The Things We Mistake for God

If faith has ever felt confusing, heavy, or disappointing, this might explain why

Most things in church were designed to inspire us, not replace God. Image: Canva Pro.

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As a Vicar, I served in a church where, for reasons nobody could quite explain, a stuffed swift was mounted in a frame in the chancel.

For clarity, it was an actual swift. Deceased.

Preserved, framed, and placed in one of the most visible parts of the church, where it sat with the kind of significance usually reserved for something holier than a taxidermy bird.

When I first noticed it, I assumed there must be an explanation. Something historical, perhaps. Some local story everyone knew. So I asked around.

Nobody seemed entirely sure.

People spoke about it in hushed and slightly reverent tones, as if the bird had somehow become part of the church’s spiritual furniture. It belonged there, apparently. It mattered.

You did not move the swift.

Eventually, I discovered the reason from a local historian. Many years earlier, the church tower had been struck by lightning. The swift had also been struck and killed. Since no people were harmed, the dead bird was stuffed and preserved as a sign that God had watched over the congregation.

I remember thinking that this might be reassuring for the church, but rather less so for Swiftkind.

So I explained to the church folk why it had originally been placed there, which seemed the sensible thing to do. Not long afterwards, mysteriously, it disappeared and was never seen again.

— • —

Even now, I still think about that poor bird.

Not because it was especially important, but because it revealed something about religious life. Somewhere along the way, a framed swift had gathered a kind of meaning it was never meant to carry. It had become more than a story or an object and now had significance, making it an indispensable part of worship.

Faith can work like that, too.

Not all at once. Just slowly, almost imperceptibly. Things gain importance. Practices harden into principles. Assumptions sit in the room so long that nobody questions them anymore. Before long, people begin treating them with a reverence reserved for God alone.

That is part of the problem.

Not everything we attach to faith actually reflects its heart.

Some of those things are helpful. Most of them started for good reasons. But when they begin to get in the way of encountering God, something changes. Faith becomes heavier, harder, and stranger than it was ever meant to be.

Jesus spent a surprising amount of time confronting exactly this kind of confusion. To be clear: He was not irreligious. He was not against prayer, worship, Scripture, or holiness. But he consistently challenged the things people mistook for the centre, especially when those things began to obscure the character of God rather than reveal it.

Looking back over the Gospels, I find myself returning to the same patterns again and again. These are seven things we often place at the centre that Jesus quietly moves back to the edges.

— • —

1. Rules

Rules are not the enemy. Every community needs shape, rhythm, and boundaries.

But too many rules can easily get in the way of actually encountering God.

One of the most consistent patterns in the Gospels is Jesus refusing to let rule-keeping become the measure of spiritual life. When challenged over the Sabbath, he does not dismiss the law. He reframes it. The sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the sabbath. In other words, the gift had become a burden.

That happens more easily than we like to admit.

What begins as guidance can become surveillance. People can become so busy asking whether they are doing everything correctly that they lose sight of the God they were trying to honour in the first place.

Jesus does not abolish the law. He draws out its heart. He insists that mercy, justice, and human flourishing are not distractions from obedience but part of what obedience was always for.

The problem is not the structure.

It is when structure starts demanding devotion.

— • —

2. Guilt

Guilt often feels spiritual because it is intense.

It can feel serious, honest, even holy. Many people have been taught, consciously or not, that the more guilty they feel, the more genuine their faith must be. But the New Testament makes a clearer distinction than that.

Conviction and condemnation are not the same thing.

One leads a person toward truth and change. The other pushes them further down into shame. One opens the possibility of repentance. The other freezes the soul in place.

Jesus is remarkably consistent about this. When the woman caught in adultery is dragged before him, he does not deny the seriousness of sin. But neither does he join the theatre of condemnation. He refuses to let public failure become a public spectacle. He sends her away, not excused, but uncrushed.

That matters.

Because many people do not confuse God with obvious cruelty. They confuse him with a voice that constantly accuses. A presence that is always disappointed, always watching, always ready to remind them of where they fall short.

But Jesus does not seem interested in producing that kind of spiritual dynamic. He convicts, yes. He calls people to turn, yes. But he restores rather than humiliates.

That is a very different thing.

— • —

3. Being a Good Person

This one is especially common because it sounds so reasonable.

For many people, faith merges with morality. The aim becomes being decent, kind, respectable, and basically harmless. God becomes little more than a divine extension of good citizenship.

The difficulty is that Jesus keeps challenging this idea.

The rich young ruler appears, by every visible measure, to be doing well. He is moral, serious, devout, and sincere. Yet Jesus exposes the gap between outward goodness and inward freedom. The man has kept the commandments, but something still holds him. His righteousness is real enough to impress others, but not deep enough to set him free.

