You're Not Enough (and That's Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love

by Allie Beth Stuckey

This book is about good news. While the admission that self-love won’t satisfy us may feel counterintuitive (it’s certainly countercultural), it also gives us immense relief. We get to remove this crushing burden of trying to muster up a love inside us that just doesn’t hold up under the weight of life’s demands. We get to rely on a sovereign God to be our sufficiency, our confidence, our guide, and our giver of purpose.

1. You are enough. 2. You determine your truth. 3. You’re perfect the way you are. 4. You’re entitled to your dreams. 5. You can’t love others until you love yourself. You’ve heard these popular mantras propagated in the world of self-love, and while they sound inspirational on the surface, they lead only to confusion and desperation. Just like leaving some of our childhood dreams required us to confront hard truths about ourselves, accepting our limitations today will require us to take some tough-to-swallow pills. As we do, the mirage of self-sufficiency will fade, and along with it, the false hopes “you are enough” promises. Any time we let go of a false hope and replace it with a hope that’s real, we grow up a little bit. That’s what this book aims to do: to help us grow up by replacing the empty hope we have in ourselves with the satisfying hope we can place in God.

The first step to getting out of whatever unhealthy cycle you’re currently in is realizing just how not enough you are. That means letting go of the responsibility to be your own source of fulfillment—a responsibility that was never yours in the first place.

I’m not alone in my experience. For a generation obsessed with personal happiness and self-discovery, we’re startlingly unhappy and lost. Our rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide are staggering. Even the memes we make highlight the problems that ail us: social anxiety, insomnia, insecurity, a fear of “adulting.” At best, we’re discontent and confused. At worst, we’re totally hollow.

There’s a reason Jesus describes himself as Living Water and Bread of Life: he satisfies.

And aren’t these the questions everyone’s trying to answer: Who are we and why are we here? The world’s answer to these questions is “You.” You define your identity, your purpose, your value, your truth. Jesus’s answer is “Me.” He defines your identity, your purpose, your value, your truth.

When Jesus saves us, we are made new creations and children of God. As such, our goal is to glorify him in everything we do. We don’t have to wonder what it’s all about anymore. This is it. In exchange for the confusion and exhaustion that comes with trying to be enough, he gives us peace and relief. In exchange for superficial confidence and unsatisfying self-care, Jesus offers us steadfast assurance and trust in his faithfulness.

we see the destructive nature of the Cult of Self-Affirmation and the hollowness of authenticity and autonomy as supreme values. What happens when we place too much importance on “being yourself” is that we justify choices that hurt us and other people simply because it’s “true” to who we are. We convince ourselves that as long as our choice falls in line with who we claim to be, it’s good.

This is the how “morality” within the Cult of Self-Affirmation works: the only standard of right and wrong is how you feel. In the cult, there is nothing inherently good about fidelity or exclusive commitment to a single person. All that matters is that people are happy. This is why, for many people, the Cult of Self-Affirmation is much more appealing than normal religion. It encourages people to do what feels good and removes restrictions and responsibility to others. It values self-love over sacrifice, self-care over service, and self-interest over selflessness. It asks us to give up only that which doesn’t please us, and in exchange, it lends us a sense of righteousness.

This is why Christianity and the Cult of Self-Affirmation can’t coincide.

The Cult of Self-Affirmation wants its members to center their world around them and their feelings. So it makes moms feel like we are victims of motherhood rather than what we are: blessed beneficiaries of it.

God designed us all to need rest. But the mentality surrounding our breaks matters.

The Cult of Self-Affirmation encourages us to grab hold of our lives so we don’t “lose ourselves” to motherhood. But when we follow Christ, we are never at risk of “losing ourselves,” because our identity is eternally found in him.

of Scripture, we trust him. We trust him with unexpected pregnancies. We trust that he made us in the body he meant to make us in. We trust that he has called us and will equip us to be mothers. We trust that his commands are better and more trustworthy than our feelings. If we worship the god of self, we’ll sacrifice anything on its altar to satisfy its demands. And the god of self is relentlessly demanding, pushing us even to kill unborn children, damage our bodies, or reject the responsibility of being a mother.

Two of the most popular forms of meology today are found in the prosperity gospel and in what I call hipster Jesus Christianity. Prosperity teachers like Joel Osteen, Paula White, Kenneth Copeland, and others preach messages that guarantee God’s material and monetary gifts in exchange for faith.

The prosperity gospel exchanges God’s truth of promised hardship for our “truth” of entitlement to an easy life or overflowing bank account. It views God as a genie aroused by “naming it and claiming it.”

Neither the prosperity gospel nor Hipster Jesus Christianity have much to say about sin, because meology—like the Cult of Self-Affirmation—is concerned with temporary happiness rather than lasting holiness. Meology of any kind looks nothing like Jesus’s teachings.

The hours we spend in church should be defined by self-forgetfulness, not self-fulfillment.

Biblical theology gives us solid ground where meology offers sinking sand. Any pastor whose sermons glorify and coddle his congregants rather than point them to God, his glory, and his Gospel is doing an eternal disservice to his congregants, and it’s not a church we need to be a part of. A healthy, thriving church will base all they say and do on Scripture, and the good news of Jesus’s death and resurrection will be at the center of their sermons, ministries, and local and global mission work.

