What If Your Picture of God Is Broken?
You can know all the right things about God and still experience Him as distant or critical. Tim Long shares his personal journey through addiction and shame — and how he came to experience God differently.
Most Christians I know can tell you the right things about God. He is good. He is loving. He is near. And yet — for many of those same people — that knowledge lives entirely in the head. In the heart, God feels distant, critical, or absent altogether.
This gap between what we believe and what we actually experience is one of the most common and least talked-about struggles in the Christian life. And in this episode of Mental Health Matters for Christians, Christine and I get into why it happens — and what healing actually looks like.
I share my own story in this one more than I usually do. For years I struggled with pornography addiction, cycling through shame and effort and failure and more shame. I saw four different therapists. I tried accountability. I tried harder. None of it produced lasting change — because none of it touched the thing underneath: I didn’t actually believe, in my heart, that God was with me in my pain. I knew it. I didn’t feel it.
The therapist who finally helped me didn’t give me better strategies. He looked at me and said, “I believe you.” That moment — being seen, being known, not being judged — began to rewrite something deep. And slowly, I started to experience God differently. Not as a distant authority waiting for me to get it together, but as someone present, compassionate, and genuinely attuned to what I was carrying.
Christine brings her own story to this conversation. She grew up in a home marked by domestic violence, and that environment quietly shaped how she understood both men and God. Head knowledge couldn’t undo that. What did was a series of safe, loving relationships — people who showed her, over time, what trustworthy love actually looks like.
Together we explore:
- Why intellectual knowledge of God so rarely produces heart transformation on its own
- How shame and addiction are connected at the root — and why willpower alone can’t break the cycle
- What childhood experiences teach us about God before we ever open a Bible
- Why feeling seen, soothed, safe, and secure isn’t a therapeutic luxury — it’s a spiritual necessity
- How God uses healthy human relationships to reveal His true character
We also recommend two books that have shaped how we think about this: Knowing God by J.I. Packer and Experiencing God by Henry Blackaby — both worth returning to with fresh eyes after a conversation like this one.
The gap between knowing about God and actually experiencing Him is real. But it isn’t permanent. That’s what this episode is about.
