The Two Cosmic Lies that Devastate the Human Heart – Part 2, Lie 1 “You Are Not Good Enough”
One time, when teaching about this lie and how it can affect our hearts, someone asked, “Doesn’t the Bible teach us that we really aren’t good enough?” Yes, it does. But at the same time the Bible affirms our value to God. In Scripture there is a tension between our corrupt, evil hearts and our magnificence. Here is what I mean:
Paul writes, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips” (Romans 3: 10 – 13 NIV).
That sounds like Paul is saying, “no one is good enough”. We know that humans are capable of doing good. But most of us, even Christians, do good for our glory, not God’s. We operate out of our pride – we live according to our wisdom, our understanding, based on our experience. We rely on our sense of right and wrong, which is shaped by culture. For many of us, it is more important to be aligned with culture, than it is to be aligned with God and His word; we fear the criticism of culture more than we fear God. The power and presence of God are not in us, and all that we do, we do separately from Him, and in reality, from each other. Our god is self, also called the flesh; and self is a power or force that no man, in his own power, can limit or control.
Paul is saying humankind is fallen, no one is righteous; no one, in his or her own power apart from Christ, does good. No one can receive salvation and Kingdom life based on their works and merit. But, through faith in Jesus, we can be made righteous. In fact, when through faith we turn to Jesus and accept Him as Lord and Savior, we are born again, we are new creations, God sees us as “holy and blameless in His sight”, and we are “raised up with Christ and seated with Him in the heavenly realms”. This is our hope – in the power of the Holy Spirit we can gain victory over and freedom from our flesh.
In Christ, we are made “good enough” to live with Him for eternity in the Kingdom of God. Apart from Christ, all are eternally lost, condemned by our pride, godlessness, and unbelief.
But there is another dimension to our humanity.
The lie “you are not good enough” that people carry in their hearts, is not just about earning salvation and sin. It is more fundamental. It is about believing that you have no inherent value or significance – it is the ultimate word of devaluing. It is about:
Not belonging, being separate.
Hopelessness and powerlessness.
Believing you are a failure.
Being susceptible to the attacks of the enemy as satan accuses you about the sins in your past.
The destruction of your most intimate relationships as you distance yourself from people and separate yourself from God.
Not everyone resonates with the words “not good enough”. Here are some synonyms: “I am . . . unworthy, unimportant, worthless, unlovable, or inadequate”. Others say:
“I have no value to anyone. I might as well be dead.”
“I am stupid”.
“I can never measure up”,
“I will never fit in”.
“I am a failure”.
“I can’t do that”.
“I am not spiritual enough”.
“They are all better than me”.
“I don’t deserve grace”.
“I deserve whatever happens to me”.
“I am unattractive”. etc.
Being “not good enough” at one level is the truth about salvation and the human condition. And because of pride – the worship of self – many people will not be saved. But that is because they reject Jesus and choose destruction, not because God created them to be destroyed. As we are today, without Jesus, we are a mess. But the lie is also about believing you have no value to God; that God does not, cannot, and will never love you. The former is about who a person is apart from Christ; the latter is about satan preventing them from being what they can become in Christ. The purpose of the lie is to steal a person’s hope, robbing them of their potential for freedom and an abundant life, and preventing them from partnering with God to release His Kingdom.
In Genesis, Scripture makes three points about who we are created to be:
First, we are all created by God. Each person is His masterpiece. We are ‘living’, with a spirit and a soul, which includes our will and intellect, because God breathed His life into us. “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2: 7 NIV).
Because we are made by God and given life by Him, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. The Psalmist writes:
“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalm 139: 13, 14 NIV).
Apart from Christ, I am a sinful, unrighteous man because of the fall in the Garden. But God did not knit me together in my mother’s womb that way. He does not make defects, rejects, or mistakes. I am both wonderful to God and at the same time in need of His righteousness and grace. But I am His creation. His breath gave me life. I am valuable to God. I am worth fighting for!
Second, every human being carries in them the image and likeness of God – the Imago Dei. It is the reason why Christians have always asserted that every human life is valuable and worthy of loving-kindness, from conception on.
The image of God in each human being was damaged and distorted by the fall, but not wiped away. John Piper writes:
“Both the Old Testament and the New Testament concur that the image of God given to man in creation is not lost, even in the presence of sin.”
As my friend Mark said, “A crumpled dollar bill is still a dollar bill.”
Jesus affirms this when confronted by the Pharisees. Trying to trick Jesus, the Pharisees asked Jesus, “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” Jesus replied, “Bring me a denarius that I may see it.” So they gave it to Him and He said, “Whose image and inscription is this?” And they said to Him, “Caesar’s”. So Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12: 14 – 17 NKJV).
