When I was a sophomore in high school, I volunteered was volun-told to participate in an audition for vocal soloists to be sent to state competition. In that era of my life, I was painfully introverted, especially when it comes to the performing arts or anything involving emotional expression. My voice—really my whole body—was shaking, and the sun couldn’t have burned me redder than the blood rushing to my face from embarrassment.
Needless to say, a lot has changed. I’m an extrovert who leads worship literally every week and speaks publicly from time to time. I’m sure they’d barely recognize who I’ve become.
If you’ve ever performed an audition, interviewed for a job, or even taken a test, you’ve probably felt it. The racing heart. The uncertain mind. The future hanging in the balance to be as intentionally melodramatic as possible.
The goal? Measure up. Meet the standard. Be enough.
If your social media algorithms are like mine, you probably keep hearing that word: “enough.” It’s especially noticeable if you see a lot of therapeutic or pop-psychologically themed posts. It’s this idea that you have, or are, everything you need. Life coaches, cartoonists, some psychologists—probably people from almost every walk of life—are asking us the question we are asking ourselves: “Am I enough?” A lot of them seem to think so.
In addition to the many authorities we listen to, Christians often listen to another authority pretty commonly: pastors. A few years ago, I was on a bit of a watch-every-popular-pastor binge when I came across Steven Furtick from Elevation Church. Like a lot of massive churches with massive bands, their music has been great for me. That being said, I’m always wary of what an influential (or any) church teaches whether by lecture, lyric, or liturgy.
When I’m listening to a person communicate, more than their words, I’m listening for their tone. I’m not big on prejudging, but his struck me as off—not always, but enough. Maybe a little too much self-help or life-coach to be theologically sound. Maybe not enough Christ-crucified in his teaching. Maybe too much motivational fluff. Maybe “prosperity lite”? Still not totally sure. And don’t get me wrong: for someone who is as annoyed by some of those stereotypes as I am, I definitely need a little motivational speaking myself sometimes.
I couldn’t quite place what was off, but then I saw the quote, and I heard it preached.
“Christ is in me; I am enough.”
Wait, what?
Something is off, and that might seem like a horrible thing to say about such a positive statement, but it’s really not.
If you know me well at all, you know I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. If something seems off about a statement, I like to assume that they don’t mean it the way I might be taking it. In other words, if the theology is a little “sus,” I try not to assume that it’s their theology but maybe the way it’s articulated. Or at least if it is bad theology, I try to assume it’s not malicious. This one, though? This one made me stop for a minute.
This “enoughness” conversation is super important (and not just because a megachurch pastor said something that had me raising an eyebrow in the way of the Vulcan, the myth, the legend, Mr. Spock—yes, my trekkie is showing). The question is out there, and people want an answer, preferably a “yes,” but we wouldn’t question it if there weren’t evidence that made us doubt. That is hard to reckon with in a cultural moment defined by self-actualization, in which it is borderline impossible to question the validity of anything, not to mention how impossible it is to exist on social media with anything less than a perfect image. After all, why would we want to be fully ourselves if there is something wrong with us or if we are deficient—not enough? We wouldn’t.
At the same time, there’s something insufficient about answering the very question, “Am I enough?” with a simple “no” because if that were the whole story, how could we be expected to live life? Without the physiological tools you need to grow as a person with a body, being born would be completely fruitless. Without the mental tools needed to learn or the emotional tools needed to connect with others, life in a world of complexity and full of other people would be impossible to live.
A simple yes or no answer to the question of whether or not we are enough is entirely insufficient. Let’s give the question, “Am I enough?” some due diligence.
(Disclaimer: This is not a post about Elevation Church or Steven Furtick. The quote is just a really good example of something we get very wrong about our theology as Christians in the modern world.)
When we break the statement down, we find that it’s actually made up of two statements: “Christ is in me” and “I am enough.” The presentation suggests an if-then relationship. It’s causal. One thing is true because of another thing. In other words, if Christ is in me, then I am enough.
