So, I think Miller tackles an issue with which we all struggle. It's the number one thing I struggle with in any attempt to share the gospel. The constant refrain I hear is always along the lines of "yeah, but Christianity is just a bunch of hypocrites."

I think Miller points out an idea to which I have always subscribed, and, interestingly enough, was also the topic of the sermon at church this past Sunday: religion sucks. Religion, as Miller says, is people actually believing that God is who they think He is. Or, in other words, religion is a man-made structure fitting the God idea into a manageable box to which we owe no allegiance and from which we can escape whenever we like. One of my favorite lines from Big Daddy Weave's song, Fields of Grace, is about when we find that place "where religion finally dies." In Romans, Paul quotes from Psalm 14, Psalm 53, and Ecclesiastes 7 when he says that there isn't a single righteous person on Earth, and he goes on to describe humanity in some pretty devastating terms. Paul is referring to our active refusal to seek to know God. Instead, we have a tendency to want to control God by making Him over into the image that pleases us most thereby abrogating both His sovereignty and our obligation to acknowledge our own sinfulness.

So, as Miller says, we create impostor Gods. We "change Jesus around in order to make Him more like ourselves," so that we don't have to face the awful and painful truth that is we who need to change. After all, if our interpretation of God says that what we're doing is OK, then we're OK. The issue is, of course, that none of us are ok. And so, we come to "worship a very small god, a god who exists simply to validate [our] identities." These little gods become the thing to which we cling. The irony, of course, is that God really is the one who validates our identities, but He does so on His terms and only with His grace.