Jesus was telling them (and us), the image stamped on the coin is Caesar’s. So pay taxes to him. But the image stamped on every human’s heart is God’s so give to God what, as His subjects, we owe Him – our love and obedience. And that image carried by every human being makes each of us incredibly valuable to God, no matter how far we have strayed from Him, have denounced Him, or have sinned against Him. Jesus will leave the 99 to search for the 1.
In Psalm 8 we read:
“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man (here referring to us, but also used in the New Testament to mean Jesus) that you care for him. You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor (Psalm 8: 3 – 5 NIV).
Third, God created humans for a special purpose – to rule over the Earth as His delegate authorities. But only through a personal relationship with God, so that our limited power is meshed and integrated with His cosmic, infinite power. We are called to be rulers, in partnership with God. We have been given an extraordinary role in creation, but still, as junior partners.
“I believe men and women were designed by God, in the very constitution of their human personalities, to carry out His rule by meshing the relatively little power resident in their own bodies with the power inherent in the infinite Rule of the Kingdom of God” (Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines, pg. 54).
After the fall, we were separated from God and His power. Without His power, we were no longer capable of fulfilling this purpose. But He has not given up on us. In fact, we are so valuable to God that He sent His Son to redeem us at the cross. In Christ, the power and purpose are restored. That terrifies satan!
In his commentary on Hosea, Lloyd Ogilvie writes:
“Our sins, though perhaps different than Gomer’s, are no less serious. And the breathtaking wonder is what God came to earth in Christ to do for us on Calvary to atone for our sins and reconcile us to Himself. Hosea, chapter 3, is that Gospel, that awesome Good News, in predated miniature. It is one of the clearest intimations of the Incarnation in the New Testament. In it we find the limitless degree of God’s love for humankind, for each of us personally” (Ogilvie, ‘Mastering the Old Testament – Hosea, pg. 54).
Paul wrote, “But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5: 8 NIV).
C.S. Lewis puts it this way, “And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense” (Lewis, ‘The Problem of Pain’, pg. 33).
And God’s value for humankind is just as real as His love. Lewis again:
“the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes” (Lewis, ‘The Problem of Pain’, pg. 39).
We find on the one hand that we are ‘not good enough’ to earn salvation and Kingdom life through our own efforts and in our own power, although ‘in Christ’ we are more than conquerors. On the other hand, we are all incredibly valuable to God and loved by Him because God created every human being and placed in each of us His image and likeness to rule in His name. We are ‘good enough’ in the sense that when God looks at each of us, He sees potential. And He is willing to invest His time and love in us, no matter how far we have gone from Him, to bring us back to a place of healing and wholeness in Christ. For “God wants all men to be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2: 4 NIV). God will go to war for us!
It is to undermine our potential to come to know God’s love and value for us that Satan attacks every person with the lie “you are not good enough”. In every devaluing situation, the lie is not far away. “This happened because you don’t deserve success”, “You failed, again”, “How many times do I have to tell you, you are just not smart enough, “when are you going to learn, no one likes you”, “you are not good enough.” And on and on.
These lies and accusations can have a profound effect on us:
We become discouraged and believe that we really aren’t worth anything.
We turn inward, give up, and shut down.
We turn away from Jesus – when we see ourselves as unworthy of His love, we miss out on His grace and the possibility of knowing Him as Savior.
There are two other effects. First, when we ‘hear’ in our spirit or are told, “I am not good enough” or words to that effect, I will dig in and work harder in my own power to prove to myself and others that I am worthy. If I involve God in this work, it can be very productive. But more typically, I will work harder relying entirely on ‘self’. That is pride – a place that drives me deeper into sin, farther from God, and into the arms of satan.
Second, as we listen to, believe in, and act on the lie, we can release into the world more devaluing. God intended for us to live in and release into the world a culture of value, which is life in the Kingdom of God. Instead, we create within us and around us, a culture of devaluing typical of the kingdom of the world. Instead of unity and harmony, we release chaos and destruction into the world – right out of satan’s play book.
How does the lie, “you are not good enough” come to be so prevalent in the hearts of human beings? I believe this lie is part of our fallen spiritual DNA. As I wrote in the previous post, I believe the lie was planted as a seed in the hearts of Adam and Eve. Each of us, as their spiritual progeny, inherited the seed. It lies fallow in the fallen human heart until conditions are favorable for the seed to sprout.