Put clearly, this is a prime example of false equivalence—in other words, treating two very different things as the same. Here’s why.
For starters, the kinds of statements are mismatched. “Christ is in me” is a statement about where Christ is, his location or position in our lives. “I am enough” is an identity statement; it’s about who and what we are, a description of us.
Further, not only do the statements not match each other, they are not even about the same thing. We are taking something about Christ and using it to assert something about ourselves. “If Christ is… then I am…” just doesn’t work. Not logically. Not theologically. Not everything about him is automatically true of us when we are born again.
There are two elements of truth here, but they are, hilariously, “not enough.”
First, it is true that Christ is enough, and that in him we have everything we need. This is a very Psalm 23 way to take this statement—”The Lord is my shepherd; I lack nothing” (v. 1). Besides the fact that it is because of him we have access to anything good in life, even if it’s just the air we breathe, we have access to forgiveness, to the Spirit that empowers us to live well, to strength in our weaknesses.
Where this falls short is that Christ’s sufficiency is not our sufficiency. That is a false equivalence. The fact that he must be enough for us implies that we are indeed not enough. However, he is. Therefore, we should refrain from insisting that we are enough because he is enough, and instead, we should reframe the notion of sufficiency altogether.
Second, the presence of Christ in us and everything God has done for us would seem to indicate we are somehow “enough” to elicit his love. After all, according to scripture, he made us in his image, he made us good, we were chosen before the foundations of the world, and Christ died for us while we were still sinners. Surely, that speaks volumes about our enoughness.
Where this also falls short is that Christ’s love is not predicated by outside influence. He loves us because he is love—end of story. In fact, it is precisely because we threw away the good in us in favor of the pride of becoming “like God” that we need him to restore the kind of goodness and likeness to God that we were made for. He does that through Christ in us. It is an act of love that exists eternally among the persons of the triune God—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—when he fills us with himself to make us a new creation. It is his constant presence that keeps us growing in sanctification. Yet again, even being made new, that is his enoughness reviving us, not ours. Without him, we can’t do that. And unless he draws us to him, we cannot even move meaningfully toward him. Even with what good is left in us from the fall, it doesn’t make up for what we’ve lost.
We need Jesus, and if we need him, we are indeed not enough.
But we’re not just not enough.
When God made us, he made us able to do what he made us to do. He didn’t set life in front of us as an impossible task. He gave us everything we would need, not the least of which is his presence, to make something beautiful out of this world. If God is the one who makes, sustains, and defines reality, then it’s safe to assume he’s pretty realistic about the work he gives us.
But God also made us parts of a larger world in a vast universe, held together and directed by forces as general as gravity and as intimate as love. We can’t survive without food and safety. The planet can’t survive without the sun to warm it, and the solar system would fly off into God knows what other celestial body if it weren’t for the immense gravity of a supermassive black hole keeping us in our galactic lanes.
Not a single component of the universe is enough all by itself. It was all created together; and together, it thrives. When we are working together as God clearly intended, it is enough, and that means in some limited way, so are we because what God has given each of us is intended to contribute to the whole.
But things are not how God intended. Not anymore. We are broken, divisive, prideful souls, and our deficiency shows in the way we fail to love and succeed to destroy one another. When life goes wrong, loved ones die, friends leave, jobs end, finances crumble, tasks are incomplete, weddings need planning, new babies are born—no matter what need we have in good or bad times, someone is supposed to be there to fill the gap.
We were never supposed to be alone, and that’s why the world is full of different people. But so often, half of us choose to go it alone, and the other half are left abandoned. We cut each other off and deepen the deficits we already have, both in ourselves and in the community we are supposed to have. It further limits the limitations we already have. What was already not enough on its own, becomes less.
That’s why it’s so important to remember that God is the source of everything that made this world enough in the beginning, and it’s the same God who gave us his son Jesus to be enough for us.
