Living with Yourself as an Inadequate Person

I want to feel that I am an adequate person, but I know I am not. I will be facing some protracted challenges, and I know I’m not up to them – not emotionally, psychologically, physically, or even spiritually. My many failures confirm this for me.

I want to feel that I have things under control, but I do not. I find this threatening. I am therefore greeted by anxiety dreams at night and fear in the morning. My defenses have been breached and my insecurities stick out like spines on a porcupine.

I morbidly obsess over my weaknesses and failures. The Apostle Paul had his own weaknesses. He called one of them a “thorn in my flesh.” He prayed that the Lord would remove this painful affliction, but the Lord would not. Instead, He informed Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

In light of this, weaknesses and inadequacies are actually a plus and not a minus, as Paul concluded:

• Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10)

Frankly, I want to be in control. I do not want any more “thorn[s] in my flesh.” They’re just too painful, but according to my Savior, I need them. He doesn’t want me to be in control or to trust in my abilities and strengths to carry me through. This was the very lesson Paul had learned:

• We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters about the troubles we experienced in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. (2 Cor. 1:8-9)

He does not want us to be in control. This is what self-trust and self-righteousness is all about, and it’s in opposition to trusting in God. If I’m convinced that I got what it takes, I will not trust in God. I also must admit that I would not learn to adore God. Instead, it would be all about me, and the fact that I got what it takes to manage this life, no thanks to God!

I am an inadequate person, but so are all of God’s children. Paul admitted that he lacked what was required to accomplish any spiritual undertaking:

• Such confidence we have through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant. (2 Cor. 3:4-6)

Okay, we might be competent in Christ, but He also painfully chastens us and allows us to fail. How can I endure the constant stream of anxiety dreams and the morning panics? I can’t! He will have to enable me – the very thing He promised to do:

• Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. (John 15:4)

But I do remain in Him, and I crash nevertheless! However, He has promised to rescue me:

• “Because he loves me,” says the Lord, “I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name. He will call on me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him and show him my salvation.” (Psalm 91:14-16)

The crashing is an unavoidable part of the Christian life (2 Cor. 4:10-11), but the rescue is also guaranteed.

We need to let go of all the demands that we place on life – that we be happy, healthy, spiritually successful, popular, wealthy, admired…. Instead, we need to place Him first in everything (Mat. 6:33) and entrust of our concerns, fears, weaknesses, insecurities, and inadequacies to Him:

• This poor man called, and the Lord heard him; he saved him out of all his troubles. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and he delivers them. Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him. Fear the Lord, you his holy people, for those who fear him lack nothing… The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. The righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all. (Psalm 34:6-9, 17-19)

Yes, I am a dependent, kept man, but I am God’s man. I am not defined by my weaknesses, failures and inabilities. Instead, I am defined by the unconditional love of my Savior – the source of all worth, truth, and reality. I don’t have to prove that I am significant, if I am significant in His eyes. I might be a failure, but not before Him.

Abraham was a spiritual failure. He had periodically pimped out his wife Sarah (Gen. 20:11-13). However, after the king of Gerar had taken Sarah to be his wife, having been told that she was merely Abraham’s sister, God visited the king in dream and warned him that he was a dead man if he didn’t return Sarah to her husband. He also informed the king that Abraham would have to pray for him so that God would heal him from his debilitating disease:

• Then God said to him in the dream, “Yes, I know you did this with a clear conscience, and so I have kept you from sinning against me. That is why I did not let you touch her. Now return the man’s wife, for he is a prophet, and he will pray for you and you will live. But if you do not return her, you may be sure that you and all who belong to you will die.” (Gen. 20:6-7)

How is it that God would still call this spiritual failure a “prophet” and honor Abraham by requiring his prayer? Wasn’t Abraham a disappointment? Yes, but not in his Savior’s eyes, and that’s what mattered. Abraham’s relationship with his God overshadowed everything else.

