On familiarity, shrunken expectations, and how we find our awe again.
There's a church somewhere — maybe you've heard of one — in a back street of nowhere. No fancy coffee bar. No lighting rig. No perfectly curated worship set. The chairs are mismatched, the carpet is old, and the pastor preaches in the same suit every Sunday. And yet, somehow, the miraculous seems to just… happen there. Healings. Broken lives made whole. People walking in as skeptics and walking out weeping, changed.
And then there's the big church. The one with the incredible team, the best production, the full house. The one where you can get a great latte on the way in. And everything is excellent. And God is good there too — don't get me wrong — but somehow the extraordinary feels… quieter.
Have you ever sat with that? Have you ever wondered why?
I have. And lately I've been circling around a story in Mark 6 that I think might hold a piece of the answer.
The Day Jesus Went Home
Jesus goes back to Nazareth. His hometown. The streets He grew up running. The neighbours who watched Him learn to walk. The synagogue where He first learned the Torah. He gets up to teach, and the crowd is amazed — genuinely, initially, amazed — and then something shifts. You can almost feel it in the room.
"Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?" And they took offence at him.
Mark 6:3
And there it is. We know him.
Not in a reverent way. Not in a "we have a long and meaningful relationship" kind of way. In the most deflating, ordinary, shrinking way possible. We know where he's from. We know his mum. We know his brothers. We watched him sand wood. He's just — he's just one of us.
And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marvelled because of their unbelief.
Mark 6:5–6
He marvelled at their unbelief. Jesus — who healed the blind, calmed storms, raised the dead — stood in his own hometown and was genuinely astonished at what wasn't happening. Not because his power had diminished. But because there was nowhere for it to land.
"Familiarity didn't kill the miracles. Familiarity quietly led them to decide who Jesus was — and once they'd decided, they'd stopped looking."
The Box We Build Without Knowing It
Here's the thing that gets me. The people of Nazareth weren't hostile at first. They weren't scoffers. They were, in their own way, religious people who knew the scriptures. They'd heard his teaching. They were amazed. But then something clicked over — some internal categorisation happened — and Jesus got filed away under known.
And I wonder if that happens to us too. Slowly. Quietly. Not with a dramatic falling away, but with a slow accumulation of familiarity.
We learn the stories. We memorise the theology. We can name the books of the Bible and recite the miracles. We know that God healed the blind man, that He parted the Red Sea, that He raised Lazarus. We know all of this. And somewhere in the knowing, we build a box — not intentionally, not maliciously — but a box. A box of what God does and doesn't do. What's His will and what isn't. What to expect and what to quietly stop expecting.
A deeper look — Psalms 78:41
There's a devastating little phrase tucked into Psalm 78 — the psalm that recounts Israel's history with God. It says of the wandering Israelites: "They limited the Holy One of Israel." The word for "limited" in the Hebrew carries the idea of putting up a boundary. A fence. And they did it not by outright rejection, but by reducing God to what they already understood of Him. They kept relating to yesterday's version of Him instead of trusting who He was now.
Compare the people of Nazareth to the woman in Mark 5 — the one who had been bleeding for twelve years. She didn't have a theology degree. She didn't know the right words. She just had desperate faith and a single thought: If I can just touch the hem of his garment… She didn't box Jesus into what he probably would or wouldn't do. She simply believed he could.
And Jesus stopped. In the middle of a crowd. And said — "Who touched me?" Not because he didn't know. But because something was different about this touch. It was a touch of expectation. Of genuine, desperate belief.
Or think about the Centurion — a Roman soldier, a Gentile, someone with no religious pedigree in the Jewish sense — who comes to Jesus and says simply: "Just say the word." That's it. Just the word. And Jesus, of all the miracles, all the encounters, turns to the crowd and says:
"Truly, I tell you, with no one in Israel have I found such faith."
Matthew 8:10
The outsider. The one who hadn't grown up in the synagogue. The one who didn't know the stories from childhood. He saw Jesus more clearly than the ones who had heard him their whole lives.
Knowledge Without Awe
I think there's a particular danger that comes with spiritual maturity. And I say this carefully, because growth and knowledge are good things. But knowledge can slowly replace wonder if we're not paying attention.
Think about the first time you really understood grace. Really understood it — not just as a doctrine but as a living reality. The first time you felt the weight of being fully known and fully loved anyway. Remember that feeling? The almost-overwhelming nature of it? The way it broke something open inside you?
Now — and I ask this gently — when did you last feel that same quality of awe about grace? Not about a new idea. About the same truth, just freshly encountered.
C.S. Lewis wrote something that has stayed with me — the idea that we are far too easily pleased. That we settle for mud pies in the slums when we have been offered a holiday at the sea. I think familiarity can do this to our faith. We settle for the comfortable version of God — the one who fits our categories, who confirms our theology, who meets us in the ways we've already mapped — rather than the God who is wildly, uncomfortably, magnificently more than our understanding of Him.
"The people of Nazareth weren't wrong about who Jesus was. They were just incomplete. And incomplete turned out to be enough to miss the miracle."
