I Am Enough! In Christ

The title I Am Enough! could easily be misunderstood if the final two words were removed. Christianity does not teach that human beings possess within themselves everything necessary for life, righteousness, or reconciliation with God. The gospel points us in precisely the opposite direction.

Our sufficiency is found in Christ.

Those two words move the center of assurance away from the self and place it upon Jesus Christ. The believer is not enough because he has finally become disciplined enough, righteous enough, knowledgeable enough, emotionally healthy enough, or spiritually mature enough. He is able to stand before God because he has been placed into Christ and now participates in a standing established by Another.

The devotional journey therefore does not ask readers to look more deeply within themselves for confidence. It repeatedly directs their attention outward toward Christ and then back toward the remarkable things Scripture declares to be true of those who belong to Him.

Christian experience changes continually. There are seasons of confidence and seasons of uncertainty, times of spiritual growth and times of struggle, moments when God’s presence seems unmistakably near and others when faith requires us to trust what God has said despite what we presently feel.

Positional truth gives the believer an anchor within those changing experiences. It describes realities established by God because of our relationship to Christ rather than realities created by our emotional or spiritual condition.

This does not make experience irrelevant. God intends the believer’s practice increasingly to reflect his position. But the order matters. We do not establish our position by successfully managing our experience. We learn to interpret and transform our experience in light of the position God has already established.

The thirty-three-day journey repeatedly returns to that distinction because much unnecessary spiritual insecurity begins when Christians allow a changing condition to redefine an unchanging identity.

Failure presents one of the clearest tests of whether positional truth has moved from theology into the believer’s actual thinking. When Christians sin or fall short of their own expectations, they may quickly begin defining themselves by what they have just done.

Scripture never asks us to pretend that failure is unimportant. Sin should be acknowledged honestly, confessed, corrected where necessary, and followed by renewed obedience. But none of those responses requires us to overturn what God has already declared about the person who belongs to Christ.

In fact, identity provides the proper basis for repentance. The believer can face failure honestly precisely because he does not have to protect himself from the fear that every failure destroys his relationship with God. He can acknowledge conduct that is inconsistent with who he is and return to the truth from which faithful living grows.

Grace therefore does not teach us to take sin less seriously. It allows us to deal with sin without allowing sin to become our identity.

I Am Enough! In Christ grows directly from the theological foundation developed in Born Into Victory. There, the thirty-three positional truths are examined as a biblical framework for understanding the believer’s identity. Here, those same realities become a thirty-three-day devotional journey.

Readers who want the broader theological framework behind the devotional can begin with Born Into Victory. Readers already familiar with those truths can use I Am Enough! to slow the process down and consider what each one means for daily Christian experience.

I Am Enough! In Christ is a thirty-three-day devotional study designed to help believers move from merely knowing biblical truths about their identity to learning to live from them. Drawing upon the positional realities developed in Born Into Victory, each day provides an opportunity to consider another dimension of what God has made true of the person who belongs to Jesus Christ.

The title is not a declaration of human self-sufficiency. Its meaning rests entirely upon its final words: in Christ. The believer’s confidence does not arise from becoming sufficiently righteous, disciplined, successful, or spiritually mature. It rests upon Christ and upon the new standing God establishes for those who are united with Him. The devotional invites readers to bring changing feelings, experiences, successes, and failures beneath the authority of that unchanging truth.