Israel rebelled angrily against God as they were encamped against the Red Sea, and the murderous Egyptian chariots were approaching. However, their God parted the Sea making a way of escape for them. They hadn’t been faithful, but God saw something very different in them:

• By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as on dry land; but when the Egyptians tried to do so, they were drowned. (Hebrews 11:29)

There are only two kinds of people – spiritual failures and those who know that they are spiritual failures. It is a great relief to simply accept this fact and to lay aside the facade. However, this is only possible if I know that, in Christ’s eyes, I am His beloved child who dwells in His glory.

I am inadequate. I can’t even manage my own life, but this no longer matters:

• I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)

I am not in control, but this doesn’t matter either, because He is!

My Interview with Equilibrium

http://www.equilibriumpodcast.org/podcasts/

The Empty World of Atheistic Humanism

We can put a positive spin on anything. Atheists embrace a flat and monotonous world –one devoid of moral values, meaning or purpose. However, this doesn’t stop them from celebrating it and thinking that they can fill the emptiness with self-created meaning. The Humanist Manifesto II claims that:

• Humanism can provide the purpose and inspiration that so many seek; it can give personal meaning and significance to human life.

After rejecting God and any intrinsic higher purpose and meaning of life, humanism boasts that it can provide the very things that it has eliminated, like filling an empty apartment with furniture, albeit make-believe furniture.

Meanwhile, some atheists have the courage to look at the emptiness endemic to atheism. The brilliant mathematician, Bertrand Russell claimed that the emptiness of an “accidental collocations of atoms… destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system” is the only “meaning” we can embrace:

• Only on the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. (Why I am not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, 107)

Surrendering hope of any meaning was Russell’s only “habitation… safely built.”  Later in life, Russell realized that atheism was unable to offer anything that could possibly overcome the “accidental collocations of atoms” that inevitably would result in “unyielding despair.” Russell understood that creating meaning and purpose out of a purposeless world is like imagining having a wife and kids where there are none – a mere exercise in self-delusion and escapism.

However, for the younger atheist, the pursuit of pleasure and sensuality seems to be able to fill the void, at least temporarily. In The Pleasures of Cocaine, Adam Gottlieb writes:

• If there is any teleological purpose to man’s existence on earth and in his power to progress, it is that he should achieve a successful form of decadence and learn to live in harmony with it. The life-game then would be, at least in part, to sustain a decadent situation for as long as one might expect any civilization to last…

For Gottlieb, life is about decadence, and decadence is about immediate self-gratification. Evidently, he found little appeal in humanism’s promise to “give personal meaning and significance to human life.”  

However, the pursuit of sensual pleasure has a short shelf-life, as King Solomon had concluded:

• Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come    and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them.” (Ecclesiastes 12:1)

Solomon advised that our investments had to be far-sighted, and this required an eye to the Creator.

Immortality and the Human Quest for Significance

Is there one drive that especially characterizes us? In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver identifies our drive to establish our self-importance:

• Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)

Weaver documents this in many ways:

• Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)

Perhaps one reason we never achieve our longed-for significance is that it always seems to be comparative. We need to be more significant than the next guy. Writer Gore Vidal had been very transparent about this:

• “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” (58)

Clearly, this drive for significance tears at friendship, dividing instead of bringing together. The jealousy displayed by comedian Al Jolson is reflective of the human condition:

• According to his biographer, “He once had a team of performing elephants fired because he thought the audience liked them too much.” (59)

Some are very candid about their quest for significance and pursue it without hesitation. But when anyone detracts from their esteem, they become murderous. Haman, the protagonist in the Book of Esther, planned to kill the entire Jewish race because of the disrespect of one Jew:

• Haman went out that day happy and in high spirits. But when he saw Mordecai at the king’s gate and observed that he neither rose nor showed fear in his presence, he was filled with rage against Mordecai. (Esther 5:9)

For some, the closest they can come to immortality is the acclaim of the crowd. Even the fantastically successful never outgrow this quest. Napoleon foolishly boasted:

• There is no immortality but the memory that is left in the minds of men… History I conquered rather than studied.” (12)

But what is so important about the “minds of men” that we so depend on their fleeting opinions for our “immortality?” Rather than immortality, this seems to represent a servile dependence on what others think. However, we tend to feel that the acclaim of others enlarges us.