When God redeemed us through Christ, he gave us everything we needed for salvation. That which we lack because we threw it away, we were given back.
When God gave us his Spirit, he gave us the ability to become like him once again by his love rather than by our pride and ambition. He also gave us the strength to endure and to even overcome the worst things we go through.
But it is still God’s enoughness that we are seeing. That doesn’t make it easier to live with two very real yet very different truths: that we are enough in some ways yet not enough in others. We should no more accept that we are entirely insufficient than we should let any sufficiency we have go to our heads.
The answer lies within accepting the limits we have. There is a sense in which we need to be enough, both for ourselves and others. But it isn’t that we suddenly become all-sufficient.
This was a trait that the delusional Laodicean church thought they had (Revelation 3:14-22). In their own richness, they estimated themselves to have everything they needed, when in reality, they had nothing of actual value in the kingdom of God and were advised by Christ himself to buy from him what they lacked.
God is able to see things both as they are and as they should be, and he is able to bridge the gap.
He sees the false riches, and he offers refined gold.
He sees the sin, and he supplies forgiveness.
He sees the weakness, and he supplies the strength.
He sees the loneliness, and he provides the love.
He sees the deficiency, and he supplies the need.
He is the only one that has literally everything we need for salvation and for life, and that’s okay.
Yes, God made us able to be enough for some things but not for everything, and in some ways but not all ways. That feels contradictory, but it isn’t. If he had made us all perfectly enough, we would all have less of a purpose in each other’s lives because we wouldn’t need each other, and we often don’t seek what we don’t need. That isn’t contradiction: it’s diversity.
Even love itself would be diminished in its meaning if we were all completely enough on our own. So, we have to be enough in limited ways to limited people who are also not truly enough for us, and that gives us opportunities to love in ways we never could otherwise.
So, if God didn’t make us to be enough, maybe we should stop trying to be.
Stop trying to fit everything into your schedule until you can’t focus or sleep. You weren’t made to do it all.
Stop trying to please everyone or make them like you. We were literally created the way we were to please God, and he would not have made someone he didn’t like.
Stop trying to be good at everything. Everyone has a place in this world.
Stop trying to earn grace. Jesus died and rose again to give you that.
Stop trying to force everyone else do and be everything you want. They are not God.
We may not be enough, but God never made us to be that.
Maybe, it’s not so much about being enough as being content.
We should accept people who aren’t enough, including ourselves, as though they are enough because the reality is that none of us will ever measure up, and we will all become disappointments to each other and rejects if we don’t. This entails an understanding of “being enough” as an attitude of contentment with reality as it is rather than the assumption that all on our own we lack nothing, or that other flawed human beings can be or give us everything we want, remembering that the only one who is all-sufficient is Christ.
Contentment doesn’t mean apathy or stagnation, though. True contentment simply appreciates what it has. It sees the deficit, but it does not give into discouragement. And from contentment, we grow and encourage each other to do the same because we are not burdened with the weight of hopelessness in a state of inadequacy. We can become more. We can change. We can be better. We can aspire to that, knowing that the God who supplies all our needs according to his riches in glory is faithful to complete the work he started in us.
Therefore, unless we keep our expectations based in a reality we accept with contentment, we will find ourselves abusing people, including ourselves, out of the misguided notion that they will live up to a standard only God can reach. That’s how grace and mercy find their place in our lives. If we fail to recognize that we all fall short, it will be impossible to give grace to those who let us down or receive it when we let others down.
In so doing, we will show each other Christ and offer each other a little more of him so that in our not-enoughness they will be filled with the one who is enough.
Are we enough? No, but maybe that’s the most beautiful thing about us. God made us that way.
We were never supposed to be “enough.” We were only ever supposed to be perfect in the presence of God, and without his presence, this is impossible. Thank God that he is near, and with him, all things are possible.
Michael William Nichols 