Have you ever felt that you are not good enough – that you just don’t serve enough, care enough, pray enough, read your Bible enough, or you sin too much?

Those feelings can be good or they can be bad.

If the feelings are because of God’s love drawing you into a closer relationship with Him, and it is your heart’s desire to spend more time with God, serve more, care more,   read God’s Word more and have less sin in your life, then those are good feelings.  The feelings are being generated by God transforming you from the inside out and giving you a desire for more of Him.

However, if the feelings are there because they are fed by condemnation and striving, they are bad feelings.  It is very easy to let feelings push you across a line into becoming works oriented with the result being that a process of striving commences – a process that eliminates the Biblical truth that it is only because of the cross that we are good enough.

God always looks at our hearts – our motives.  The moment I do things only because I “have to” to obtain God’s favour, the process of a works oriented striving starts.  I walk outside of the finished work of the cross.

Sometimes, we also compare ourselves to others.  That person reads their Bible more hours a week than I do!  That other person prays hours and hours longer than I do! That person across the aisle is so much sweeter and kinder to people than me!

Who am I to judge myself or others?  There is only one fair judge and that is God.

What does God’s word say?  Our hope is built on nothing less than the cross and God’s transforming power to make us how He wants us to be — in His time and in His way.  I am not the person  who is sitting beside me or across the aisle.  I am me with my frailties and weaknesses.  We are all in different states of being transformed, and we all have our weaknesses.

“For consider your calling, brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before God.

But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us righteousness and sanctification, and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-31 NASB)

If you are not perfect and a particular sin seems to still not be totally rooted out of your life and you still fall down a lot — Get up!  Repent and get up!  This is not to say we use grace as a reason to purposely sin; however, we are not perfect and when God has not completed sanctifying a particular area of our life — when we fail — repent and get up!

The getting up is what the righteous do.  If you wallow in self-pity and condemnation the enemy wins.  Instead recognize that God is your righteousness and He forgives!  He will complete the work He has begun in you; but, you are a work in progress.  You are not perfect yet – you are not in Heaven.

For a righteous man falls seven times, and rises again . . .  (Proverbs 24:16)

You are not good enough and never will be; however, God will make beauty out of your ashes.  Through the process of sanctification, He will transform you.  Just remember, you are a work in progress!