People achieve their “immortality” in many different ways. In Fame, The Psychology of Stardom, psychologists Evans and Wilson argue:

• What we try to create… is some illusion of permanence. The desire for permanence drives people to carve their name on trees and rocks, just like the handprints on Hollywood Boulevard. We need to have an impact on life – to leave something behind us when we go. (19)

Humanity so desires to attach itself to something greater to elevate self. However, success is never enough. Weaver cites President Lyndon B. Johnson as an example of this:

• According to one commentator, “It is a curious footnote to history that long before he ran into trouble, Johnson had turned central Texas into a living monument to his heritage and his journey to the summit (the L.B.J birthplace, the L.B.J. boyhood home, the L.B.J. state park, the L.B.J. ranch and more).” (22)

However, “success” and significance can be achieved in other ways. Weaver writes about the opposite attempt to establish one’s mark on the world:

• In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, this drive for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the moral dictates of conscience. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous.” (45)

This drive for significance can even override all other affections. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:

• “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was  ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)

By attaching himself to someone greater, Chapman was able to elevate himself. Was it “low self-esteem” or merely Chapman’s own way to achieve what everyone else is trying to achieve – importance? Weaver reports that:

• More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)

The need for importance is so powerful that it seems that people are willing to pay almost any price for it. However, observing the insubstantiality of this pursuit, some have converted absurd quest into a quest for ultimate meaning. It might take a moral-crusader form. The UN claims: “The precious dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value” (82-83). Even if true, is this mission also a reflection of the pursuit of significance, disguised as a “nobler” quest? Is it a deceptive perversion of something more immediate and tangible?

Meanwhile, others have forsaken the temporary attainments of this world in favor of attaining enlightenment and ultimately of being absorbed into a person-less nirvana, the only reality – a universal consciousness where individual distinctions do not exist. This is the monistic answer – a rejection of the illusory worldly strivings in favor of a singular other-worldly pursuit, a real immortality, or so it seems.

However, the poet Miguel de Unamuno protested that the:

• “Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality.” (84)

According to Unamuno, monism presents a false hope. To whom does it offer immortality if the individual no longer exists in the monistic heaven, but rather just a universal consciousness? Is this immortality any more substantial than a dead body thrown in the ground with a tree planted over it, eventually lifting its nutrients into its branches and fruit? Is it any more substantial than Napoleon’s hope of immortality in being remembered by others, by history, by something grander than himself?

Chapman felt himself elevated by Lennon’s autograph; others by achieving success and praise, even worship. It seems that all of these attempts to take hold of immortality are also attempts to join ourselves to something greater.

What do we make of this quest? Is it entirely aberrant or does it reflect something essential about our human reality? Often, our desires are curiously matched with real-world objects. We hunger, and there is food; we thirst, and there is drink; we tire and there is sleep; we are lonely, and there are friends and family. Is it possible that our desire for significance is also matched with a real-world fulfillment? Is there a God who has created us for relationship with Him? Is it possible that our pursuit to be connected to something greater than we is a reflection of a divinely implanted desire for God?

This desire remains strangely unfulfilled in most people. Could it be that it has been misdirected onto the wrong objects - success and notoriety? The Prophet Isaiah offered an alternative solution consisting of spiritual food:

• “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money,    come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live… Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.” (Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-7)

To receive from God is to be free from our need to establish our self-importance, from the endless burden to prove and to define ourselves! Instead, we were created to be beloved by God and to love Him back.

Humanity, Mammalian Equality, and the Divine

Ideas and beliefs are our masters. As we think, so also do we live! Let’s do a thought experiment. Ingrid Newkirk, the head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, believes that we should make no moral or value distinction among mammals: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. They are all mammals.”

