Updating our Picture of God: Part 4, God is More Internal

God is bigger than I used to picture; God is more loving than I used to picture; and God is more internal than I used to picture.

God is more internal

I admit that this third update is the most difficult one for me to describe. The best I can do is to say that I found God to be more internal than I did before.

There is no doubt that God is external to me. That was part of my old picture of God, and rightfully so. After all, God is much bigger than just me.

But as I reflect, my previous picture made God almost exclusively external to me. When I prayed, I always offered my prayer to a God who was “out there” somewhere. At religious services, I would join others in singing worship songs to God “out there.” When I offered myself in acts of service to those around me, I did so in an effort to please the God who was “out there.” My reverence was based on a holy fear of that external God.

What I needed was to update my picture of God to include the paradoxical other side of the mystery – that God also is found deep within each of us, as well as out there somewhere.

At first, I wondered if it was proper to look within myself to find God. I quickly realized that even the conservative Christian Biblical perspective of my formative years acknowledged that God is also to be found “within.”

In the first pages of the Bible, the creation account says humans were created “in the image of God.” In the New Testament, I read about the “indwelling” nature of God’s spirit in people, as well as the idea that Christ followers are not the “body of Christ” on Earth. What could these images possibly mean if not that God can be found within us?

Seldom-quoted verses from near the end of the Bible spell it out even more clearly ( 2 Peter 1:3-4):

“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires (emphasis added).”

We are described as participants in the divine nature. Certainly, this concept of participating in the divine nature is consistent with the idea that God can be found internally.

Yet I had always pictured God as out there somewhere. I needed to update picture of God to include the paradoxical other side of the mystery – that God also is found deep within as well.

For me at least, this required silence and contemplation. I need regular times of solitude and intention in order to find God deep within. When I carve out space for such contemplation, I find the divine dwells internally, deep within myself.

Once I updated my picture of God to be more internal, and not merely external, a whole new contemplative journey opened up before me.