So How Do We Get the Awe Back?
This is the real question, isn't it. Not just why we lose it — but how we find it again.
Because I don't think the answer is ignorance. You can't unknow what you know. You can't unlearn the theology. And we shouldn't want to. The answer isn't less knowledge — it's a different posture in the presence of what we know.
I think about Moses. Moses, who had seen more of God's power than almost anyone — the burning bush, the plagues, the sea parting, manna falling from the sky, water from a rock — and yet in Exodus 33 he asks God something extraordinary. After all of that, he says:
"Show me your glory."
Exodus 33:18
Not — "I've seen enough." Not — "I think I have a pretty good picture of you now." But — more. Show me more. The intimacy Moses had with God didn't reduce his hunger for God. It deepened it. He'd been close enough to know how much he still didn't know.
And then there's Job. Job had an entire theology of God before the whirlwind. He had his arguments well-formed, his positions well-reasoned. And then God shows up — not to answer Job's questions, but to ask his own. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? And Job, who had been so certain of himself and his theology, is undone. Not broken — but opened. Remade into something larger.
"I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you." (Job 42:5)
Heard of you. Versus sees you. There's a whole world in that difference.
Five ways to widen the box
- Read scripture like you've never read it before. Pick a passage you think you know. Sit with it. Ask God: "What am I missing?" Not "what does this confirm" — but "what am I not seeing yet?"
2. Pray bold prayers again. Not just maintenance prayers. Wrestle-with-God prayers. Importunate, embarrassingly large, "I know this seems impossible but I'm asking anyway" prayers. The kind Jacob prayed when he said "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
3. Practice holy interruption. Before you explain away the unexpected — the "coincidence," the unlikely answer, the strange peace that arrived at the worst moment — pause. Sit with it. Let God be God before your theology kicks in.
4. Restore reverence alongside intimacy. God is Abba, Father — yes. He is also the One before whom Isaiah fell on his face. Before whom John fell as though dead. The nearness of God and the holiness of God are not in tension. They belong together.
5. Become a child again. Jesus said it plainly: unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom. Children ask obvious questions. Children are surprised by things adults have learned to dismiss. Children expect things that adults have decided are impossible.
Back to That Little Church
I keep coming back to that image of the small church in the back streets. And I think part of what's happening there — part of it, not all of it — is desperation. When you don't have the excellent programs and the polished production, when your church is small and your resources are thin, you tend to need God to show up in a way that comfortable churches sometimes forget to need.
Desperation is a posture of openness. It's hard to put God in a box when you're genuinely desperate. Boxes are a luxury of the comfortable.
And I think about the early church in Acts — house churches, persecuted, poorly resourced — and what they did when they were in trouble. They didn't form a committee. They gathered and prayed, and the building shook. (Acts 4:31) They expected God to do something. And He did.
We don't need to manufacture desperation. But we might need to ask ourselves whether our comfort has made us quietly stop expecting. Whether our knowledge has made us quietly start explaining. Whether the very goodness of our church experience has, slowly, made Jesus into something a little too manageable.
"We don't need a new God. We need a fresh revelation of the same God — the one who was always bigger than our categories."
Hebrews 13:8
Jesus Christ — the one who turned water into wine at a wedding, the one who told the sea to be still and it was, the one who called a dead man by name out of a tomb, the one who is seated right now at the right hand of the Father making intercession for you — is the same yesterday, today and forever.
He hasn't changed. He hasn't become ordinary. He hasn't become manageable. He is not a concept. He is not a comfort object. He is not a coping mechanism dressed up in religious language. He is the Son of God, alive, active, and still — still — capable of walking into your most impossible situation and doing something you didn't see coming.
The question is just whether we've quietly become Nazareth. Whether we've explained him away. Filed him under known. Built a neat little box of what He will and won't do.
And if we have — the good news is, He already knows. He's not offended. He's just waiting for us to look up and see Him again. Not the version we've constructed over years of familiarity. But Him. The actual, alive, magnificent, impossible Him.
Reflect & Respond
Where have you quietly stopped expecting God to move — in your health, your relationships, your circumstances? What have you explained away as "His will" that might actually be an invitation to ask?
When did you last feel genuine awe in God's presence — not just comfort, but the kind that makes you feel small in the best possible way? What was different then?
What would you ask for if you genuinely believed He could do anything? Write it down. Pray it. Don't explain it away first.
Let's Pray
Dear Father,
Help me see you, Like Job saw you, like Moses saw you. Let me see your magnitude, see your awesomeness. Open my eyes to see you, not just know you through what I read, think or feel. Help me to not take you for granted and to always walk in the shadow of your sheer magnitude. Open my Heart and Eyes to see you work in my life and in the life of others, of our Brothers and Sisters, of our church, Community and Home.
I thank you that you are God, Lord of Lords, King of Kings yet still close. Thank you that you are the same today as you were at the beginning of creation and will always be the same. Thank you for You.
In Jesus Name, Amen
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