I’ve written about this topic before, more than once. Just stating upfront that I am aware that this is not the first time I’ve brought it up in our conversations. I didn’t forget and you can stop trying to spell d-e-m-e-n-t-i-a in your head. I don’t have it. But I do have a passion for this particular subject and as long as it is poisoning the Church, I’ll keep talking about it.

For most of my life I believed I was not enough. And by most of my life I mean since I was a little girl lost in a family of dysfunction, feeling invisible and voiceless. Not enough to stop the chaos around me. I grew up and left that home, but ‘not enough’ left with me and it about did me in.

The fear/belief/suspicion that we are not enough is a weapon the enemy is using against the Church quite effectively. It breeds comparison in us. It brings depression and anxiety, striving, and self-hatred. But it is not being used in the way most of us would think.

It is truth he is using, not a lie.

I have yet to find one thing in the Word of God that tells me that I am enough. Instead, He paints picture after picture of just the opposite.

We’ll start with the loaves and the fish. The little boy with a small lunch, among 5,000 hungry people, offered what he had. It was clearly not enough.

The poor widow who put her two very small copper coins in the offering plate. Not enough to help anyone, but it was all she had.

The crippled man at the pool of Bethesda. He didn’t have enough strength to get himself into the pool and get his healing.

The disciples with not enough faith in the storm.

The countless times that the Israelites did not have enough of anything to win their battles.

And the most glaring not enough of them all – our severe lack of enough righteousness to save ourselves.

There’s more, but I think you get my point. We are not enough. It’s the truth, but it’s the lie the enemy puts behind it that makes it a weapon against us.

We should be enough.

Just a little twist of the truth and you have a sharp weapon to use against the psyche of God’s people. Something that will keep them focused on themselves for generations. A should that keeps them chasing what they will never catch.

Can we begin to see it from a different perspective, and turn that weapon around?

What if my enough would keep someone from seeing their need for Jesus? If I’m enough for my husband, why will he go to God to be filled? If I’m enough for my children, why would they learn to depend on God? What if I let go of the need to be enough, because I know the truth?

Has it occurred to us that the enemy’s scheme is to make everything about us? To keep us focused on our smallness, our failures, our weaknesses (or, our strengths, our victories and successes). Either way, it turns us inward. Really, that’s what this “not enough” thing is about, don’t you think? Us. But if we would pick up the Word of God and read it, we would find the truth and the truth would set us free.

We are not enough. God is. That’s the whole point. God is our deliverer, our healer, our all the things that we are not. That’s why we must set our eyes on Him. Set our hearts on Him. Set our faith on Him. And stop trying to be enough so that we are justified in setting all of that on ourselves.

Let’s spare ourselves the self-help books and the memes that show us whispering to ourselves “you are enough”. Let’s refuse to listen to those who, with the best of intentions, keep trying to convince us that we are enough.

Instead, let’s repent. Turn around. Go the other way. The way that glorifies God for being more than enough, for having strength that is perfected in our weaknesses, for being not just everything we need, but everything those around us need.

Let’s repent of giving God glory and then beating ourselves up. Of singing His praises and then silently screaming our self-loathing at ourselves. It’s a grievous thing we are doing when we say He is our all in all, but walk around feeling shame that we can’t be the all in all for others. It is making us sick – physically, emotionally and spiritually sick.

After many years in the Word of God, walking with Him, learning Him, I no longer feel the need to be enough. My God is enough and this is about Him. My family needs Him, not me, to be enough. My friends, my community, the lost around me – they all need Him to be enough.

Christianity is about Christ. We will not be healed until we stop making it about us.

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Colossians 3:1-4

^{John 6; Mark 12; John 5; Mark 4;}