Most of my life I have lived with the “not good enough” syndrome.  It’s very motivating.  When you think that you aren’t good enough, the usual reaction is to try harder.  After all, everyone wants approval, especially from the ones who are most involved with us.  So, when your parents or your spouse or your close friends give you the signs that you just aren’t good enough, the adrenaline pumps and off you go, trying one more time to improve whatever it was that caused you to be judged inadequate.

This reaction, however, is doomed to fail.  The fact is that when you subscribe to the “not good enough” lifestyle, you will never be good enough, no matter how accomplished you become.  People who live under this banner usually burn out somewhere along the way.  It just isn’t possible to be perfect.  That means there is always going to be someplace where you miss the mark.  So, if perfection is the goal, you fail.  And there is usually someone around to remind you that you fail.

It is important to come to terms with this vicious spiral.  Until we feel the deep inadequacy of this way of living, we go on and on running the circular track of acceptance.  So, discovering that life will never provide us with the opportunity to be all that someone else expects is an important mental and spiritual breakthrough.  When we make this discovery, we will have to set aside the expectations of others as a measure of our worth.  And spiritually, we will discover that God knew all along that we couldn’t live like this and He provided that only real solution.

Unfortunately, knowing that we need a mental and spiritual adjustment is not quite the same as applying the adjustment.  We would all most likely assert that good mental and spiritual health demands letting go of a personal worth standard based on someone else’s evaluation of my performance.  But it’s difficult to remember this important fact when basic personal worth situations arise.

Teenagers are particularly susceptible to this issue.  Parents pull one way, peers pull another.  Since self-identity is in the process of being dismantled and rebuilt during these years, the conflict about personal self worth rises rapidly to a boil.  There are plenty of arguments over values that really aren’t arguments about values at all.  They are about acceptance.  The amazing fact is that peers appear to be more accepting than parents (and consequently win the tug of war) not because they have the long term best in mind for the teenager but because they lend group anonymity.  They provide a place for the ego to hide while the value system is in turmoil.  The best example of this is the unwritten “no rat” code.  Even though teenagers know that some behavior by another person is dangerous, illegal or immoral, they refuse to disclose what they know.  They are misled by group acceptance.  They believe that loyalty is more important than honesty and ethical responsibility.

Most of us make it through the teenage years most or less intact.  Then we discover the unwelcome fact that those people who replace the role models of parents are just as demanding (perhaps even more so) than the ones we left behind.  And the “not good enough” game starts over again – but this time it is about jobs and marriage and community.  We now play for bigger stakes with about the same hand in the game.  There are still available “safety zones” but as time goes on, they are harder to reach and less frequent.  The boys “night out”, the “tee time”, the girls “shopping together”, the “play group”.  Invariably life gets more complicated and the pressure mounts to leave these escapes behind.  After all, if you run away to escape who you are, you’re still “not good enough” when you get there.  So it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.  And usually we don’t.

Marriage is the substitute for personal self-worth psychiatry.  But anyone married more than the length of one pregnancy knows that the central issue of marriage is precisely the issue that most of us never learned to deal with – evaluation by others.  Marriage is the perfect soil for growing “not good enough” plants.  It has all the right ingredients – the desire to please someone else of importance, the intimate daily contact needed for full investigation of faults and the climate of disappointment.  Marriage knows no bounds in diminishing self-worth.  A commitment to each other is the perfect vise needed to squeeze every ounce of self-confidence from an individual.

“Are you really going to wear that?”

“Why can’t you ever learn to pick up after yourself?”

“And what was this check for?”

“Did you have to mention that in front of them?”

“I don’t see why you just can’t leave it alone?”

“It’s about time you did something to help me around here?”

“Who do you think I work for?”

“It’s either them or me, what do you want?”

“So, you just don’t want to talk about it, is that it?”

You don’t have to be a writer to add a few of your own.  The topics can cover any area where two people are required to interact.  Money is a big one, followed closely thereafter by sex, children, career, vacations, house, friends and family.  Just pick one.  There is always fodder for critical self-worth invectives.

Amazingly, God knew this would happen.  In fact, even though He didn’t want it to happen, He planned for it.  Paul tells us that God subjected creation to futility in order that we would rapidly discover that purpose and worth are not going to be found in things or in other people.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that we can still find purposeful self-worth.  It just isn’t going to be found in the usual places.

In a perfect world, each of us would rely exclusively on the personal evaluation of our Creator.  We would discover through a process of trial and error that God loves us exactly as we are.  God does not play the “not good enough” game.  In fact, He is so far away from that mental manipulation that most of us just can’t believe what He claims.  We think that because we have experienced the grading system of life for all these years that God must use the same system.  He just expects higher grades to pass.  But of course (thank heaven) God doesn’t grade us this way.  His evaluation is not based at all on what we do.  It is based on what He did.  And what He did involves the performance of only one man – Jesus.  If Jesus says, “This one belongs to me”, then God says, “Great.  I’ll agree with that.”

