In this episode of the In Touch Podcast, we delve into the seemingly unsettling feelings of inadequacy that touch every person’s life. Charles Stanley explores how feelings of not being enough can linger like a cloud over us, often impacting various aspects of life, including career, parenting, and social relationships. However, there is hope. Through the lens of Apostle Paul’s teachings, we uncover the hidden strength in acknowledging our weaknesses and learn why embracing our inadequacies can be pivotal for spiritual growth.
00:00:01 Introduction and Apostle Paul’s View on Weakness
Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, December 8th. It’s natural to highlight your own strengths, but that wasn’t the case with the Apostle Paul. He boasted of his weakness. Stay with us to see how that attitude is key to usefulness for all followers of Christ.
SPEAKER 01 :
Feelings of inadequacy are rather uncomfortable feelings and oftentimes very painful. And all of us have felt inadequate at some time or the other. And in fact, there’ll probably never come a time in your life when you won’t feel inadequate about something. Maybe here, maybe there, maybe not very often. But the tragedy is that so many people live their entire lives feeling inadequate. They go through life with that feeling. It’s like a cloud hanging over them. And about the time they think they have it just about finished and everything is under control and they feel adequate, something comes along to remind them that after all, they’re not all that adequate. at all. So when I think about all the different ways and different things that cause people to feel inadequate, I think, for example, serving the Lord is certainly one of them. And if somebody asked me if I felt adequate to do what I do, I would have to say, no, I do not. because God never intends for us to feel like we got it together. And so oftentimes people feel inadequate when there are reasons to feel that way, sometimes when there’s not a reason. Then I think people just feel inadequate about being parents. When the truth is that many of those parents are very adequate because they know the key to adequacy. They are adequate to raise their children. Sometimes it’s just social relationships. People just don’t feel adequate to meet other people. It’s something deep down inside of them. Maybe something happened back there when they were children. And their parents said, you’ll never amount to anything. Or why don’t you be like your brother? Or why don’t you look like your sister? You can absolutely destroy someone with those kind of comments. And so they grow up feeling inadequate. So what I want you to do is I want you to take your thumb and I want you to look at it. God didn’t give any two of us the same thumb. He didn’t give any two of us the same anything. You are a unique person. There is nobody in the entire world like you. Therefore, don’t compare yourself with somebody else. It’s unfair. You may look like somebody else in different ways, but the truth is you’re a unique person. And so sometimes we don’t feel adequate because we don’t think we look like, we don’t measure up, and so therefore we have these feelings of inadequacy. Now sometimes When you think about feeling inadequate, you will probably be able to come up with some reason and say, well, here’s the reason I don’t feel adequate. And I do understand that, that all of us at some time or the other will have those feelings. Now the question is this, is it good or bad? And a second question is this, can a person be happy and contented and have joy in their life and still feel inadequate? Or does this feeling of inadequacy just destroy all of that? If I’m feeling inadequate, does that mean that I can never be happy, contented, joyful, have peace in my life? Or am I always harassed by this feeling of inadequacy? So, let’s just define what that means. Inadequate simply means this, and that is I’m not equal to what is required of me. To feel inadequate means I’m not equal to what is required of me. So, what we do, we look at other people and we think we ought to be like them. And so, since we don’t feel like we are equal to being like them, we have these feelings of inadequacy. So, we heap a lot of this on us. There’s no question about that. And so, what we have to ask is, what does God say about inadequacy? Because, you know, the world’s got its opinion. Be like this. They’re going to pour you into a mole. What does the Word of God say about adequacy, inadequacy? Can any good come out of it? So I want you to turn, if you will, to 2 Corinthians chapter 3. And Paul makes a very clear statement about adequacy and inadequacy here, and I want us to see and to answer that very question. Is there anything good that can come out of this? Because I want to talk about the fact that inadequacy, is it a barrier in our life, or can it be a blessing in our life? And so look at this third chapter, if you will, and what Paul is doing, and he’s writing about his feelings about it. And here’s what he says, beginning in verse 1. Are we, he says, beginning to commend ourselves again? Do we need in some letters of commendation to you or from you? And what he was saying is this. The Christians in Corinth, some of those folks are living a godly life, and people are criticizing the Apostle Paul. And what he was saying is, listen, we don’t need any letters to introduce. He says, your life is an introduction, and your life