So, what are these conditions? How does the seed sprout and grow into the lie that can control and devastate us? I’m not sure, but here is what makes sense to me. Seeds need soil to sprout and grow into a plant or tree. And this seed is no different. The soil it grows in is the soil of the fallen human heart. But seeds also need to be watered. Devaluing is the ‘rain’ necessary for the seed to sprout. This water is not living water – it is a type of polluted water that produces a twisted and corrupted heart.
Satan wants to turn us away from worshiping God. Satan wants us to worship self, the world, and ultimately satan himself. And the sooner we begin to worship satan in our lives, the better it is for him. And because it is a fallen world, we don’t have to wait too long or look too hard to be devalued. Most devaluing that provides the ‘rain’ for the seed to sprout happens when we are young and the most vulnerable.
The devaluing can be traumatic like a divorce, abandonment, sexual or physical abuse; or emotional abuse – like an alcoholic or drug-addicted parent who neglects her child and withholds love. Devaluing can come from a father or mother who is so determined to make money and be successful, thereby proving to the world that they are good enough, that they have no time for their children. A domineering parent who demands perfection, but rules with a critical spirit, is very devaluing. There are a hundred other ways that parents, extended family, teachers, day-care workers, or even strangers devalue children.
In all of these cases, the devaluing provides the spiritual and emotional environment – the ‘rain’ – for the seed to sprout and begin to grow inside the child’s heart, releasing the lie – “not good enough” – which is reinforced and strengthened as the devaluing and abuse continues.
But the seed doesn’t have to be released by traumatic circumstances. The seed can sprout, even in loving families. Many of us grow up feeling not good enough because of minor childhood events or words that caused us to feel ‘less than’. For me one of them was a Little League baseball coach who constantly screamed at me for not catching fly balls in left field. I used to pray for games to be rained out. Whatever the trigger, a message is sent that you “are not good enough” and the seed sprouts and grows.
If this hypothesis is correct, does it mean that we are simply the product of our spiritual DNA and a fallen world and so have no responsibility for our actions? Are we victims and therefore immune from judgment and punishment? In general, I say no. Jesus calls us to account for our actions. There are always consequences for our disobedience and lawlessness; we will be judged. But . . . Jesus is also merciful.
C.S. Lewis writes about this:
“The situation is not nearly so hard to understand as some people make out. It arises among human beings whenever a very badly brought up boy is introduced into a decent family. They rightly remind themselves that it is ‘not his own fault’ that he is a bully, a coward, a tale-bearer, and a liar. But none the less, however it came there, his present character is detestable. They not only hate it, but ought to hate it . . . Though the boy is most unfortunate in having been so brought up, you cannot quite call his character a ‘misfortune’ as if he were one thing and his character another. It is he – he himself – who bullies and sneaks and likes doing it. And if he begins to mend he will inevitably begin to feel shame and guilt at what he is just beginning to cease to be” (Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pgs 81, 82).
So why make such a big deal about the lie, “You are not good enough”? Can’t we just grow up, get tough, and overcome these painful or not so painful but still traumatic circumstances from childhood? Some can, but in my experience most cannot, at least without Jesus.
And burying past trauma does not mean it is not there. It just means it is walled off in a ‘fortified city’ in our hearts, still leaking poison. And that enables the second lie to kick in. As bad as the first lie is, the second lie is really destructive. If I believe I am not good enough, I will typically do one of two things when operating in my fallen, rebellious nature or flesh: I will try really hard to make myself good enough apart from God, or I will medicate myself to shut out that voice. As we live our lives believing the second lie – “I can make myself good enough in my own power and in my own way” – we enter the wide gate and travel the broad road that leads to destruction. We walk on the way of pride. Along the way we release sin, evil, and wickedness into the world and place ourselves under the authority of satan, who is the prince of this world. The second lie is the topic of the next post.
Here are the words to a song I heard on the radio the other day titled ‘Fear Is a Liar’, by Zach Williams (I would title it ‘The Devil is a Liar’):
“When he told you you’re not good enough; when he told you you’re not right
When he told you you’re not strong enough to put up a good fight
When he told you you’re not worthy; when he told you you’re not loved
When he told you you’re not beautiful, that you’ll never be enough.”
“When he told you you were troubled, you’ll forever be alone
When he told you you should run away, you’ll never find a home
When he told you you were dirty, and you should be ashamed
When he told you you could be the one that grace could never change.”
“Fear, he is a liar
He will take your breath
Stop you in your steps
He will rob your rest
Steal your happiness.”
“Cast your fear in the fire,
Cause fear he is a liar.”
“Not good enough” is a devaluing lie. Come out of agreement with this lie and enter into agreement with Jesus – you are valuable and beloved. Let that truth be the starting point for a new life in Christ.
John