The Secret of the God Is Good Enough for Me Life

Over the past year, I've sprinkled in a few draft chapters of an upcoming book on living with divine affirmation. You can read earlier excerpts here:

January 1st: God is Good Enough for You

August. 28: The Power of Divine Affirmation, Part 2

July 10: The Power of Divine Affirmation, Part 1

June 19: Show Me the Wonders of Your Great Love

This is a long post (it wouldn't have made as much sense if I cut it up into two posts), addressing a pastoral issue I've seen time and time again: Christians who don't really believe God is good enough for them. They are still trying to keep their focus on wringing a little more satisfaction from the world. When we realize God is truly enough for us, spiritual delights become more intense and fulfilling. Sometimes, God even takes believers through a severe path to open our eyes to this blessed reality.

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“You make known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.” Psalm 16:11

“I’m constantly bored.”

So says Petra Ecclestone, an enormously rich heiress who bought one of the largest houses in the United States in 2011 when she was just 22 years old.[i] Petra told the New York Times that she bought the house unseen with her then-husband for $85 million.[ii]

The couple divorced in 2018, but Petra met her second husband in 2017. They went for their first date to Tao, a posh restaurant in L.A. Their second date was a trip to Dubai.[iii]

I don’t recall what Lisa and I did on our second date, but it certainly didn’t include flying to a different country. This is not meant to sound petty or envious. It’s to point out that having several luxury homes (Petra and her second husband paid over twenty-two million dollars for another home that was closer to her daughter’s school. She also owns an 18th-century Georgian mansion in London that “is being shopped around off-market for about $200 million.”) and traveling to exotic locales on a second date doesn’t stave off boredom. If you’re bored living a lifestyle that 99.9% of others can’t afford, then this world can’t satisfy you. Satisfaction won’t be found by obtaining something you don’t yet have. However, there is plenty of satisfaction, fulfillment, and contentment for those who understand that God and his kingdom are good enough for them.

C.S. Lewis wrote: “God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn – or the food our spirits were designed to feed on… God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”

The Prodigal Son’s disillusionment with the world isn’t just a parable; it’s the most common story in human experience. “You can find him in Pittsburgh, you can find him in Rome, you can find him in Athens; you can find him yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Always the experiment has the same dismal ending…How merciless the world is to those who worship it! How cruel it is to those who love it!”[iv]

These desperate souls are those who “are trying to get more out of the world than there is in it.”[v]

Whether they know it or not, everyone is looking for the God is good enough for me life. They’re just looking in the wrong places.

Who is the one person Jesus named a fool? It is this one:

“Then [Jesus] said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.’ And he told them this parable: ‘The ground of a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’ This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves but is not rich toward God.”

Don’t buy or build a bigger barn. Build a bigger life, a life based on the truth that you are good enough for God, and God is good enough for you.