You’re Not Enough—and That’s Good News!

“Your limits are good news,” said no advertisement ever. Instead, the mantras ring: “Push the limits.” “Don’t limit your options.” “The possibilities are limitless!” One organization, aptly named Lifehack, even worries we’ve been “conditioned to live within the limits of what the ‘average person’ can and should do.”

With the unprecedented opportunities of our modern world come unprecedented expectations. Adding to this pressure is the anxiety of a digital stage. Thanks to social media, our failures and successes are more public than ever. So even if efficiency grows, so do anxiety, depression, and—that great tyrant of our time—FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

There is biblical warrant for hard work and its promise. “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance,” Solomon taught (Prov. 21:5). The one who increases his talents is the “good and faithful servant,” Jesus said (Matt. 25:20–21). But our society’s opposition to limits feels different. It doesn’t feel like first-century farmers finding in Proverbs healthy warnings against being sluggards. It feels more like 21st-century meritocrats terrified of being average.

Notwithstanding the benefits of life hacks and new technologies, perhaps we need a new approach to our limitations.

Professor and author Kelly Kapic offers us one. In his insightful new book, You’re Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News, he turns this conversation on its head. Kapic argues that, rather than kick against our limitations, we should embrace—even leverage—them.

As a busy pastor caring for people in the busy area of Washington, D.C., I found Kapic’s five insights about human finitude especially insightful and helpful.

1. Your Limitations Are Not Necessarily Sinful

Our limits can leave us feeling guilty: Did I sin by giving in to fatigue at 9 p.m. instead of studying all night for the exam? Or, we may feel frustration: Why can’t I study all night as my classmates do?

Rather than kick against our limitations, we should embrace—even leverage—them.

Biblically, however, we are under no obligation “to be infinite—infinity is reserved for God alone” (14). Even the smartest among us has been hardwired by God to not know everything: “Where is the place of understanding? It is hidden from the eyes of all living” (Job 28:20b–21a). Even the most disciplined among us spend about one-third of their life asleep; only God will “neither slumber nor sleep” (Ps. 121:4).

Strive to avoid laziness, yes, but stop feeling guilty when you can’t do everything.

2. Neither Neglect nor Idolize Your Body—Honor It

We are embodied beings, and our bodies are where we live out faithfulness to God (Rom. 12:1). Our bodies are also where we feel acutely the limitations of humanness. Though aspects of finitude predate our fall (Adam and Eve depend on God for knowledge and provision even in Gen. 1–2), the present mortality of our bodies presents a stark experience of our limits—our “outer self is wasting away” (2 Cor. 4:16).

Perhaps this is why humans fluctuate between hatred of the body (e.g., Gnosticism) and idolatry of the body (e.g., modern advertising).

Our bodies are not to be despised or idolized but rather stewarded as good gifts. Drawing from as far back as Tertullian’s On the Flesh of Christ (ca. 200), Kapic shows that the key to rightly understanding embodiment lies in the incarnation. The incarnation is God’s “yes” to our bodies—Jesus has a body. At the same time, the incarnation is God’s “yes” to the limitations of the human body—even Jesus, as fully human, needed to eat and sleep and was susceptible to the full array of the body’s weaknesses and temptations (Heb. 4:15).

3. We Are Not Ourselves by Ourselves

The popular slogans “discover yourself” and “create your true self” are yet more expressions denying human limitations. We’re not ourselves by ourselves, but our identity develops out of an array of relationships. We don’t determine our family of origin, our ethnicity, our sex, or the epoch in which we live—all matters with “immense significance” in “shaping who we are” (75).

Our bodies are not to be despised or idolized, but rather stewarded as good gifts.

In this way, our relationship with God and his family, the church, becomes integral to our identity. Who we are is grounded in whose we are.

Rather than vacillating between self-made saint or self-destructive sinner, our identity can rest in the never-changing declaration of God’s Spirit within us—we are his sons and daughters (Rom. 8:14–15).

4. Time Is Not a Tyrant, but the Theater in Which God Works

Modern technologies like electricity and computers offer benefits but also threaten healthy patterns of life. One example of this is our shift from “ritual time” to “clock time.” Long ago, our sense of time was governed by the sun and seasons, and its steady passage was less foe than familiar friend. Now, time is a tyrant (121): as Kapic explains, “clock time and modern technology foster in us the belief that we can and should be doing something every moment we are awake” (129). Under such tyranny, we become less human and more machine (126).

The antidote is a twofold reorientation to the presence of God. First, we recall that the God who is present with us is not governed by time—he’s never nervous or rushed; he’s never out of time. Second, we recall that the God who is present with us has ordained to work through time.

From creation (Gen. 1–2) to redemption (Gal. 4:4), God works through processes that unfold in time. This is also the case with sanctification. God’s ways of working in us involve processes occurring over time. They take place both “behind the scenes, where the Holy Spirit renews our being apart from our conscious knowledge, and also in our conscious and repeated turning toward Christ” (164).

When we feel rushed, we remember that God is in no hurry; when we feel impatient, we remember that God is at work.

5. The Church Does More in a Day Than I Can in a Lifetime

We can experience what Kapic calls “activism fatigue.” Even within our churches, there are so many good ministries in which to participate, but so little time. We wish we were doing more.

But as part of the body of Christ, we are doing more—so much more. With keen insight, Kapic shows how human limitations fit within a proper ecclesiology. Because “we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another” (Rom. 12:5), an individual churchgoer like Kapic—or you or I—can rightly say,

Today, I am caring for prisoners in jail; I am evangelizing the disenfranchised in Nepal; I am praying over the sick child in the hospital; I am serving the recovering victims of sex trafficking; I am standing against racial injustice; I am caring for widows. And I am doing so much more. . . . How? I am doing all this because I am part of the living body of Christ. God’s Spirit has united me to Christ and, because of that union, to my sisters and brothers of the faith. We are one. (178)

When we wish we could be doing more for God, take joy in the thought of all we are doing—as the Body of Christ.

When we wish we could be doing more for God, take joy in the thought of all we are doing—as the Body of Christ.

These highlights merely touch the surface of a deep, pastorally sensitive, and at times theologically dense book. Kapic interacts with diverse thinkers ranging from John Calvin to John Paul II, from Marcion to Thomas Aquinas.

As modern technology pushes the boundaries of human possibility, we would do well to remember not only that we are not God, infinite and all-powerful, but also—refreshingly—that we don’t have to try to be God. We can ask for help when we need—help from God and his church. We can rest when we need it. We can let him shoulder the burden of everything from righting the world to getting us through this afternoon.

And perhaps we can learn not only to be “content with weaknesses” (2 Cor. 12:10)—our finitude and vulnerability—but also to see that God uses these very limitations as channels for his divine strength and rich blessings.