There is a sneaky, devious, and—I dare say—evil distortion that tells us that our human limitations are “bad” or wrong. We all like to think we can do it all, but we don’t always have a healthy, or right, approach.
I don’t presume to know the motives behind those who promote these messages. Yet these messages are dangerous, unhealthy, and untrue. Most of the time they are a call to walk in faith and meant to encourage risk-taking. They grow from promises that we can do all things, that nothing is impossible, and that if we trust God, we will be able to do what we never could otherwise.
While these promises are true, this type of thinking is a deceptive lie that encourages us to think our created limitations are wrong. It confuses our sinful lack of faith in God with our God-given, created limitations. The most easily identifiable of these Christian messages comes from an isolated and out-of- context Bible verse: Philippians 4:13. It’s usually shortened to something like, “I can do all things.”
This all-too- common tendency is ultimately rooted in a wrong understanding of Jesus and of ourselves. As I show in the book, all of us—including many Christians—look at the life of Jesus Christ, and we assume we are meant to be his equal in every way. Jesus Christ is human and we are human, so we should strive to be like Jesus, right? But this (false) Christian logic neglects an important difference. While Jesus was fully human, he was also uniquely God. And even though we should seek to be like Jesus, that does not mean we become like God in every way. In some ways we become like God, but in many other ways we remain subject to God’s created limitations. The faulty logic works like this:
God has no limits.
Jesus is God.
Jesus has no limits.
Jesus is human.
I am human.
I have no limits (through Christ).
This line of thinking tempts us not to think twice when we read, “I can do all things through Christ,” and to assume this statement means that as Christians our human limits have been expanded or redefined. But this assumption ignores a key difference between Jesus, who has two natures, and you and me.
We don’t become God. We remain human, with all our created limitations, and learn to follow Jesus by faith, walking in the power of God’s Holy Spirit. Grasping this difference is one of the keys to embracing our God-given limits as good limits.
In The Good News of Our Limits: Find Greater Peace, Joy, and Effectiveness through God’s Gift of Inadequacy, I urge us to embrace the blessedness of our limitations and adopt a few key biblical and practical skills to better balance our lives.
Written by: Sean McGever, PhD smcgever@gmail.com