You Are Not Good Enough

"God saw all that He had made, and it was very good." Genesis 1.31 NIV

I keep catching myself with thoughts of being “good enough.” I find a surprising amount of my life filtered through this idea, this goal, this standard. I keep thinking, “If I achieve this kind of prayer life, this level of spiritual maturity, then I will be good enough.” Sometimes I’ll rephrase it: “If I can do X, then I will be ready for Y.”  Most often I’m trying to be “good enough” or “ready” for God to grant me sobriety or mental health, or maybe to send me a family or a better job. But that means my entire faith is just a means to an end. I am not working toward being closer to God for the purpose of achieving intimacy with Him. I’m working toward being close to God so I’ll be “prepared” or “ready” or “good enough” for something or someone else.

I am unable to enjoy life or God or food or people or sex for their own sake. Those things become a means to an end, a channel for the thing I really want most: satisfaction, health, status, security, intimacy. But this thinking will lead me nowhere. Assuming I somehow find the things I’m working toward, it will never fill the hollow spot in my soul. And once I realize this, I will be forced to set my sights on something or someone else, endlessly searching for “good enough.”

But there’s a hidden truth about “good enough.” It’s not a secret or information you have to search all that hard to find, but it’s a truth that our world has worked very hard to conceal.

The truth is that there is no “enough.” There never was.

God didn’t look at man and woman at the point of creation and say, “You are good enough.” To be enough is to just be adequate. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never looked at someone I love with a contented smile and said, “You are adequate.”

In the moment of creation, God looked at man and woman and saw the epoch of His infinitely intricate and beautiful work of art that is our universe. Completely satisfied in His desire, He looked at us with full knowledge of our utter brokenness, with a complete understanding of what His only Son would endure at our hands, and He said, “You are good, my child.”

Let us take a moment to pray this together: Lord Jesus, we spend too many hours striking deals and making promises with you and ourselves in an effort be good enough. You named us good. You suffered, died, and rose again to ensure that goodness. Reshape the structures in our minds that tell us we must strive for the moving target of being good enough so we may rest in the goodness you bought for every one of us.

Contributor: Jordan N.