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The Reality Behind Our Culture’s Favorite Mantra
Are You Enough?
I don’t know where it came from, but now it seems to be everywhere. I hear it on podcasts and TV shows. I’ve seen it on T-shirts and social media graphics. A quick search for it on Amazon brings up hundreds of results, ranging from books for kids and adults to silver charm bracelets to hoodies of many colors to embroidered makeup cases to wall hangings and throw pillows and stickers to place on your rearview mirror. I’m talking about the simple, uplifting mantra for our times: “You Are Enough.”
Surely you’ve seen this too. But have you stopped to consider why this phrase, in these settings, is this popular? I see at least two implications.
For one thing, it means that insecurity about our worth is a massive problem in our culture. I’m not just talking about how wide the problem must reach if this phrase is popping up all over the place. I’m talking about how deep the problem must go. Just how low must my self-view be if I get a boost from a statement made by who knows who, about no one in particular, and mass-produced for sale at suburban homegoods megastores?
Remember Heaven
Matthew McCullough
In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.
The popularity of this phrase fits perfectly with what French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg argues in The Weariness of the Self, his history of depression among contemporary Western people. It’s not a book about how to cope with depression, all the mysterious factors that cause it, or how to get rid of it. It’s a book about what depressed people are saying about themselves, about how they are describing their experience.
He believes depression has spread the way it has, when and where it has, because of the cultural expectation that it’s up to each individual to define the meaning and value of his own life. The defining feature of modern depression, based on interviews of those who are suffering, is a suffocating sense of inadequacy. Here’s how Ehrenberg puts it: “Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself. . . . The depressed person is a person out of gas.”1
Whatever else you may say about it, “You Are Enough” is a symptom of a deep and pervasive problem in our culture. Many people feel relentlessly, hopelessly inadequate and long for relief.
The second thing this phrase suggests is that we humans have an inevitable craving for validation. We desperately want to measure up. We need to hear from someone else that we do. And it’s entirely appropriate that we should. The theological category for the validation we crave is justification. Think of it like a courtroom where a judge gives a verdict on your standing before him. The biblical vocabulary word for a statement like “You Are Enough” is righteous. To be righteous is to have right standing before the proper authority, to have a life that measures up. It is being exactly what you’re supposed to be. When you are righteous, you are enough.
We are not wrong to crave justification. It is supposed to matter to us whether we’re good enough. This is core to our humanity. But everything depends on where we look for this validation, on what basis, and when.
The only person authorized to tell us that we are enough is the God who gave us our lives in the first place.
The only person authorized to tell us that we are enough is the God who gave us our lives in the first place. Right at the heart of the gospel is the promise that God already sees us as righteous because of Jesus’s righteousness received through faith. Paul says in Romans that “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 5:1). That means there is “now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). Justification is something we already have if we’re in Christ, a guarantee of our righteous standing before God that we must remember and rest in every day.
And yet the gospel also looks forward. “By faith,” Paul writes, “we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Gal. 5:5). Like so much of what God has promised us, justification has an already and a not-yet dimension. Already by faith we are righteous in God’s sight because of Jesus. But we are waiting for righteousness too. We do not yet see ourselves as God sees us. For now, we walk by faith and not by sight. We see our failures with painful clarity, not the spotless righteousness in which Jesus wraps us. On the day of judgment, we will trade our faith for sight once and for all. We will stand before God and receive publicly, unmistakably, and irrevocably what he has promised us already—his pronouncement of our righteousness in Christ. We will know from experience that we are enough not because of what we’ve done with our lives but because of what Jesus has done with his. On that day, and only on that day, will we be finished wondering whether or not we measure up.2
Notes:
- Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 4.
- I appreciate the way Thomas Schreiner summarizes the past and future dimensions to justification in the Bible. He lists many texts that speak of justification as a future reality, tied to the final judgment (Rom. 2:13; 8:33; 1 Cor. 4:4–5; Gal. 2:16–17; 5:5; Phil. 3:9). And he lists many texts that refer to justification as a past reality, claimed by faith (Rom. 5:1, 9, 17; Rom. 8:30; 1 Cor. 1:30; 6:11; 2 Cor. 5:21; Titus 3:7). Then he sums up the biblical teaching on the timing of justification: “Believers in Jesus Christ are now justified through faith in Jesus Christ. They are justified by faith alone by virtue of Christ’s death for their sins and his resurrection for their justification (Rom. 4:25). Still, they look forward to the day when the declaration will be announced publicly and to the entire world. In this sense, as many scholars attest, justification is an already but not yet reality.” Faith Alone: The Doctrine of Justification (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2015), 157. See also 153–57.
Matthew McCullough is the author of Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime.
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