Stop Domesticating God
Brainwaves — Sunday Notes
Okay, so I wanted to start a new series.
Most Sundays at church I take notes. Sometimes they’re direct notes from the sermon, sometimes they’re Bible verses I want to come back to, and sometimes they’re just whatever thought has fired off in my brain while someone else is still talking.
And I’ve realised I actually get quite a lot out of going back through them.
So I thought: why not share them?
This isn’t going to be me pretending to be a theologian. It’s also not going to be a neat summary of the sermon every week. Think of it more like my notes from Sunday, expanded with my own thoughts, questions and occasional existential crisis attached.
I’m hoping that, firstly, writing these helps me properly process what I’ve heard rather than forgetting 90% of it by Monday morning.
But secondly, maybe sharing them helps someone else with their own faith journey too.
And if faith isn’t your thing, read it anyway lol. Might be exactly what you need.
This week, we’re in Mark 6.
When Jesus Goes Home
Mark 6 begins with Jesus returning to his hometown of Nazareth.
Which is already interesting when you think about who these people are.
They know Jesus.
Or at least, they think they know Jesus.
This is the town where Jesus grew up. These are people who would have known his family. Some of them presumably watched him grow from a child into a man. They knew Mary. They knew his brothers and sisters. They knew him as the carpenter.
Then Jesus comes back and begins teaching in the synagogue.
And they’re amazed.
“Where did this man get these things?”
That’s the question they ask.
They recognise that something extraordinary is happening. They hear his wisdom. They’ve heard about the miracles. Jesus has just come from places where incredible things are happening around him.
And yet something doesn’t compute.
Ralph made an interesting point about this: perhaps their vision of Jesus was simply too small.
They couldn’t separate the Jesus they remembered from the Jesus standing in front of them.
They had already decided who he was.
He’s the carpenter.
He’s Mary’s son.
We know his family.
We know where he came from.
So who does he think he is?
And I think there is something deeply uncomfortable in that because we can do exactly the same thing.
We Put God in a Box
Mark 6:3 ends with a surprisingly strong response:
“And they took offence at him.”
They weren’t merely confused by Jesus.
They were offended by him.
The Greek behind the idea of taking offence is where we get the idea of a scandal or stumbling block. Something about Jesus didn’t just challenge their understanding. It collided with it.
They had a box labelled JESUS.
Jesus had stopped fitting inside it.
And rather than making the box bigger, they rejected what was standing in front of them.
I think we do this constantly with God.
We domesticate God.
We turn him into something manageable. Something familiar. Something that fits comfortably alongside everything else we’ve already decided about life.
God can have Sunday morning.
God can help with my problems.
God can give me some guidance.
God can hopefully make me a slightly better person.
But then God disagrees with us.
And suddenly we’re offended.
Because somewhere along the way we stopped trying to become more like God and started trying to make God more like us.
We want a God who validates the life we’ve already chosen rather than one who might completely rearrange it.
That isn’t really surrender.
That’s asking God to become our consultant.
God Doesn’t Want to Improve Your Life
This is probably the part that hit me hardest.
Because Christianity isn’t ultimately about God helping me become a more successful version of myself.
God has no interest in merely helping me live my life better.
He wants my life.
Jesus says something brutally direct in Luke 14:
“Those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”
Not exactly inspirational-coffee-mug Christianity.
Everything.
And this is something I struggle with.
I overthink worldly things constantly.
Where is my money coming from?
Where is it going?
What am I building?
What’s the next move?
What happens if this goes wrong?
How do I make sure that doesn’t happen?
How do I control the outcome?
And control becomes the problem.
Because if I genuinely believe my life belongs to God, then at some point I have to actually let it belong to God.
My money is God’s.
My work is God’s.
My plans are God’s.
My future is God’s.
My successes are God’s.
My failures are God’s.
That doesn’t mean becoming irresponsible and sitting around waiting for money to fall from heaven. It means recognising that ultimately I am a steward, not the owner.
There’s a massive difference.
Maybe a better prayer is:
Take everything from me, as long as you’re glorified through it.
And I don’t particularly enjoy writing that sentence because there is a difference between saying it and actually meaning it.
We Prefer the God We Already Know
There’s another problem hiding inside Nazareth.
Familiarity.
We tend to settle for what we’ve always known rather than make room for whatever new thing God might be doing.
Nazareth knew Jesus as the carpenter.
They couldn’t comprehend Jesus as anything greater.
And I wonder how often churches do exactly the same thing.
“This is how we’ve always done it.”
“This is what church looks like.”
“This is how worship works.”
“This is who belongs here.”
“This is what God does.”
We construct an image of God from our previous experiences of him, then accidentally use that image to restrict what we believe he can do next.
The vision God has is so much greater than what we can envisage.
It is greater than our institutions.
Greater than our traditions.
Greater than our plans.
Greater than the darkness around us.
Greater than our sin.
Greater than whatever comfortable little box we’ve managed to squeeze him into.
Maybe part of faith is having the humility to admit that God might be considerably bigger than our understanding of God.
A Prophet Without Honour
Jesus responds to Nazareth:
“A prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”
What strikes me is that Jesus doesn’t throw a tantrum.
He isn’t offended because people haven’t recognised how important he is.
If anything, the passage feels sad.
