Not Good Enough

~Tim Be Told, "Not Good Enough"

I stumbled upon this song a little while ago, and I wanted to share it ever since I heard it =].

As I'm sure all of you know about me, I'm a person who thinks a lot x]. For the past few weeks, what's been eating at my head was: what can I do to make God happy? Going through the Old Testament for my devos, I was amazed and fascinated by the laws God gave the Israelites and the very practical reasons why He commanded them. So, I felt motivated to try my best to honor God through obedience of His commandments. While I was trying to do this though, I got tripped up; I started criticizing and scrutinizing every detail of my day, wondering if any of it made God happy. While focusing on this, I lost sight of God's love for me and became concerned with whether I was good enough for God.

God sent me two things in this time that I really needed. One was talking with one of the upperclassmen in my fellowship, who challenged me to ask myself: "Am I trying to earn God's favor?" Before that, I don't think I realized that my accumulation of my actions was my attempt to try to earn God's favor for me. I knew the 'right answer,' which is that there's nothing I can do to make God love me more, and there's nothing I can do (or not do) that would make Him love me less. But somehow I had completely lost the beauty of this statement; that undeserved grace ultimately frees me from the weight of the law, because of Christ's finished work on the cross.

The other was my fellowship's at-church-retreat, the theme for which was "The Furious Love of God." The speaker opened up his message series with this question: "What do you think God thinks of you right now?" The speaker said that the most common response to this question is: "disappointed." the next was "angry," and the next "unconcerned." And I could definitely identify with feeling that God was perpetually disappointed in me, because I always fail to carry out what I want to do for Him. Throughout the rest of the retreat, I learned about how God's first forethought for me is not judgment or disappointment, but love. I think the greatest application challenge from that entire retreat was to simply accept God's amazing love for me.

During this retreat, I was reminded of how prone I am to turn to "moralism," which is trying to save myself or make myself favorable through my own righteousness. Alongside that, I was also reminded of God's amazing, unconditional love for me. I remember one night, after worship had ended, I laid back in a pew by myself and just pondered on that beautiful truth: "God's love for me is CONSTANT and UNCHANGING."

This song from Tim Be Told lays out all the expectations placed on a boy to be a man. And when it all comes down to it, by those measures, he is and feels as if he is not a man. All the "I should be's" collide with the "I'm not's." All those expectations to hold it all together...and in the end, "it's your fault anyways." And after the speaker's gathered all that he's done, all his trophies and achievements into his arms, he shows his dad, and all his dad can say, "where is the rest of it, son?" ...isn't is great to know that even though our parents might treat us this way, or we might treat ourselves, our Father and Creator doesn't look at us like this. It's awesome that He would even understand the pain and pressures and hardships of being human. But still then, He doesn't even look at how much we accumulated.. All He does is smiles, holds us, and says: "you're good enough."