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Let Me Tell You About “My” God

Let Me Tell You About “My” God

Last updated on: August 17, 2026 at 12:43 pm by Christy Thomas

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Let Me Tell You About “My” God 2026-08-17T12:43:47-05:00 Christy Thomas

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Any time we reduce God to being “my” god, our presumed ownership of the Holy One turns us into idolaters.

a "my" god t-shirt seen at a nearby mall

Virtue signaling with the “my” god t-shirt

I saw this t-shirt, with the words “Let me tell you about my God” stenciled on the back, at a kiosk in a nearby mall where my husband and I, along with the rest of the geriatric crowd, take our morning walks to avoid the extreme summer heat.

It slapped me in the face. Why? Because it perfectly sums up the worst of the human condition.

A number of years ago, I heard a series of lectures by Barbara Brown Taylor. I went because I wanted to hear and learn techniques from a woman proclaimed one of the most effective preachers in the English-speaking world. I went away very uncomfortable with the state of my own soul.

In one of the first lectures, she reminded us that while Christians use the Genesis 3 passage as the template for life patterns that rebel against God, Jews use the story in Exodus 32. There we read of the Israelites on Mount Sinai as they wait for Moses’ return from his forty days and forty nights in the presence of the Lord.

According to the Exodus narrative, this beleaguered group of slaves has just experienced great deliverance—they were free for the first time in their lives. None of them has ever lived one minute in freedom before. Suddenly, no one tells them what to do, where to go, or how to use their time.

They are alone in the wilderness, in the dry place, following a man called Moses who has proclaimed an unseen and mighty God over whom they had no power and no influence. Everything is strange and different. Worse, this man, Moses, then disappears somewhere in the clefts of the mountain.

No one hears from him for days. Fear takes over. The people have no structure, no grounding in the ways of freedom. This God that Moses demanded they follow was very much NOT something they could call “my” God.

So what shall they do? They turn to a second-fiddle man, Moses’s brother Aaron, elevate him to a leadership position where he’s unaccountable to that mighty unseen God, and prepare to do, without thinking, whatever he asks. Freedom is too hard—best to find a person to take charge, give orders, tell them what to do… as a friend of mine put it, “We all want to return to Egypt.”

Aaron happily steps into leadership, tells his eager followers to strip their wives and children of their gold earrings, mostly taken from the Egyptians during their escape, and offer these treasures to him. The gold quickly gathered; Aaron has it all melted down. Voila! The golden calf emerges!

Now they have their god, made in a familiar, friendly image, and everyone proclaims that this is the god that brought them out of Egypt. In other words, they have created their very own “my” god.

A shiny metal God who will give us what we want

As Rev. Taylor pegged it, “A shiny little metal god who will give us what we want.”

And so, the worst of the human condition demands, “If You really love me, You will prove Your love by becoming a shiny little metal God whom I control and who gives me whatever I want, especially comfort, with no need to change, to mature, to look carefully at myself and what I am doing.”

In other words, God has now become “my” god, one we can boldly claim ownership over by a slogan slapped on our backs.

In even better terminology, we prefer to become idolaters—it is so much easier, far more comfortable.

Yes, idolatry is an old-fashioned word. None of us thinks we worship idols, of course. That’s for a primitive society.

But we do indeed worship idols. How?

Any time we work to reduce God to some controllable idea or act or phenomenon, we’ve worshipped an idol.
Any time we ask God to prove God’s love by demanding that we get what we want, we have succumbed to idol worship.
Any time we reduce God to being “my god,” our presumed ownership of the Holy One turns us into idolaters.
Any time we think we can define God by insisting we know exactly what the Bible says and means about the nature of the Holy One, we have become idolaters.

Let’s face it: at heart, most of us do want a shiny metal “god” whom we can cage and control. And thus people buy those T-shirts, proudly virtue signaling by proclaiming their ownership of the caged “god.”

My "god": the golden calf

Image generated by OpenAI ChatGPT

How’s your idol worship shaping up these days?

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About The Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas

The Thoughtful Pastor is one woman’s way of making sense of the world, particularly the intersecting worlds of religion, business, and politics. I think, question, and connect odd dots. I find delight in ambiguity and mystery, and find little tolerance for those who call themselves people of God and then use that self-description as a way to abuse others. You can read more about the author here.

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