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

by Allie Beth Stuckey

As we get older, we’re supposed to tell ourselves hard things. We’re supposed to grow up, assess our strengths, do things we don’t want to do, and realize we’re not as special as we think we are. We’re supposed to get out of our houses, get over ourselves, and create a life that’s productive and meaningful. The confidence we have in ourselves should change from juvenile blind adoration to grounded awareness.

We’ve spent our lives prioritizing ourselves, our wants, and our happiness, and, guess what. We’re still not happy. So how in the world could it be that self-love is the answer to our problems when there’s no evidence whatsoever that we’ve ever stopped loving ourselves?

The idea that you’re enough is central to the culture of self-love. The logic goes: because you are complete, perfect, and sufficient on your own, you don’t need anyone else to love you to be content. All you need is yourself.

But here’s the thing: our sufficiency isn’t the answer to insecurity, and self-love isn’t the antidote to our feelings of self-loathing. Why? Because the self can’t be both the problem and the solution. If our problem is that we’re insecure or unfulfilled, we’re not going be able to find the antidote to these things in the same place our insecurities and fear are coming from.

The self isn’t enough—period. The answer to the purposelessness and hollowness we feel is found not in us but outside of us. The solutions to our problems and pain aren’t found in self-love, but in God’s love. The God who created us, who created the universe, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, is the one who provides us with the purpose and satisfaction we’re seeking. While self-love depletes, God’s love for us doesn’t.

Self-love is superficial and temporary. God’s love is profound and eternal. And his love compels us to something much better than self-obsession: self-sacrifice. While the thought of putting others before ourselves is considered blasphemy in the culture of self-love, it’s the joyous mode of operation for those who follow God. God’s love frees and empowers us to consider and serve other people before and instead of ourselves.

The first myth was that you are enough. My counter was this: you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, and that’s okay, because God is. I highlighted this passage from Ephesians: “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us . . . made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.” We are corrupted, helpless, and spiritually dead on our own, but God, through his power, saves us, sanctifies us, and makes us alive in Christ. We are less than “not enough”; on our own, we’re nothing. But God.

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.

“Being Diagnosed with a Chronic Illness Taught Me That Health Isn’t a Meritocracy.” The author wrote: “Women have been conditioned to believe both that our bodies are our self-worth and that our bodies are under our own control. As wellness culture would have us believe, health is a meritocracy in which ‘fueling’ your body and ‘detoxing’ and holding crystals can rocket you to the top.” Her debilitating fibromyalgia showed her that no amount of self-care could completely heal her, and that the road to coping with her sickness was going to mean dependence on others rather than self-sufficiency.

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.

Self-love is unreliable, conditional, and limited. Chasing after it always brings us to a dead end.

Our desperation is exacerbated because of a reason we’ve already named: the self can’t be both our problem and our solution. If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can’t also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment. That means loving ourselves more doesn’t satiate us. We need something else—something bigger. Simply, we need Jesus. There’s a reason Jesus describes himself as Living Water and Bread of Life: he satisfies. The searching for peace and for purpose stops in him alone. He created us; therefore only he can tell us who we are and why we’re here. 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.

But when Jesus is on the throne of our lives, he has the authority to give us our identity and purpose, and in him, these things never change.

If we were enough, we wouldn’t need Jesus to do these things for us, but we do. Without him we’re hopeless, purposeless, and dead in our sin.

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. That’s why the fact that you’re not enough is not just okay—it’s great. You aren’t meant to be enough, and neither am I.

We’re small, frail, and finite, which means we don’t have what it takes to love ourselves to wholeness. And we have exactly one comfort: that we serve a God whose reign never ends, whose faithfulness never fails.

The cult promises peace and salvation if you adhere to its doctrines and assures destruction if you don’t. Once you’re in, you must abide by its rules. Otherwise, you’re out. In the cult, the god is self, “doing you” is the standard of righteousness, and “following your heart” is the way to salvation. The two key tenets of the cult are Authenticity and Autonomy—being true to yourself and maintaining control over your life. Anyone or anything that attempts to limit who you believe you are is immediately categorized as “toxic” and “judgmental” and is thus pushed to the side.

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.

Mainstream thought dictates that biology has nothing to do with how we identify, going against basic science and millennia of human history that proves the contrary. But when the god of self rules, none of these facts matter. All that matters is what we want.

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

There’s some truth in these assurances. We do need a break. It would be nice for our husbands to acknowledge our hard work. We do have roles in addition to being a mom. But the deceptive premise in each of them is that we’re entitled to a tangible reward for simply doing our job. In that way, motherhood is subtly depicted as something that happened to us rather than something we chose and that God graciously gave us.

The Cult of Self-Affirmation wants its members to center their world around them and their feelings.

When our reason behind our rest is to ensure better service to the Lord and to others, we don’t have to worry whether or not taking needed breaks is self-centered. It’s not.

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. Who we “really are” isn’t some mystery we need to solve or path we need to follow. Our sole aim is to honor God by gratefully executing the tasks he’s put before us with his help.

They’re all matters of worship. If we worship the God 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.

