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

by Allie Beth Stuckey

Yes, many of us struggle with insecurities and even self-loathing. But these are just other indicators of self-obsession. Even when we don’t like ourselves, our perpetual prioritization of our wants, needs, problems, and dreams above all else proves that we still love ourselves a whole lot.

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.

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.

Your insistence upon “doing you” by choosing only what feels good in the moment will only defer the pain until it becomes a crushing burden.

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

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.

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.

Cecily came to the end of herself, which is the destination for all of us on the road to self-fulfillment and self-love. We’re small, frail, and finite, which means we don’t have what it takes to love ourselves to wholeness.

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.

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.

They’re all matters of worship. If we worship the God of Scripture, we trust him.

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,

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.

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.

There may be many characteristics that make a good church, but the most important one is this: the Gospel—the biblical truth about sin, salvation through Jesus, and sanctification—is preached.

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,

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.

“What a difference it would be if our system of morality were based on the Bible instead of the standards devised by cultural Christians.” I would add, “or by culture, period.”

The goal with which social justice is primarily concerned is equality. Where there is disparity—in wealth, in prison sentencing, in graduation rates, in success, in representation, in treatment, and so on—social justice advocates see injustice.

Social justice uses intersectionality to determine who qualifies as the oppressed and who qualifies as the oppressor. Intersectionality takes stock of an individual’s characteristics, such as race, nationality, or sexual orientation, and assigns them oppression “points,” for lack of a better term, based on how many historically marginalized identity groups they belong to. The more points you have, the more likely you are to be considered on the side of the oppressed.

The difference is that, this ruling was based on provable injustice, not on perceived injustice. This is the key difference between social justice and actual justice.

The former deals in perception; the latter deals in proof. And this is why Christians should care: we follow God, the transcendent Lawgiver, which means we are indebted to the truth in all things.

God’s justice means restoration for the downtrodden as much as it means repercussions for the wrongdoer. That means Christians indeed

There is no place for intersectionality in the body of Christ.

This doesn’t discount the disadvantages people indeed face nor the uneven playing field that inevitably characterizes life on earth, and it certainly doesn’t abdicate our responsibility as Christians to help those in need.

Social justice gives us an overly simplistic worldview of the oppressed versus the oppressor. Applying these categories to all people at all times leads to more unfairness, not less, as adherents aim to reach an impossible outcome of total equality through cosmic calculations that aim to help one group at the expense of another.

While most people build their value system based on what feels good and what’s convenient, Christians are called to a higher standard—one that guarantees self-denial and difficulty. That

From this perspective, you don’t have flaws—you have underappreciated qualities. You haven’t made mistakes—you’ve made decisions the “shame culture” wants to guilt you for. You’ve never failed—you’ve simply rejected society’s unrealistic standards of success. In Girl, Stop Apologizing, Rachel Hollis argues: “For the average

You are not perfect the way you are, and you never will be.

Scripture reveals this fact to us plainly. Biblically, there are only two kinds of selves: the old self and the new self. The old self is enslaved to sin, lost, looking for love and satisfaction in all the wrong places. The old self is totally depraved, hopeless, an enemy of God, and bound for destruction. This is who we all are apart from Christ.

Moreover, 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. Our unique talents and gifts are important and are to be used to help the body of Christ for his glory. Our bodies are dwelling places of the Holy Spirit and therefore are to be in submission to God’s will as outlined in his Word. In this sense, we are special. We matter.

We weren’t chosen because of our good works, but rather for good works. No matter how much we introspect, we will never find our good and

We are all to be obedient. No quirk or characteristic makes us exempt from the standards God has set for us.

The world of self-love tells us that knowing ourselves is essential happiness. We’re told that our inner perfection, once found and unleashed, will empower us to succeed and have peace. God tells us something different: that knowing him gives us the peace we’re looking for and that his love gives us the confidence we’re looking for.

Confidence, therefore, is not something to be achieved. It’s a gift from God to accept.

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.

to commit to self-love is actually to commit to selfishness.

Self-obsession and self-hatred aren’t mutually exclusive. Most of the time they go hand in hand. This is a hard to admit but universal fact of human nature.

This same Jesus calls us not to self-love but to self-denial and full obedience. He doesn’t tell us to learn to love ourselves before we love other people, because his love for us is more than sufficient to equip us to love those around us.

That means we are free to love people right now, rather than waiting until we have positive feelings toward ourselves.

Believing the lie that we have to love ourselves before we love other people will cause us to miss out on the most joyful experiences of our lives. And even more important, there are people whose needs won’t be met because we’re too busy meeting our own needs to pay attention to theirs.

“Reminder: relationships are supposed to make you feel good.” That logic makes sense only if the self is the highest priority. But if everyone really thought that way, we’d all end up alone.

You’re not enough for your own fulfillment. God made you not only to need him but also to need other people. Popular culture will tell you to invest only in relationships that feel good and help you advance your goals. God tells us that sacrificial love is the goal.

What I’ve learned over the years is this: the seasons defined by self-centeredness have been my most miserable, and the times in my life when I have felt peace and fulfillment have been the moments when I’ve removed myself from the center, reoriented myself around God and his truth, and remembered that I’m not enough.