Have I done enough? Does God love me…. well, for me?
There’s no time to be exhausted. There’s too much yet to do.
Why can’t I be more like her? I want what he has.
I wish I wasn’t so… What if I tried to be more like…
If only there were more hours in a day. Or more days in a week. If only I had more… If only I was more… Then I’d be okay. Then we’d be successful.
If only. If only.
We constantly collide with our limits. Or those of others. We’re frustrated by them. We could do better, be better, have more, solve our own worries if we just… if he or they just…
Do we have unrealistic expectations of ourselves? Of one another? Don’t we rush about with our to-do lists and all the unmet expectations we have of ourselves—we carry them around, never satisfied until …well, until when?
When the to-do list is empty? When has that ever happened? When will we be enough, do enough, have enough, accomplish enough? And how will we know?
Søren Kierkegaard kept a journal in which he wrote,
“The result of busyness is that an individual is very seldom permitted to form a heart.”
When will I be enough? Or you? Will we ever be? Are we supposed to be?
Many of us fail to understand that our limitations are a gift from God, and therefore good. But that’s not how we see them. When we run into our limits, we’re far less likely to pause and be kind to ourselves or listen to what that means and we’re constantly colliding with our own limits. We’ve yet to discover, or at least become okay, with all this.
If we had the choice, we wouldn’t have created ourselves this way, but that might be the point. We didn’t create ourselves. God did. And maybe God knew what He was doing when He created us with limits, shortcomings, and longings because they remind us that we aren’t made for ourselves, and we aren’t meant to make it on our own. So, what are we made for? And what are we supposed to be?
Pastor Tim Keller, who passed away Friday, wrote,
“We are sinful and flawed in ourselves more than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted by Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
What if our limits reflect God’s design? Shouldn’t they point us to the limitless One? The boundaries of our abilities to handle life are closer than we’d like them to be, but we hang onto the delusion that if we just work harder, hold on tighter, and be more productive, we can regain control. Could it be that we’ve been giving ourselves and one another a hard time when all along the lesson is to look beyond us to the One who gave us these limitations so we might know of His limitlessness?
We should be encouraged. None of this is bad news. It’s the way God made us. We aren’t meant or made for completeness. We were created as dependent creatures, and that’s a constructive gift rather than anything to overcome.
We’ve been talking about saving ourselves for a long while now. It’s one of our culture’s obsessions, and we’re easily caught up in it. That’s how most out there talk, too. They say we have what it takes to save ourselves. But don’t you think if we had it in us to do so that we would have done it already?
In every facet of our life and our life together, we sense our shortcomings, we suffer under our own urgency to be more, do more. But we constantly run into our own limits. But what if our limitations are made to remind us of who to rely upon?
If we’re not alright on our own, maybe it’s by wisdom’s design. Could it be we’re not supposed to be—that we’re not made for that, but instead, we’re made to look past ourselves to the One who makes us alright? We will only become what we’re meant to be when we’re joined to Jesus.
Last Sunday we looked into Romans six where Paul assures us that God knows of our brokenness and has anticipated our need for healing. We talked about how sin is not a stain but a wound, and that we have a God who has come close to us in Christ Jesus to bring us back into right relationship with God. It’s because of what God has accomplished through Christ, bringing us back into good standing with Himself, that we can grow more and more into the likeness of Jesus.
See, our salvation is a completed act. Once and for all accomplished by Jesus on the cross. We didn’t earn it and we never will. We can’t add to it or take away from it. But we can spend a lifetime living into it, joining ourselves to Jesus—patterning and aligning our thinking, our words, and our relationships with others and ourselves according to and alongside Jesus. Paul is encouraging us to step into the pathway that God has opened up for us. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, God has cleared a way for us to become one with him and one with each other. Because of what Christ has accomplished, there is no more distance between us and God. We don’t have to live our life halfway anymore.
Full relationship with God and one another is now possible because of what Christ has accomplished on the cross. And because that’s now possible, we can stop wishing for a better life because in Christ our better life is here. It’s no longer a wild and unattainable hope. There’s no more impossible climbing toward God, no more striving to get on His good side, no longer is there a need to prove ourselves. Because of what Jesus has accomplished for us, we stand on common ground with God and each other. No more hierarchy, there is no longer a need to become worthy of one another. Let’s not live as if Christ hasn’t done that for us already.
I don’t know about you, but I’m done trying to prove my worth. It’s exhausting. The Godless world lives that way because it doesn’t know about what God has done in Christ. It can knock itself out with those senseless efforts, but it’s all self-justification and we’ve already established that we’re only justified, or made right, through Christ.
In his second letter to the church in Corinth, Paul talks about all the ladder-climbing he used to do. Before he knew Christ, he thought the only way to get right with God was to prove his worth, his enoughness, to God and others. All that striving made less of him, and it makes less of us, too. Exhausted and exhausting. We get nowhere that way, and we’ll wear each other out, too. That’s not how we get better; that’s how we crumble apart.
These first words from Romans 5 are for us—for we who give ourselves a hard time. Since we have received good standing with God through Christ, because He has accomplished that for us, we set out to live into that gift. It’s not up to us. God has done the work already. We need only to walk into the generous life He’s opened up to us through Christ.
We are no longer separated from God, and we need no longer be separated from one another. The task ahead of us is to be joined to Jesus. Then it will be possible to heal the distrust between us. We have too often looked to one another and our own efforts for our salvation, but we can’t save ourselves. And not one of us can do that for another. Only Jesus can.
Can we treat one another with grace? Can we allow God to carry us? That’s possible if we put into practice the new life Jesus has accomplished for us and afforded to us. We don’t earn it; it’s a sheer gift. But we can make the best of it. We are joined to Jesus and through Jesus to one another. And Jesus is more than worthy of our best effort.
Paul says there’s enough. Dare we hope that in Christ there is enough?
All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful! Alleluia! Amen.