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

by Allie Beth Stuckey

You aren’t meant to be enough, and neither am I.

we serve a God whose reign never ends, whose faithfulness never fails.

allow his power to be perfected in our weakness (1 Peter 5:7).

The values of the Christ follower aren’t authenticity and autonomy. They’re Christlikeness and obedience.

We have an objective standard of right and wrong found in the Bible, which means we’re not ruled by cultural trends or our feelings. God’s moral standards lead to peace. The cult’s lead to chaos and pain.

victims of motherhood rather than what we are: blessed beneficiaries of it.

Motherhood is the calling God has placed on our lives now, and we fulfill that calling for his glory, not for our own recognition.

The only lasting joy we can find in the chaos of parenthood is in the knowledge that even the most mundane, trying moments of motherhood are meant to bring us closer to Christ.

As we get older, we don’t automatically grow out of the tendency to believe things that aren’t true; the lies we believe just become more complex and consequential. Our culture encourages us to defer to what’s true for us, even if it contradicts what is true—scientifically, biblically, historically, and so on.

Because while our feelings change and mislead us, God’s Word never will.

“our truth” is usually Satan’s lie.

While it’s true that we have experiences and trauma that shape us, these things don’t equate to moral truths.

But in order to know whether these lessons we learned are truths worth building our lives on, we have to compare them to the standard of truth, God’s Word.

the Bible, which is inerrant, infallible, and sufficient for instruction.

Furthermore, many popular devotional authors and preachers today simply don’t teach the Bible. Instead, they preach what I call meology—or me-centered theology.

Rather than teaching what Scripture means and what it says about God, they highlight what Scripture means to us and what it says about us. Meology seeks to comfort at the expense of conviction. This results in readers who are both misinformed and uninformed about the nature of God.

But Job 1:21 tells us that God both gives and takes, and that either way, his name is to be praised.

Our “truth” is that we want God’s stuff. The truth is that God has given us something better than stuff—himself.

The definition of marriage as between a man and a woman is rooted in creation and reiterated in the New Testament as representative of Christ and the church and is therefore reflective of the Gospel.

God’s definition of marriage has both physical and spiritual significance—Gospel significance.

On earth he healed and he comforted, but he also called those he encountered to repentance (Matthew 4:17).

Jesus defined sin as not just what we do outwardly, but also as what we think and feel on the inside.

That means reading our Bibles is crucial in differentiating between our truth, which leads to confusion, and the truth, which leads to life, joy, and peace.

I love the ESV Study Bible. Start in the book of John. You can read it fast or slow, by chapter or verse by verse. Try to answer these questions when you read (see box): Praying for wisdom from the Holy Spirit, Christians use these questions to dig into what Scripture actually means, not just what it means to us:

What’s the historical context of this passage? How does this fit with Scripture as a whole? Why was this written? Who was the audience? What does this verse tell me about God? Is there a sin I should repent or an action I need to take?

You’re not going to understand everything. I don’t. That’s okay. Pray for wisdom—something God promises to give to those who ask (James 1:5).

Churches are to exist in local communities to encourage and instruct Christians in God’s Word, to meet the needs of fellow believers, and to equip members to share the Gospel and serve their neighbors and the “least of these.” The hours we spend in church should be defined by self-forgetfulness, not self-fulfillment.

Because without the Gospel as the driving force of all a church does, mission trips are just Instagram opportunities, and the children’s ministry is just glorified day care. The Gospel is the core reason churches exist, and it’s to define all that we as Christians do.

A good question to ask when listening to preachers is: Is he providing context and pointing us to Christ, or is he extracting verses to fit a predetermined message and pointing us to ourselves?

For example, a pastor who teaches the story of David and Goliath as a metaphor for Christians slaying their giants isn’t pointing his congregants to

God. We are not David in this story—Jesus is. He slayed the ultimate giant—sin and death—when he died on the cross for our transgress...

take every turn on the road of self-discovery to find truth? It’s available to us in God himself, whose wisdom Christians have access to through Christ.