The first thing you need to do is get rid of the box with the picture of the puzzle that your religious leaders gave you to guide you. It is a picture for a very old puzzle of another god. It will not help you assemble your puzzle. You also need to ignore what your friends have done. Their puzzle is old, small, incomplete, and wrong. You will waste a lot of time assembling your puzzle if you try to create an accurate, meaningful picture of God if you model it after the picture that your friends and religious leaders have created.

So what you need to do is get rid of all the help others try to give you and resolve to let God alone help you assemble your puzzle. Your puzzle, after you work on it for a while is new, large, vibrant and multidimensional. It will never be fully complete but you will not care because you will be excited about the picture of God you already have and full of anticipation for the new aspects of God that are yet to come.

Begin without a picture to guide you. You would never do that with a material picture puzzle, but that is what you need to do when trying to understand God. Best you can, try to rid yourself of all your preconceptions of who God is, how he works, and what he expects from his people. Humbly admit that you don’t really know what God looks like. That might not seem important until you recognize that he wants to recreate us to conform to his image. That means that, as much as possible, the physical religious people we are must decrease as the spiritual person God wants us to be increases.

If you thought you had a picture of what he looked like, and if you listened to others to help create that image, you will do well to repent for trusting men instead of God for creating the image you have of him. Admit that, in addition to trusting men, you have been walking by sight and not by faith to assemble your understanding of God. Forgive those who have taught you wrongly.

And after you have done all that, quit looking to others for help. They will only confuse you. More importantly, you do not need anyone’s help to know God. God has made this very clear in Jeremiah’ prophecy about the New Covenant:

Jeremiah 31:31-34: “Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. 33 But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”

If you really trust God, you will accept that the time for the fulfillment of this prophecy has indeed come for you. It is not some future event that will occur for a bunch of people all at one time. It will happen one-by-one as the Spirit is poured out on individual believers. This is the promise of the New Covenant that was and is mediated by Christ to people who are ready to abandon the Old/First Covenant (i.e. the incomplete picture of God) in favor of a better covenant that allows people to know God directly.

Resolve to commit as much time as it takes to assemble your puzzle. The goal is to know God and be conformed to his likeness — no matter how long it takes. Then begin by looking for a few pieces that go together. A few here, and a few there. If you work at it, you will be surprised and excited about your spiritual growth.

Do not allow yourself to get frustrated for lack of a big picture of what you are trying to assemble. Be satisfied with the little sections that fit and trust that it will all come together eventually. And do not forget to look for the spiritual image that exists below the physical image — this is the key to understanding. Every time you find two or more pieces that fit, thank God. When you think you are beginning to see what a little section looks like, ask God to help you find the missing pieces. But keep searching.

If possible, find one or two others to work with you. In order to be useful in the task of assembling the picture, however, your coworkers must be willing to discard their previous picture of what God looks like and proceed in faith — not by sight. If your coworkers do not have the same attitude as you about the puzzle, he/she will slow you down and lead you astray.

Always keep in mind that God has promised that those who seek him will find him. So that is what you will do — even during the dry wilderness times. It is all part of the process by which God leads us through the wilderness of the literal Bible (i.e. the law) as he tests us to show how our hearts are inclined toward him. And those who are faithful are the ones who enter into the Promised Land where God writes his spiritual law on their hearts.