too - at least in my perspective and attitude.  If I recognize that God is working throughout history and across the world to accomplish salvation, deliverance, redemption, and wholeness and that this occurs on God's time and in God's way - I start to simply shape my efforts and energies according to God's commands and characteristics.  I know that God, at any moment, could easily bless and accomplish all of my wildest dreams for ministries in a moment.  But I also know that the big God knows more than I do.  He knows more about my life, about where I fit in a bigger picture, about all the lives that I brush alongside and influence, and about how it all works in the eternal plan to restore the world.  My big God knows this and I can choose to trust Him as I seek to do work that is consistent with His character and revealed intentions.

Hebrews 11 really speaks to how this looks in the lives of the faithful.  Countless faithful ones through the generations have chosen to abide in and adhere to God's character and revealed purposes through their whole lives...even when they don't see the visions fulfilled in their life spans.  It is far more faithful to ask God to bind me to His grand and big work in the world than to ask God to come and bless my uncertain, narrow visions.

Do my visions and dreams for my life and ministry have something to do with God's big purpose in the world?  Sure.  But my relationship with my plans has more to do with how the American Dream has told me that I can be anything I want to be in this life, than it does with the gospel that says I have been included by grace into an infinite ministry that I have some unique, but small, part in.