Here is the real solution to self-worth:  God judges me on what I do with His Son – and that’s all!  I cannot ever win God’s approval by being good enough.  Period.  But I can put all my chips of Jesus.  And that is good enough for God.

So, in a perfect world, each of us would find full self-worth in the perfect sacrifice of Jesus.  We would get our individual asset evaluation straight from God and we would live only to please Him.  That’s the plan.  That’s why the issue of identity from God’s perspective is settled in the past, not in the future.  God is not waiting for me to prove I am worth saving.  He is not waiting to see what I will become or how good I will be.  God settles my worth (my identity) with His own actions through the death of Jesus on the cross.  A long time ago, in fact, before the world was created, Jesus established the only necessary and sufficient condition for my worth.  He chose me!  Past tense.  Can’t be undone.  Never to be revised.  The entire point of the cross is that it is not up to me but it is entirely about me.  God decided that I was worth dying for.  I am valuable because He said so.

That’s not the way the world views worth.  In this world, worth is a function of the future, not the past.  The world lives by the motto, “What will you be when you grow up?”  In other words, my identity is somewhere out there, waiting for me to do something about it.  Carpe diem.  It’s up to me.  My worth is only settled by my next accomplishment, not by the ones that are already accounted for.  That’s why we express regret about those who “sit on their laurels”.  They may have been great once, but what have they done lately?  No one seems to realize that the world never gives anything that it cannot take away.

In our world we are constantly evaluating each other and messing up God’s “fixed in the past” plan.  When one of us points toward heaven and says, “Wait, God accepts me”, we summarily push aside that evaluation with some action that says, “Well, God might accept you but that’s not good enough for me.”

If you are struggling with some aspect of the “not good enough” syndrome in your life, it’s time to let God’s plan wash away that false future evaluation.  You probably hear Him say, “I love you and forgive you.” Now it’s time to let that become your motto for living.  This is “life-application” and it’s tough.  It starts with realizing that God is not standing in judgment of you.  God wants you to live a life of perfect peace and harmony with Him because it’s good for you.  He doesn’t need you to live that kind of life because you need to appease Him.  His plan is all about reconstructing your character so that you can become everything you were meant to be in His purposes.  You don’t have to prove yourself to God.  He knows who you are.

Step Number One:  You are so important to God that He sacrificed His most valuable relationship just to bring you back to Him.  You matter to Him.

Step Number Two:  God’s evaluation of your value to Him HAS NOTHING TO DO with being good enough.  Get that into your life.  God is not waiting for you to be better before He will love you.

Step Number Three:  THE BIG ONE! No matter what other people think or say, God says you are just what He wants. 

Let go of the slings and arrows of others.  Oh, I know.  It’s not easy.  Those poison darts and barbed spears hurt.  But every hurt is an opportunity to turn your face to the Father and say, “You love me and accept me.”  Life cannot be fulfilled on the “not good enough” playing field.  You must run for cover, right into the arms of Jesus.  You have to leave the playing field in order to stop the game.  This just might be the hardest thing for you to do.  It is for me.  I so much want to gain approval and feel needed and appreciated.  When I run into walls of rejection, the emotional turmoil is real.  But there is only One Who never pushes me away.  I must learn to live on my knees, thanking Him for His strength.  I can’t do this on my own.  I’m weak.  But He puts His hand on my shoulder and says, “You matter to me.  How can I help you today.”

Step Number Four:  I must adjust my mind so that I see my self-worth only in terms of my relationship to God and I live only to glorify and please Him.

The audience of One is all that matters.  In the end, if God says, “Well done”, does it really make any difference what anyone else says?  It takes daily concentration to realign my existence so that I anchor my self-worth on His assessment and demonstration.  I practice this shift by evaluating my actions in terms of His glory.  Here’s the amazing secret.  Every time I act in a way that promotes the glorification of God, I find that He confirms my worthiness to Him.  It doesn’t matter if I am suffering or victorious.  The circumstances no longer affect the outcome.  As long as I deliberately honoring Him, He deliberately validates me.

“Not good enough” is a spiritual disease.  It refuses to accept the diagnosis of the Great Physician.  There is a cure, but most of us have chosen chronic contagion.  We are sick and we want others to be sick with us.  We are diminishing ourselves to death.  The path of the lowest common denominator is not what God ordained.  He deals with infinite value and immeasurable worth and His actions prove it.