Due to the nature of life in a fallen world, at some point nearly all of us experience enough relational wounding and deprivation to break our ‘truster’ and give us reason to suspect that self-reliance might be a better way to live. We learn how to hold most people at some distance from us emotionally, become quite conditional in our willingness to give to others to receive from others, and often settle for connections with others that would be better characterized as arrangements rather than relationships. In short, our truster gets broken and we become highly guarded, highly protected individuals. … Our truster is simply unable to respond to anyone, including God. What’s more, our broken truster has a way of distorting our perceptions. Instead of seeing ourselves as broken and in need of healing, we tend to see others as untrustworthy. And while there are plenty of untrustworthy people, that is not our real problem. Our difficulty lies in the kind of lens we see through that makes it almost impossible for us to trust at all. … Some see God as a “Policeman” who enforces the rules. Others see Him as an “Old Man in the Sky,” or as a “Santa Claus” figure. … We cannot trust or get close to a God who is small, petty, or judgmental. Unless we rediscover God as He truly is, there is little change of developing a close, trusting relationship with Him. … [F]ar too many Christians think of God primarily in judicial terms. Which is a serious problem, because having a life-giving relationship with a judicial God is almost impossible. Only when we discover how much God truly delights in being with us can we have any hope of trusting Him enough to join Him in the process of restoring our soul.
David Takle, Forming: A Work of Grace
Brave Ole World 