Why God Feels Smaller Than He Used To

There was a time when God seemed bigger to you than He does right now. Nothing in your theology changed. What changed is your awe, and awe is something you can trade away without ever deciding to. The fear of the Lord is not being afraid of God. It is reverent awe, a right-sized view of who God is, and it is the posture David holds in Psalm 145. If you have ever asked what it means to fear God, the answer starts not with a feeling you work up, but with a God you cannot measure.

What Does It Mean to Fear God?

The fear of the Lord is not the scared, terrified kind of fear. It is the reverent kind. It is what rises in you when you consider who God actually is, and it is the honest response to a God whose greatness you will never fully take in.

God offers us an invitation to know Him as best we can, in what He reveals and in what He offers. That invitation does not come with full comprehension attached. It comes with enough of Him to leave us in awe.

David's Final Song and the God No One Can Measure

Psalm 145 is thought to be an acrostic poem. If you take the first letter of each verse, it moves through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order, though for some reason one is missing. It is also considered David's final psalm in the Psalter, which means David finishes writing his songs with a deep reflection on the power, greatness, and character of God, from top to bottom, A to Z.

Listen for the perspective in it. No one can measure His greatness. The Lord is merciful and compassionate. Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. He always keeps His promises, and He is righteous in everything He does.

But David does not stop at description. He says each generation will tell of God's mighty acts. He says everyone will share the story of His wonderful goodness. He says all God's works will thank Him, and that includes us, because we are the works of His hands. He says we will speak of His glorious kingdom. Then he commits himself personally: I will praise the Lord, and may everyone bless His holy name forever.

Do you hear the worship in that? Do you hear the perspective?

His Greatness Is Beyond You, His Goodness Is Not

Here is the takeaway. God's greatness is beyond my true ability to comprehend it, but His goodness is within my ability to experience. I may not be able to understand all there is about Him, but I can experience His goodness and see that greatness on display in my life.

That gap is not a loss. It is the design. The purpose of your life, what you have been given, the breath in your lungs, was put there so that you could experience the goodness of God and yet still not comprehend the greatness of God.

Why Your Worship Cannot Depend on What God Does for You

Our worship, our awe, and our fear of God cannot depend solely on whether He does something or does not do something in our lifetime, in our situation, or in our circumstances. We have to right-size God. Everything we know about Him, my awe and my worship of Him, has to be rooted in who God is eternally.

Because God is God whether I am around or not. I am not the center of this universe. I am not the goal. My betterment and my well-being, whatever you want to call it, are not God's goal. God's goal is God's glory, and He gains glory in creating you, creating me, and allowing us to live in relationship with Him.

What Happens When You Lose Your Awe of God

There is a real danger in losing your awe, because your decisions start getting made on the basis of preserving self rather than pleasing God. That dilemma is why we see our cultures, our churches, our cities, our nation, and even our world in the condition they are in. We have an awe problem.

Paul David Tripp wrote a book called Awe that is worth your time. He describes the problem this way among those who teach and lead: we allow ourselves to stand above the things we teach, we begin in subtle ways to view ourselves as grace graduates, and we explain away our own sin. We teach grace to others while being ungracious to the people closest to us. We approach ministry as a burden rather than a joy. We carry bitterness and resentment toward the people we perceive as our detractors. We preach and teach love without being examples of love. Why does this happen? His answer is simple, and it stings. It happens because we are full of ourselves. As he puts it, "we have replaced the awe of God with the awe of self," and what grows out of that ground is ugly.

But the awe of God can actually protect you and protect me from the traps that sin sets to capture us. If you and I are going to lead ourselves, our marriages, our families, our kids, and our grandkids to be more Christlike, more centered on Jesus and on His hope for this world and His methods, it starts right here. If you do not have an awe of God, if you do not have that healthy fear, then why would you do what God commands? Why would you live underneath His authority? Welcome to the condition of our world. We have lost our awe, our fear of the Lord.

Why Do People Stop Worshiping God?

How did that happen? Paul gives a good indicator, a real explanation, in Romans 1.

He writes that God shows His anger from heaven against people who suppress the truth by their wickedness. He is talking about those of us who have given in to our sin nature, which is all of us, by the way. They know the truth about God because He has made it obvious to them. Ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and the sky, and through everything God made they can clearly see His invisible qualities, His eternal power, and His divine nature, so that they have no excuse for not knowing God.

Then comes the line that stings: they knew God, but they wouldn't worship Him as God or even give Him thanks(Romans 1:21). They began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like, and their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they instead became fools. Instead of worshiping the glorious, ever living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people, birds, animals, and reptiles. God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. They traded the truth about God for a lie, and they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator Himself (Romans 1:25).

When we trade or exchange the truth about God for a lie, we make less of His desire in us and we make more of our desires for ourselves. What you have done in that moment is make an awe exchange.

The Awe Exchanges We Make

Have you ever made an awe exchange in your life? As I prepared this week, I sat down and wrote out a couple of my own recent ones. Maybe you can relate to these.

There are times when my sin exchanges the worship of God for the worship of self. I will come into a church service and start picking apart what is happening, noting what we need to fix and what we need to change, because I am more concerned about how people view my leadership of our church than about the fact that the Holy One who is worthy to be praised forever is in the room and in our midst.

A lot of times my sin exchanges submission to God for self-rule. I do not do the things Paul said I ought to do, and I do the things I ought not to do, because those are the things my eyes are on and that is what I want immediately. Somehow I make the exchange that I am going to do what I want rather than follow and obey the God who is worthy of praise.

And my sin sometimes exchanges gratitude to Him for entitlement. Why do I have to do this? Why am I in this position? The moment I start believing I deserve something, I lose my gratitude, because I have made an exchange.

Where the Fear of God Begins Again

What does it mean to fear God? It means refusing to make yourself the center of a universe you did not create. It means letting your awe and your worship be rooted in who God is eternally rather than in what He has or has not done for you lately. And it means being honest enough to name the exchanges you have already made, the same way David named God's greatness, from top to bottom, A to Z.

You will not comprehend His greatness. You were never meant to. But you can experience His goodness, and that is what makes God look His true size again.