“My God” and “My Boots”: Our Problem with Possession

A friend of mine recently asked me to check out an article he had recently read that was concerning him. The gist of the title was that we shouldn’t say we have a personal relationship with God. Red flags and alarms immediately flared up in my mind and I started reading, looking for the heresy I was sure I’d find. The article ended up discussing ideas that I believe: We should never say “my God” and “my faith” as the things that we can bend and shape to fit our own wills. Instead, they are rock-solid truths that we either embrace or break ourselves on.

While the article was just written to shock people and make them curious, it still reminded me of the powerful differentiation we must make between our possession of things and our relationship with God. While I was thinking about how to answer my friend, I thought of a quote from C. S. Lewis. He is the author I almost always turn to when someone asks a profound question. In his book, The Screwtape Letters, he shares with us a glimpse into what it might look like if a demon were to give another demon advice about destroying souls. The book was intended to help us understand our enemy, and our own souls. Here is what he wrote about humanity’s issue with possession:

We [demons] teach [humans] not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun—the finely graded differences that run from "my boots" through"my dog","my servant","my wife","my father","my master" and "my country", to"my God". They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of "my boots", the"my" of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by"my Teddy-bear"... "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like". And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say ‘My God’ in a sense not really very different from"My boots", meaning "The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit—the God I have done a corner in".

What we can learn from this is that we must be careful in the way we mentally use words about possession. We must balance between absolute possessor and complete indifference. We must not treat things as if we have the right to destroy them whenever we feel like it, but we must not treat everything we own with carelessness.

Lewis goes on to explain how we can easily misuse the word “My”:

And all the time the joke is that the word "Mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either Our Father or the Enemy will say "Mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

What Do We Do with Possession?

My main point is this: When we say "my God" we should mean the God we made our everything, not the God we made up.

We Christians have the opportunity to realize that we have nothing, and yet possess everything. How can that work? The Apostle Paul makes this abundantly clear in his letter to a city in Greece:

...as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way… as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything. (2 Corinthians 6:4, 10 ESV)

The counterintuitive truth is this: If we try to possess everything, including God, and make it do what we want, we will end up with nothing. If we make God our central focus, everything, even eternal joy, is given to us.

Question: Do you find it hard to let go of your feelings of possession? What are some of the ways you could release those feelings?