This was the intriquing title of a book which was published in 1967.  The editor, James Mitchell, collected a number of essays, written by well-known personalities, which described the sort of God the authors were willing to believe in.

More recently, the Rev. Dr. Clay Smith, the lead pastor of Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter, has written a piece with the same title.  It demonstrates well the gulf between ‘the God I want’ and ‘the God I need’; between a God of human fabrication and the God of divine revelation.

Clay Smith writes:

I want a God who will help me win the lottery…

I want a God who will fix my problems….

I want a God who will make me smart…

I want a God who humbles self-centered people…

I want a God who agrees with me theologically…

I want a God who punishes the wicked a little faster…

I want a God who never disciplines me or teaches me a hard lesson…

I want a God who will understand how hard it is to be me…

I want a God who never convicts me of sin…

But (continues Clay Smith):

Funny, as I write each line about the God I want, the personality of God shrinks. This God I want is no longer the great “I AM;” he is an idol of projection. I am projecting the darker corners of my soul. This God I want would not be the God mighty enough to save me.

When God told his people “I am the LORD your God; you shall have no other gods before me,” I think he was saying, “You don’t get to define me; I define myself.” When you begin to think you get to tell God who he is, you are really creating an idol, an idol you will find in the mirror. Every idol ever made, whether in stone or in our hearts, reflects a God we want, not the God who is real. How you think about God matters. He decides who he is, not you.

My hunch is even if I got the God I wanted, it wouldn’t work. That God would be too small, too narrow, too bound up with my own flawed understandings. The God I want is not the God I need.