The same reversal appears in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. One man arrives with an impressive spiritual résumé. The other arrives with nothing but a plea for mercy. Jesus says the second man goes home justified.

That is not because goodness does not matter. It is when goodness is treated as a self-contained project. It turns faith into a performance review.

God is not simply looking for polished people.

He is drawing human beings into life.

— • —

4. Certainty

Certainty is comforting. It offers clean edges in a world full of ambiguity. It makes faith feel manageable.

That is precisely why it can become so seductive.

Many people have been taught to think that doubt is failure, confusion is weakness, and unanswered questions are signs of spiritual decline. Yet the Gospels paint a more patient picture.

The disciples misunderstand Jesus repeatedly. Thomas doubts. Peter speaks too quickly and understands too little. Even those closest to Jesus are often bewildered by him.

He does not cast them off.

He responds differently to cynical resistance than he does to genuine uncertainty. Hardened hearts receive rebuke. Honest confusion receives time, presence, and sometimes even evidence. Thomas is invited to touch the wounds. The disciples come to understanding slowly, often only in retrospect.

That should help us.

Faith is not the same thing as having every question tidied away. Sometimes people mistake confidence for trust, and certitude for maturity. But those are not always the same thing. Often, a brittle certainty hides a surprisingly fragile soul.

Faith is not weakened by honest questions. It is often deepened by them.

— • —

5. Church Experience

This is one of the hardest confusions to untangle, because it is also one of the most understandable.

People meet God through communities, leaders, friendships, worship, and shared life. That is often how faith is first mediated. But when those communities fail, as they sometimes do, it becomes painfully easy to collapse God into the behaviour of the people who claim to represent him.

Scripture is much less romantic about religious communities than we usually are. Peter denies Jesus. The early church argues, excludes, stumbles, and needs repeated correction. Even in Acts, that most energetic portrait of Christian beginnings, tensions and failures are never far away.

It is not an embarrassment to the biblical story. It is part of the point.

The people of God fail repeatedly, while God remains stubbornly faithful. The Church is not presented as proof of human goodness. It is presented as a community continually dependent on grace.

That does not make church wounds less serious. Nor does it excuse spiritual abuse, arrogance, or cruelty in religious settings. But it does make one distinction essential: God’s character and human representation are not identical.

Sometimes the Church gets in the way of the Christ it is supposed to proclaim.

— • —

6. Control

Control often disguises itself as wisdom.

It promises safety, order, and clarity. It creates systems, expectations, and boundaries that make religious life feel secure. Yet Jesus regularly collides with precisely these structures, especially when they are used to exclude, burden, or diminish people.

In first-century Judaism, purity laws and social boundaries were bound up with identity and survival. They mattered. But Jesus keeps pushing them beyond the protective logic of control. He touches those considered unclean. He eats with the wrong people. He resists authority structures that use holiness to keep certain people in their place.

He relentlessly relocates the centre. Not around control, but around compassion.

Control is attractive because it feels strong.

But love is often braver.

— • —

7. Religious Identity

There is a difference between belonging to a religious organisation and being transformed by God.

Jesus makes that distinction painfully clear. Nicodemus has all the right credentials and still does not understand what Jesus is saying. The Samaritan woman, by contrast, is the least likely candidate and yet finds herself drawn into truth. Those on the edges often recognise something that the insiders miss.

The early Church faced the same question in Acts. Must Gentiles adopt the full visible identity markers of the old covenant in order to belong? Circumcision, food laws, inherited boundaries? The answer, after much struggle, is no. Belonging cannot be reduced to external badges. The leaders refuse to place additional burdens on those entering the community of faith.

That is a decisive moment.

It means that God’s people are no longer defined primarily by inherited markers, cultural codes, or visible belonging, but by grace and inward transformation. The old temptation, however, never fully disappears. We still confuse religious familiarity with spiritual depth. We still assume that looking the part is the same as becoming new.

It is not.

A person can be surrounded by religious language and remain untouched by the living God.

— • —

Which brings us back, in a strange way, to the stuffed swift.

It was only ever a bird, framed by a human story and slowly surrounded by unspoken significance. It may have meant something once. It may even have pointed, however awkwardly, to gratitude or memory. But it was never meant to carry reverence or become part of the sacred architecture of the church.

Neither are these other things.

This is not a rejection of religion. Rules, guilt, morality, certainty, church culture, control or religious identity. None of them are necessarily wrong; most of them are, in fact, needed. They just make terrible substitutes for God.

Perhaps that is why some people find themselves burnt out. Not because God is absent, but because too many other things have taken his place.

Sometimes, the most important step in faith is not learning something new.

It is seeing clearly what was never meant to sit in the centre.

Thank you for being a Sacred & Secular subscriber. I really appreciate it.

Paul.