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"My thoughts are completely different from yours," says the LORD. "And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9

Not long ago I was reading Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, and related to his description of what most of us raised in the mainline American church system have been taught to believe that Jesus is: The Flannelgraph Jesus. The one that we learned about in Sunday School—our teachers using felt cutouts to show us Jesus with a lamb over his shoulders, Jesus engaged in a group hug with five children, Jesus and his glowing halo with his hands folded smiling at a lame person on a mat. This Jesus was fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed, and wore Birkenstocks and a white bathrobe. What an absolutely ridiculous picture of projection.

I was eating breakfast at 1:00 am with a few friends at Denny’s a couple days ago, and one of them said something about his mother reading one of the gospels and saying, “That Jesus guy really wasn’t very nice.” Another friend, who is actually quite a new Christian, said, “Jesus didn’t come here to be nice. He came to save us.” Her picture is way more accurate than my other friend’s mom’s picture, one in which she wanted Jesus to carry a lamb on his shoulders and play hopscotch with children. I think that seems to be a pretty common picture of projection.

Last week another friend was lamenting the slow and slippery journey of his friend who is searching for something more. He was telling me that his friend kept saying things like, “Well, my God wouldn’t allow suffering in this world.” “My God wouldn’t expect me to give up this or that.” He kept starting sentences with, “My God...” He was projecting, too.

And the bible has a word for that: Idolatry.

When we make God in our own image, we aren’t actually worshipping God, we’re worshipping a false image of God. And in this age, as Isaac pointed out tonight, we are no longer left to projecting. We have Jesus—who is the image of God, who is fully God.

But leave it to us to have a very accurate picture of who God is right there in the bible, and continue to project. To pick and choose which things we like about Jesus, and discount the rest as if we’re glossing over the fact that Uncle Eugene chews with his mouth open at family gatherings.

God has always been very honest with us about who he is. Let’s ask that he give us the conviction to always seek him as he is, to dive faithfully into scripture and prayer to see God as he’s revealed himself to us—not in the movies, not in tradition, not in popular theology...but in Jesus.