But our fight for the “least of these” needn’t be lumped in with the secular world’s definition of “social justice.” Biblical justice is both truthful and direct; it does not advocate for punishing entire groups based on perceptions of privilege. It does not demand that those whom one group views as more privileged hand over their earnings to the government to be redistributed as the government sees fit. When Jesus calls his followers to care for the “least of these,” that is an individual mandate, not a bureaucratic one (Matthew 25:40).

The idea that the God of the universe can be limited by nine man-made personality types is silly at best and blasphemous at worst. The Enneagram isn’t our source of knowledge about God; the Bible is. Introspection doesn’t take us down a path of sanctification. That’s a New Age idea, not a Christian one.

God calls each of us not to be our “best selves,” but to be filled with the fruit of the spirit, which, according to Galatians, is made up of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We are called to embody all of these qualities, not only the ones that come naturally to us.

followers of Jesus know our identity, value, and purpose without taking a personality test. We understand that each of us was made on purpose with purpose by a Creator who does nothing arbitrarily.

Unlike the authors of personality tests who don’t even know your name, God knew you before time began. He is intimately acquainted with your thoughts, motivations, desires, dreams, what makes you laugh, and what makes you anxious. He wrote every single one of your days before any of them came to be (Psalm 139), and he is with you in each of them. His love for you gives you the comfort you’ve been needlessly looking for in personality tests and your journey to “find yourself.”

they’re not valid if they’re not based in reality. Our feelings can be very much irrational. If followed, they can send us into a spiral of discouragement and despair. They can lead us to resent people who don’t deserve our resentment. They can fill our minds with fear that doesn’t need to be there. Worse yet, they can compel us to say or do something that we’ll regret and will hurt those around us.

My anger toward him was real in the moment, but it wasn’t valid, because he hadn’t done anything wrong. And because I followed my invalid anger, I lashed out and caused a fight where there didn’t need to be one. While all valid feelings are real, not all real feelings are valid. That means we can acknowledge our emotions without affirming them. The question of “Why?” can help us determine the difference between valid and invalid feelings.

The culture of self-love tells us our feelings are valid because deep down we’re perfect. Therefore, we can and should trust ourselves. But this is both irrational and unbiblical. As we’ve already established, we’re actually fundamentally flawed, which means our feelings are too.

But those who bow down to the God of Scripture know that our emotions don’t have the final say in our lives, God does. While our feelings change, God doesn’t. Every thought we have is to be held “captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). This doesn’t mean we pretend our emotions don’t exist; it means we assess them, examine them, and weigh them against reality and God’s Word. We surrender them to our compassionate, attentive Father, who hears us, sees us, and knows what we need before we ask (Matthew 6:8).

Confidence, therefore, is not something to be achieved. It’s a gift from God to accept. Unlike confidence derived from the opinions of boys, our female friends, and representations of the “ideal body” on social media, in movies, and in pornography, the gift of God’s confidence is permanent and real.

yes, of course we can exercise, lose weight, diet, change our hair and all the rest—but only if we do so in an effort to truly care for the bodies that God has given us. Only in order to glorify him, not in order to worship ourselves. Motivation matters.

Our identity, our significance, and our confidence come not from what we see in the mirror or what others say online, but from who God is and what he says we are.

He says that, in Jesus, you are a new creation. As a new creation, we operate as God calls us to operate: in humility, in love, in forgiveness, in self-control, in diligence, in joy, in mercy, and in justice. As a new creation, we pray for our enemies and bless those who persecute us. As a new creation, we are free from the pressure of fitting in or looking like the rest of the world wants us to look. Who we are meant to be, as followers of Jesus, are self-sacrificial disciples who take God at his Word and are empowered by his Spirit to live in peace and confidence in who Jesus is and what he’s done.

Isn’t that the message of our day? That our mere existence entitles us to the things we desire—whatever they may be? This is a symptom of the self-centeredness that characterizes our age. Because we serve ourselves, we believe we’re entitled to our wants. This is part of thinking we’re enough—the more we accomplish, the more self-fulfilled we’ll be.

Colossians 3:23 says, “Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for man.” We don’t have to have the perfect job to glorify God with our work. The work that honors him only has to meet three qualifications: it’s done well, it meets a real need, and it contributes to the good of those around us.

God, our authority, says work exists for his glory and our good. He also assures us that though our work won’t always be fruitful, he will always be faithful. He doesn’t promise that all of our dreams will come true or that our goals will be reached, but instead he commands us to obey him and to work with excellence in whatever realm we occupy. This may include our dream job, and it may not. Either way, we can have peace knowing we’re able to fulfill our aim of glorifying him no matter what role we fill.

Blessed rest indeed. Depending on our own self-esteem for healthy relationships or lifelong fulfillment is exhausting because it depends on a variety of factors that change every day: our job performance, our weight, our popularity, our mood, or our ability to think good things about ourselves. Instead, we choose self-forgetfulness, and we replace our self-love with God’s love, which is dependent on a factor that will never change: our salvation in Christ. Contradicting everything our culture tells us, it turns out the prerequisite for real love is self-forgetfulness, not self-love.

The call of those who follow this Jesus isn’t one of self-love or self-affirmation, but self-denial. Jesus asks his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him. He is not a genie waiting to fulfill our wishes. He is not a cheerleader standing on the sidelines of the game of life. He is Lord. The Great I Am. Our Creator, Sustainer, Reconciler, and Hope. He is a King to be worshipped and a Leader to be followed. He does not exist for us, but we exist for him. He is counter to what the world offers us in self-absorption and fleeting happiness, and he’s so much better.