He has come home carrying something extraordinary, and the people who should have welcomed him can’t see beyond the version of him they already know.
What should they have done?
Honoured him.
Welcomed him.
Made room for him.
Expected something.
Instead, Mark gives us one of the strangest verses in the passage:
“He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.”
Which is also an absolutely hilarious Biblical standard for “not many miracles.”
Oh, nothing much happened. He just healed a few sick people.
But compare Nazareth with everything happening around Jesus elsewhere.
Something is missing.
Mark tells us exactly what it is.
Faith.
God Will Not Force Himself on You
This is where the passage gets uncomfortable.
God will not dwell where God is not wanted.
That doesn’t mean God disappears from existence because someone doesn’t believe in him. It means God doesn’t force relationship upon us.
We have free will.
If you don’t want God, God isn’t going to kick the door down and force you to worship him.
You don’t want God?
Okay.
Deal with it.
(My words, not Ralph’s lol.)
But that principle becomes much more uncomfortable when applied to Christians.
Because it’s easy to point at the unbelieving world and say, “They don’t want God.”
What about us?
Do we?
Not theoretically.
Actually.
Do we want God when God disrupts our plans?
Do we want God when obedience costs us something?
Do we want God when he disagrees with us?
Do we want God when following him means giving something up?
Do we want God, or do we want the benefits we associate with having God nearby?
Those are two very different things.
Amazed by Jesus, Without Faith in Jesus
Mark 6:6 says:
“He was amazed at their lack of faith.”
Jesus was amazed.
That’s quite a sentence.
Especially because there is another moment in the Gospels where Jesus is amazed, except for the exact opposite reason.
A Roman centurion asks Jesus to heal his servant. Jesus offers to come to his home, but the centurion essentially says there is no need.
Just say the word.
That’s enough.
And Jesus marvels at his faith.
The contrast is brilliant.
Nazareth had every reason to believe.
They knew Jesus.
They heard him teach.
They were amazed by his wisdom.
They knew the stories.
And still they lacked faith.
The centurion simply believed that if Jesus spoke, it would happen.
Which leaves us with a pretty confronting possibility:
You can be impressed by Jesus and still have no faith in him.
You can enjoy the sermon.
You can like Christian ideas.
You can know Bible verses.
You can sing worship songs.
You can think Jesus was an extraordinary teacher.
You can even be amazed by him.
And still not actually trust him.
Faith isn’t admiration.
Faith requires something from us.
The Harvest Is Still Plentiful
This connects to another teaching of Jesus: the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.
There is so much to do.
And frankly, we don’t do enough.
I don’t mean that in the exhausting religious sense where everyone needs to add another seven church activities to their calendar.
I mean that if we genuinely believe what we say we believe, the scale of our vision should probably look different.
The vision is so much greater than what we can see.
God’s vision for a person is greater than their sin.
God’s vision for a church is greater than maintaining Sunday attendance.
God’s vision for a city is greater than keeping Christianity quietly contained inside church buildings.
But we have to remain hungry for it.
Because churches can lose that hunger.
Revelation’s warning to the church in Ephesus is confronting precisely because Ephesus wasn’t simply a useless church. It had works, endurance and discernment, yet Christ tells them they have abandoned their first love.
A church can remain busy while spiritually dying.
It can maintain programs.
Maintain buildings.
Maintain services.
Maintain traditions.
Maintain committees.
Maintain absolutely everything except the thing that gave it life in the first place.
And eventually you’re maintaining a corpse.
What Are We Actually Expecting?
Revival didn’t break out in Nazareth.
Not because Jesus wasn’t there.
Jesus was literally standing among them.
That’s what makes the story so strange.
They had the presence of Jesus and still missed what was possible.
Which makes me wonder what we actually expect when we gather as a church.
Do we expect God to do something?
Do we expect people to change?
Do we expect broken people to be restored?
Do we expect people who don’t know God to encounter him?
Do we expect our communities to change?
Do we expect revival?
Or do we expect a nice service that finishes roughly on time so everyone can go and get lunch?
Expectation doesn’t mean God becomes some cosmic vending machine where sufficient faith earns us miracles. That’s not the point.
But our hunger for God absolutely affects how much room we make for him.
How much of ourselves are we actually willing to surrender?
How much space have we made?
How much are we willing to risk?
How much do we actually want him?
Because maybe the question isn’t whether God is willing to move.
Maybe sometimes the question is whether we’ve left any room for him to move at all.
Stop Domesticating God
That’s probably my biggest takeaway from this Sunday.
Stop domesticating God.
Stop shrinking him until he comfortably fits inside the life we’ve already designed.
Stop treating Jesus like a familiar mate whose job is to agree with us.
Stop confusing admiration with faith.
Stop asking God to bless our plans without ever asking whether they’re his plans.
And stop assuming that because we’ve known God for years, we’ve somehow reached the boundaries of what God can do.
The people of Nazareth thought they knew Jesus.
That familiarity became the very thing preventing them from seeing him.
I don’t want that.
I don’t want a faith where Jesus becomes so familiar that I stop expecting anything from him.
I don’t want a church that talks endlessly about what God did while losing faith in what God can do.
And I definitely don’t want God reduced to a supporting character in the story of my own life.
The vision is bigger.
The harvest is bigger.
God is bigger.
And perhaps faith begins when we finally stop trying to make him smaller.