Five Things I Got Completely Wrong About God

I have been doing this long enough now to look back at my earlier self with a lot of love and a fair bit of laughter. Because I got things wrong. Not small things either. Not minor theological quibbles. Things that sat right at the centre of how I understood God and therefore sat right at the centre of how I experienced Him, or more accurately, how I failed to.

Nobody handed me a list of lies and said, here, believe these. Most of what I got wrong came from well-meaning people, from the culture of the church environments I was in, from assumptions I absorbed without realising I was absorbing them. That is the thing about wrong theology: it rarely announces itself. It just quietly shapes the way you approach God until one day you notice you are exhausted and distant and not sure why.

I am writing this because I know I am not the only one who had to unlearn some of this. And because I wish someone had sat me down early and told me the truth.

So here it is. The honest version.

When I came to faith I had the very clear impression, mostly from the Christians around me, that change was supposed to be immediate and dramatic. You give your life to God, you become a new creation, and the old things fall away. And they do, some of them, and that is real and beautiful. But I was also still me. I still struggled with things I had always struggled with. I was still smoking. I was still making choices with my body that the church would have had a lot of opinions about. And because change was not arriving on the timetable everyone seemed to expect, I started to wonder if I had done something wrong, if my conversion had not taken properly, if I was somehow less Christian than the people around me who appeared to have it more together.

What I did not know then, and what I wish someone had told me, is that transformation is a journey, not an event. The new birth is an event. The transformation is a lifetime. Paul, writing to people who had been in the faith for years, was still talking about putting off the old self and putting on the new. Still. Years in. This was not a crisis of insufficient faith. This was the normal experience of a person being genuinely changed by a genuinely patient God.

Being transformed. Present tense. Ongoing. Not were transformed once and now you are done. The process is the point. And the thing that actually moved me forward was not the shame of Christians who wanted me to be further along faster. It was my own growing conviction, planted quietly by the Spirit, that I wanted something different. Personal conviction. Not performance driven by someone else's expectations. The Spirit knows how to get there. He does not need us to rush the person along with judgment. He needed me to feel safe enough to stay on the journey, and the shame nearly cost me that.

This one made me so sad for such a long time, and honestly it still makes me a little sad to think about it.

There was a strong sense in the environments I moved in early on that hearing from God was something that happened to the especially holy, the especially seasoned, the people at the front of the room with the microphones. Like there was a spiritual tier system and if you were not in the top tier yet, God was not really speaking to you. He was speaking to the mature ones, who would then pass the message down.

And so I sat in services thinking I was doing something wrong. I prayed and I listened and I did not hear a dramatic voice and I did not get a clear word and I thought: He will not talk to the likes of me. Not until I have cleaned myself up a bit more. Not until I have earned the kind of access the spiritually impressive people seem to have.

It is heartbreaking, looking back, because it was so completely unnecessary. And so completely wrong.

His sheep. All of them. Not the senior sheep. Not the sheep who have been in the flock the longest. The sheep. Jesus did not say His voice was for the spiritually qualified. He said His sheep hear it. The capacity to hear God is not a reward for good behaviour or a prize for spiritual achievement. It is part of what it means to belong to Him. A brand new believer, messy and uncertain and still figuring out what prayer even is, is just as much His sheep as someone who has been walking with Him for forty years.

What changes over time is not access. It is familiarity. You learn to recognise the voice better. You learn to tell the difference between His voice and your own hopes and fears. But the voice has been there from the beginning, speaking to you in the quiet, in Scripture, in the nudge you kept dismissing because you did not think you were important enough to receive it. You were. You always were.

Volunteer at church enough. Tithe faithfully enough. Show up to every prayer meeting. Say yes when you are asked. Give more. Serve more. And then, the implication was, the blessing would come. God would reward the effort. This was dressed up in Scripture and it sounded like faithfulness but underneath it was a transaction, and transactions are not what God is after.

I ran myself ragged for a season doing all the right things in all the right places and somewhere in the middle of it I realised I was not actually closer to God. I was busier in His name. That is not the same thing. I had turned my faith into a to-do list and God into someone I was trying to impress, and the harder I worked the more distant He felt, because the whole framework was wrong.

Grace. Gift. Not earned. The blessing of God is not a salary paid in return for religious labour. It flows from relationship, and relationship flows from being genuinely close to Him, not from being impressively busy for Him. Giving and serving and showing up are beautiful things when they come from a heart that is full and free. They become exhausting and resentment-building when they come from a heart that is trying to earn what is already freely given.

The shift for me was realising it was not about me at all. It never had been. It was about Him. His character. His generosity. His love that was there before I did a single thing for Him and would be there on the days I did nothing at all. That is not a licence for laziness. It is the only foundation that makes genuine service sustainable.

I used to prepare for prayer. I would think through what I was going to say, try to phrase things correctly, use the right terms, make sure I sounded like I knew what I was doing. I heard people pray in church, so eloquent and confident and theological, and I thought: that is what prayer is supposed to sound like. And when I opened my mouth and what came out was messy and repetitive and full of half-finished sentences, I assumed it did not really count.

It took me a long time to understand that God already knows my voice. My actual voice. The one that stumbles and circles back and says the same thing three times and sometimes just sits there not saying anything at all because I do not have words. He is not waiting for the polished version. He is not more moved by eloquence than by honesty. In fact I think the opposite is true.

The heart. That is what He is after. Not the performance of prayer but the reality of it. The most powerful prayer I have ever prayed was probably about four words long and not one of them was particularly impressive. But it was real. It was honest. It came from a place of genuine need and genuine trust and He met me there, not because of how I said it but because of what was behind it.

If you have been avoiding prayer because you do not know how to do it properly, I want to say this as directly as I can: you already know how. Talk to Him the way you would talk to someone who loves you and already knows everything about you. Because that is exactly what you are doing.

This one did the most damage. When things went wrong, and they did, I immediately went to: what did I do wrong? What is God trying to teach me? What lesson am I failing to learn quickly enough that He keeps sending me this difficulty? And the implication underneath all of that was that the hard thing was my fault, that God had engineered it, and that if I could just figure out the lesson fast enough it would stop.

That is not the God of Scripture. That is a version of God shaped more by a performance framework than by the character revealed in Jesus. Jesus did not go around engineering pain for people. He healed people, fed people, wept with people. When He encountered suffering He moved toward it with compassion, not with a clipboard noting which lessons had been learned.

We live in a broken world. Hard things happen in broken worlds not because God is designing a curriculum but because that is the nature of a world not yet fully restored. God redeems what happens. He works in it. He produces things through it that could not come any other way. But He is not the author of your pain and the hard season you are in is not a punishment for something you got wrong.

The moment I stopped asking "what lesson am I missing" and started asking "where are You in this and what are You doing" everything changed. The first question puts me at the centre, anxious and self-examining. The second question puts Him at the centre, and He is far more capable of being trusted there than I ever was.

I do not tell you any of this to be critical of the people or environments that shaped me early on. Most of them loved God and were doing their best with what they had been given. But I do tell you this because I know how much unnecessary pain these wrong beliefs caused me, and I do not want them to cause you the same.

You do not have to earn your way into His presence. You do not have to clean yourself up before He will speak to you. You do not have to pray beautifully or transform quickly or perform your way to blessing. You do not have to figure out what you did wrong every time something hard happens.

You just have to come. As you are, with the voice you have, at whatever stage of the journey you are on. He is already there. He has been there the whole time.