Lloyd John Ogilvie, former pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Hollywood, California, in The Bush is Still Burning, relates the story of the time he asked one of his parishioners this penetrating question, “What do you feel is the deepest need in your life, and what can I do to help?”
His parishioner’s response was immediate and direct. “I need a new God!” he replied. “What I know about God I learned from my family, my friends and the culture in which I was raised. I’ve thought about God as a judge, or as a heavenly policeman. He has been up there or out there somewhere. And I couldn’t believe that He either knew or cared about me and my struggles.”
His answer accurately describes the way too many Christians in today’s world view God. They were taught and have come to think of God as an absentee landlord – aloof, distant, and nonexistent insofar as knowing about the daily problems they face or having genuine concern for them.
As a Christian minister I have spent my life trying to minister to people: leaders and followers, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, young and old, married and single. Most of them have two things in common: they believe in God, and yet they have persistent struggles in their lives.
I have watched some of the people I have served fold under the pressure during times of strain and struggle. Often the reason they caved under the pressures they were facing is that they needed a new God other than the one they had fashioned in their own mind – or at least a new and clearer view of the one true God.
We all have times of insecurity and self-doubt, times when we lack self-esteem, times when we feel so overloaded that we struggle, times when we do not know which direction to take, times when we have exhausted all of our resources. Anxiety is a stranger to none of us. Fears and frustrations track us like a birddog tracking a covey of quail.
We have all had and still have periods of discouragement, disappointment, and times of emotional letdown. Worry knocks on everybody’s front door. The trouble begins when we open the door and invite it inside. Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrows; it only robs today of its strength. To worry about what we can’t change is useless; to worry about what we can change is stupid.
Not all of our struggles are internal, however. We all face difficult situations at work and within our families. Progress is sometimes slow, circumstances vary, and conflict seems inevitable. Everyone at one time or another has to deal with impossible people. Each day presents us with a new edition of bad news, or with a difficult challenge we have not faced before.
The reason we have difficulty facing such things is often that we have a diminutive God of our own making. We need to believe in and personally experience the true God who knows and cares and intervenes and acts, who is present and powerful, who makes things happen!
We need to know that we do not have to face our struggles alone. The God of the Bible is the God of the past, the present, and the future. He is infinitely able to make good things come to pass. Knowing this offers no help unless we know Him personally.
That is why “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). He has promised to walk with us every mile of the way and to make us adequate for any hour.
I have known God personally for seventy-eight years, and I have never faced a need or problem in which He and His promises were not the answer I needed most. His answer has not always been the answer I initially would have preferred, but it was always the one He knew I needed. I have often failed Him, but He has never failed me.
Do you need a new God?
The Paper Pulpit 
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