10/21/2025
Fall always makes me reflective. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the season—the cooler mornings, the gold and crimson leaves, the sense that everything is changing again. Life picks up speed, calendars fill fast, and before we know it, Thanksgiving is around the corner. In the middle of it all, I sometimes catch myself thinking, If I could just get it all together… then I’d be enough.
That’s the funny thing about seasons. They remind us how temporary our “enough” really is. But I have some good news for you. And it’s even better than a crisp fall morning, the Colts' winning streak, or a surprise IRS letter saying they owe you $4,000.
However, before we get to the good news, I need to be honest about the bad news first.
We live in a culture obsessed with self. The term “self-help” was coined way back in 1859 by Samuel Smiles (yes, that’s really his name), and it instantly became a bestseller. Alisa Childers points out that it’s no surprise because the book was about everyone’s favorite subject: ourselves (Live Your Truth and Other Lies).
Fast-forward to 2025, and the self-help industry is still booming. It’s a multibillion-dollar business built on the idea that if we just love ourselves more, everything will get better.
“You are enough.”
“I am enough.”
“We are enough.”
Just. As. We. Are.
In our self-saturated culture, pastors (including yours truly) can be a bit reluctant to use the word “sin” and convey the culturally contradictory thought that we are not enough; that outside of Jesus, we are actually dead in our sins (Ephesians 2:1). We have (to put it mildly) a highly developed capacity for denial.
In a main-line church, the congregational confession spoken by all in a Sunday morning service began, “Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have,” which seems more like a memo from one professional to another than a prayer. Kathleen Norris writes, “At such times I picture God as a wily writing teacher who leans across a table and says, not at all gently, `Could you possibly be troubled to say what you mean?’ It would be refreshing to answer, simply, `I have sinned’” (Amazing Grace, 165).
That’s the bad news. Spiritually speaking, we are not enough—and we can’t save ourselves. But the even worse news is that if we never admit that, we’ll never find grace.
Norris goes on to write that many of us are fine singing about being “lost” or “blind,” in John Newton's fine old hymn, but we draw the line at the word wretch. Yet, she says, “If you can’t ever admit to being a wretch, you haven’t been paying attention” (ibid., 167). Ouch!
The good news that I promised to share earlier is this:
You are not enough … without Jesus.
When your life is surrendered to Him, He makes you enough—more than enough—because the self, apart from Jesus, is like a pumpkin pie without pumpkin. Do the math:
0 + 0 = 0. The self plus the self still equals only the self.
But 0 + 100 = 100. That zero is transformed from nothing to something—not because of any value of its own, but because of what was added to it.
That’s the power of grace.
Our nothingness becomes something, not because we’ve improved or achieved, but because Jesus has entered the equation. And honestly, that’s what I need to be reminded of this fall. When the leaves start turning and life feels like it’s speeding up again, I can slip into self-reliance without even noticing. I start believing that if I just try harder, organize better, pray more consistently, then I’ll be enough.
That’s not the gospel.
The gospel says: You can stop striving. You can stop trying to prove your worth. Jesus already gave you His.
So as you cheer on the Colts or sip that pumpkin latte, remember this—real hope doesn’t come from the next win, the next break, or even the next burst of motivation. It comes from the One who stepped in when we couldn’t.
And that, my friends, is the best news of all.
“For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh…. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”
—Romans 7:18, 25 (CSB)
