christian living on Inadequacy

Many Christians . . . find themselves defeated by the most powerful psychological weapon that Satan uses against Christians. This weapon has the effectiveness of a deadly missile. Its name? Low self-e...

When we see how God is able to show his power in our weakness, not in spite of our weakness but because of it, we are no longer ashamed or afraid. When we see the expansive task at hand and instead of...

And Grace calls out, 'You are not just a disillusioned old man who may die soon, a middle-aged woman stuck in a job and desperately wanting to get out, a young person feeling the fire in the belly...

I once heard a sermon that compared believers to commercials for God. “And God doesn’t need any bad commercials,” I remember the preacher saying. It stuck with me, and from then on I often made decisi...

The year was 1522. Luther dipped his pen into the ink. Eleven weeks had passed since he began translating the Bible, and the project was almost complete. Although his work would enrage the papacy and ...

Famed pastor and educator A. T. Pierson (1837–1911) lamented his own human inadequacies in communicating to his congregation the depth and levels of the “unsearchable riches of Christ:” “Unsearchabl...

We have conducted the previous exercise in dozens of middle-to-upper-class, predominantly Caucasian, North American churches. In the vast majority of cases, these audiences describe poverty differentl...

We are a society that despises lack. We despise weakness and need and insufficiency. We turn the other way and pretend to be watching oncoming traffic when the red light halts us and the beggar reache...

[There is nothing worse than to be] devoid of awe.

Gregg Easterbrook wrote about this in a 2003 book called The Progress Paradox. Easterbrook’s subtitle was How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse. He describes how affluent we have become—​​​bett...

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God's.

Brokenness is God’s requirement for maximum usefulness.

Alexander Maclaren writes about the importance of recognizing our dependence on God for all we have: Up to the very edge we are driven before He puts out His hand to help us. It is best for us that w...

The acknowledgment of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss.

Weak and needy people finding their hope in Christ's grace are what mark a mature relationship. The most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength...

It goes against the grain to give an image of oneself that is anything less than perfect, and many Christians imagine that they will be rejected by others if they admit to any faults. But nothing coul...

Dave Nessia was starving himself to death while hoarding food. It was on the hit reality show Alone. After 73 days alone in the wilderness, he had lost 40 lbs. and his blood pressure had fallen to 80/...

For men have no taste for (God's power) till they are convinced of their need of it and they immediately forget its value unless they are conditionally reminded by awareness of their own weakness.

...I fear that some of us understand just enough about the gospel to feel guilty--guilty that we are not measuring up to some undefinable standard--but not enough about the Atonement to feel the peace...

Brokenness is God’s method of dealing with our dependence on anything other than Him for fulfillment and security. No matter how committed we may be to God, we’ll always fight the inclination to do th...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

We don’t believe our ability to bless others might result from our poverty. Our need might be the thing that most blesses the body of Christ.

You don’t have to look very far to see awe problems everywhere around you. Adultery is an awe problem. To the degree that you forget God’s glory as the Creator of your body and his place as owner of e...

The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people, from a Christian community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; in the poor brother Christ is knocking at the door.

Much that we have interpreted as a defect of sanctification in church people is really an outgrowth of their loss of bearing with respect to justification. Christians who are no longer sure that God l...

I find your lack of faith—disturbing.

This is the middle. Things have had time to get complicated, messy, really. Nothing is simple anymore…. Disappointment unshoulders his knapsack here and pitches his ragged tent.

The absence of boundaries creates nonorder, and nonorder is not the end of exclusion but the end of life.

Cosmic ingratitude is living in the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient. It is taking credit for something that was a gift. It is the belief that you know best how to live, that you have...