What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God. Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God.

For this reason the gravest question before the Church is always God himself, and the most portentous fact about any man is not what he at a given time may say or do, but what he in his deep heart con­ceives God to be like. We tend by a secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God. Always the most reveal­ing thing about the Church is her idea of God. She can never escape the self-disclo­sure of her witness concerning God.

Were we able to extract from any man a complete answer to the question “what comes into your mind when you think about God?” we might predict with cer­tainty the spiritual future of that man. Were we able to know exactly what our most influential religious leaders think of God today, we might be able with some precision to foretell where the Church will stand tomorrow.

Without doubt, the mightiest thought the mind can entertain is the thought of God, and the weightiest word in any language is its word for God. That our idea of God correspond as nearly as possible to the true being of God is of immense importance to us. Compared with our actual thoughts about him, our creedal statements are of little conse­quence. Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe about God.

A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practi­cal Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb, the whole structure must sooner or later col­lapse. I believe there is scarcely an error in doctrine or a failure in applying Christian ethics that cannot be traced finally to imperfect and ignoble thoughts about God.

It is my opinion that the current Christian conception of God is so deca­dent as to be utterly beneath the dignity of the Most High God and actually to constitute for professed believers some­thing amounting to a moral calamity.

Among the sins to which the human heart is prone, hardly any other is more hateful to God than idolatry, for idolatry is at bottom a libel on his character. The idolatrous heart assumes that God is other than he is and substitutes for the true God one made after its own likeness.

A god begotten in the shadows of a fallen heart will quite naturally bear no true likeness of the true God. “You thought,” said the Lord to the wicked man in the psalm, “that I was altogether like you.” Surely this must be a serious affront to the Most High God.

Let us beware lest we in our pride accept the erroneous notion that idolatry consists only in kneeling before visible objects of adoration, and that civilised peoples are therefore free from it. The essence of idolatry is the entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of him.

The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear. So nec­essary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any mea­sure declines, the Church with her wor­ship and her moral standards declines along with it. The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.

Before the Christian Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology. She simply gets a wrong answer to the question “what is God like?” and goes on from there. Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her prac­tical working creed has become false. The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what he actu­ally is; and that is heresy of the most insid­ious and deadly kind.

The heaviest obligation lying upon the Christian Church today is to purify and elevate her concept of God until it is once more worthy of him. We do the greatest service to the next generation of Christians by passing on to them undimmed and undiminished that noble concept of God which we received from our Hebrew and Christian fathers of gen­erations past. This will prove of greater value to them than anything that art or science can devise.