What are the implications of such a belief? Many! Our laws reflect our values. If there is no moral distinction among mammals, then our laws should reflect this belief. They should protect mammals against murder, not only by humans but by other amoral animal agents. Consequently, we should prosecute any mammal who kills a mouse of a rat, but we can’t stop there. We should also prosecute any mammal who steals from a mammal – think milk.

What would the implications of such “upgraded” laws be? Pigs, rats and cows would inevitably overrun our streets, farms and gardens. Some fundamentalist animal rights folk will answer, “So what! It’s about time that the tables are reversed.”

However, such a reversal would have even more serious costs. When our laws are revised to protect every mammal – and this would make our laws unenforceable – then none will be protected. Expect to see libel, theft, murder and sexual abuse skyrocket!

The problems don’t stop here. Even Newkirk’s position is man-centered, depending on human judgment. Why should our laws stop at protecting mammals? Does Newkirk promote the value of mammals because she too is a mammal, and, as a mammal, she confers greater value on mammals? From the perspective of animal rights, this seems very chauvinistic. Why not also extend value and protection to fish and birds? Would we deny mammalian worth to them simply because they are more dissimilar from us?

Some will interject that, “Birds and fish are less intelligent… or emotive… or conscious than mammals. Therefore they don’t have the value that mammals have!”

Apart from the questionable science upon which such arguments rest, this position(s) has even more fundamental problems. Why should the level of intelligent or emotion bestow a greater value on an animal? While science might be able to demonstrate that certain species can perform certain tasks more efficiently, it is unable to answer the question of value.

Instead, the question of value or worth requires an even more fundamental question: “Value or worth to whom?” Is there an ultimate source that determines value or is this entire concept just a human invention to bestow meaning on life?

If we created this idea, and value has no existence outside of what we determine value to be, then we have returned to man-centered center and dominated world. However, it is an arbitrary world, depending on who is in power and can enforce their worldview. It also means that anything goes, because there is no absolute standard of truth to determine the worth of anything. It means that if I think that people who look or act like me are the most evolved, and if I attach value to the highest level of evolution, then who can say that I am wrong!

Real value therefore depends on the existence of immutable and universal truth that transcends us and our competing opinions, and therefore also a Truth-giver that transcends us.

Some will interject, “We have natural laws, and they don’t require your Truth-giver. Why then can’t we have a natural law that bestows value?”

There are many problems with this hope. For one thing, there is no evidence that our natural, universal, immutable laws don’t require a Truth-giver. Perhaps even more problematic, a natural law that bestows value cannot be natural. Once again, value is the product of personhood and not science, which can only tell us what is. Value is the product of intelligence, consciousness and will, not of impersonal and mindless forces.

We can demonstrate this by showing the distinction between the law of gravity and the law that imparts value. The effects of the former can be bypassed or overcome; those of the values law cannot.  We can board an airplane that violates the natural effects of gravity without consequence. However, we cannot sex-traffic teenagers and pre-teens without violating the law of value. Hence, this law is a different kind of law – a Personal law. In contrast, gravity can attract, but it cannot value anything.

Because of the universality, immutable, and Personhood of value, it doesn’t matter whether we go to Alaska or the desert or even enter a time machine to go to a different age, the same immutable law of value will confront us and the girls we intend to traffic. Nor will any of our scientific innovations change it. Our conscience instructs us that our value as humans transcends any changes or innovations, and our conscience will punish us if we defy the law we find therein! In this sense, it seems to be more un-defiable and Personal than the law of gravity, which we can side-step without any consequence.

At this, some will respond, “I know what is right and wrong without your God.” However, it is impossible to know what is “right and wrong” unless there is a real and objective right and wrong, which transcends our bio-chemical reactions. However, you can say, “I have the very real feeling of right and wrong regardless!” True, but irrelevant! Feelings cannot equate with truth unless truth and value have an independent existence, apart from our feelings.