The cult will have us constantly fighting for control and vying for the worship we think we deserve. God asks us to surrender control and to redirect the worship we’d like to give to ourselves to him. This is great news. The yoke of the god of self is difficult and its burden heavy, but God’s yoke is easy and his burden light. What a relief to know we don’t have to expend our precious energy serving ourselves. We make terrible, unworthy gods. And because we make unworthy gods, we do one thing really poorly, no matter how hard we try, and that is to come up with our own truth.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues for the existence of a universal moral law that all human beings, regardless of culture, inherently aim to follow. Without it, we have no right to feel outrage toward horrors like slavery or the Holocaust. But we do. That’s because there is a sense of morality embedded in each of us, given to us by a Moral Lawgiver. Without a Moral Lawgiver, there is no moral law. With no transcendent moral law or lawgiver, we are all our own gods, and no one can say who’s right and who’s wrong. This puts our lives into a tailspin of chaos.

Here’s what we need to recognize: “our truth” is usually Satan’s lie. What feels true to us in the moment may not be true, good, or trustworthy at all. While it’s true that we have experiences and trauma that shape us, these things don’t equate to moral truths. They just happened. And maybe they were significant, and maybe they taught us something. 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.

We are not enough to decide the truth, but God is.

Thankfully, as Christians, we don’t have to guess at God’s definitions of right and wrong. He tells us in the Bible, which is inerrant, infallible, and sufficient for instruction.

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. The consequence is people who are unsure of the truth he offers.

While God may choose to bless us with health and wealth for his glory, he doesn’t guarantee them. Instead, he assures us that we will suffer for his sake. He promises persecution, not promotions (Matthew 10:16).

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.” 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.

This is the danger of meology: it misses the truth. And when we miss the truth of Christianity we lose everything: salvation, joy, sanctification, intimacy with God. Our very souls are at stake when we exchange God’s truth for ours.

Of course the Bible is clear on the issue of sexuality. 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. It’s not just based on a couple of verses some people have deemed irrelevant. God’s definition of marriage has both physical and spiritual significance—Gospel significance.

It’s impossible to simultaneously submit to the God of Scripture and the god of self.

Jesus defined sin as not just what we do outwardly, but also as what we think and feel on the inside. He said it’s not enough that we don’t commit adultery; we also shouldn’t lust. He said it’s not enough not to kill someone; we shouldn’t even hate them. Jesus raised the standard of goodness to another level, insisting that we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us rather than retaliate. It’s a righteousness only possible through him.

Our aim in studying the Bible is to know God. In learning his character and his truth, our view of ourselves and of the world are consequently shaped. Scripture provides a firm, unchangeable foundation for our lives that secular self-help and “Christian” meology don’t and can’t. 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.

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). Trust that you are going to the sole source of truth.

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.

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 transgressions and rose again three days later. As Sinclair Ferguson states in his book, Preaching the Gospel from the New Testament: “Jesus is the true and better David, whose victory becomes his people’s victory, though they never lifted a stone to accomplish it themselves.” And how much better a message is that—that we’re not our own heroes, but God is? This is the privilege of being a Christian: shaking off the pressure of being our own gods and instead relying on the Savior, who is steadfast and sure.

Our truth is both elusive and unsatisfying. God’s truth is present and sustaining.

The Holy Spirit guides us, convicts us, molds us, and moves us—though usually not all at once. A person led by Christ should be on a trajectory toward truth, which means we don’t know everything now that we’ll know in a year. There will be sins we’re unaware of today that we may be repenting next week. There is selfishness we’re clinging to today that we will be asked to relinquish tomorrow.

Cancel Culture is the perfect depiction of how the secular world does morality without absolute truth: the boundaries of righteousness are ever changing based on the latest social whim. Because there’s no objective standard of right and wrong, people’s feelings are all we can base morality on. That means the group with the most cultural sway is typically in charge. What was acceptable yesterday, then, won’t be acceptable tomorrow, and so on.

The feminist mantra of the Kavanaugh saga was: “believe all women.” Not listen to all women. Not pay attention to their stories. Not take them seriously. But believe them. The standard shifted from hearing women’s accounts to fully accepting them without question, as the outrage toward toxic masculinity, coupled with a fear of a conservative justice, dictated. No matter where you stood on the Kavanaugh debacle, it’s easy to see that that kind of mentality isn’t based on truth, but on cultural trends, political expediency, and emotion. That’s not a just standard for anyone.

Without objective benchmarks for right and wrong, this is about the best a world ruled by subjective truth can do: accept morality defined by the mob. Whoever controls our means of communication and information arbitrates what’s true and what’s false, what’s right and what’s wrong, and who’s canceled and who’s not.

This is not a culture Christians should be a part of. We don’t discern good and evil based on the latest rage trend. We don’t use Twitter as our source of truth; we use God’s Word, which never changes. We don’t have to be tossed by the waves o...

There is freedom in realizing that neither we nor anyone else has authority to determine truth and morality. “My truth” and society’s “truth” are ever changing, arbitrary, and exhausting to keep up with. Sometimes outrage is justified, but that justification is not defined by people in power; it is defined by God.