is testimony and witness of the work that they have been doing. So he simply says, Now listen to what he says, we have through Christ toward God. Now here he’s speaking of confidence, and then he says, not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God. And then the sixth verse says, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the Spirit. For the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Now, what Paul is referring to here as he speaks about adequacy and inadequacy, he’s coming quick to remind the Corinthians that he’s not bragging. This is what God has done in their lives. So, in light of that, what I’d like for us to do is to look at this whole issue of inadequacy and then answer the question, is inadequacy always bad? Can it be good? What’s good about it being, feeling inadequate? And secondly, In the whole issue, how do you move from feeling inadequate to feeling adequate? And at the same time, have a spirit of humility, have a peace and joy and contentment in your life. So, let’s begin with this first area here. And the first thing I want us to mention here is this. that feelings of inadequacy are oftentimes barriers to our experiencing God’s plan, His best for our life, His purpose for our life. And so, if inadequacy is a barrier, it’s a hindrance, it’s keeping us from knowing and experiencing God’s best in our life. So, if that’s true, then we have to deal with it. And oftentimes that is true. How can I experience God’s best in my life when I don’t even feel qualified, listen, or even feel worth being blessed by God? These feelings of inadequacy can be devastating to us. Now, what I want us to look at here is this. Paul confesses his inadequacies here, and that’s prompted by several things. And if you’ll notice in this fifteenth verse of the second chapter, listen to what he said. He said, For we are a fragrance of Christ, and we’ll explain that. We are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing. To the one an aroma from death to death, to another an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things?” Who’s adequate? Here’s what Paul was saying. He says, as a believer, that you and I are like an aroma. Listen, think about this. When you’re walking in the Spirit of God, you’re a child of God, here’s the aroma of your life. There’s a sense of peace and love and joy. and contentment and gentleness and kindness and patience and self-control in your life. The people who watch you, the people who listen to you, you know what? They sense that. It’s like an aroma. There’s something about you that is attractive. No one has the power to create that. That is an overflow of the life of Jesus within a person. And he’s simply saying here on the one hand, this sense of inadequacy he has, he’s looking at what God’s been doing in his life. People’s lives have been changed. They’re being transformed. The church is growing and God’s working. And even in Corinth, that wicked, vile city, he says God is doing some awesome work there. And he says, who’s adequate of this? Paul says, I could never take credit for this. Whenever you find a child of God taking credit for what God is doing, you see arrogance and pride and eventually a fall. And so, Paul is just making the point here, who is adequate for these things? And he simply is implying that he’s not. Then when he comes down to this other part, he’s saying to the Corinthians here, he says, you know, we can’t take advantage of what God is doing in their lives. And so, on the one hand, Paul feels very, very inadequate because he’s looking at things, listen, in reality. that no man can convert another man. No person can transform someone else’s life. Have an influence, yes. Have a tremendous influence. But it is the work of God. And therefore, Paul is saying, when it comes to the transformation of people’s lives, when it comes to the wicked, vile, sensual city of Corinth and the things that were happening that were good, he says, who’s adequate for this? Nobody can do it. So here’s what I want you to see. Your feelings of inadequacy are legitimate. There are things we’re inadequate for. For example, if a schoolteacher came up to me this morning, as one did, didn’t say this question, asked me this question. But if a schoolteacher came up to me today and said, look, I teach calculus and tomorrow morning class starts at nine, I want you to teach. Forget it. Because I’d have to say, I am totally inadequate, untrained, unfit, can’t do it because I couldn’t. I’d be totally inadequate to do that. If I handed you my Bible today and said, look, you’ve been coming to church for twenty-five years, come up here and finish your sermon. Well, you would probably laugh, fall out, faint, whatever it might be. But it’s not that you don’t know the truth, it’s just that at that moment, at this season of life in your time, you’d feel inadequate. So what I want you to notice is this. It’s not a sin to feel inadequate. The sin comes in what I do with my inadequacy. Because we’re all going to feel that. Is it wrong to feel inadequate? No. Is it a sin to feel inadequate? No. Is it absolutely necessary to feel inadequate? No. Is it going to happen? Yes. They’ll never reach a stage in your life where You will never feel inadequate about something. So is it good or is it bad? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good. Depends on how you respond. And what Paul is saying here, he’s simply telling us what is making him feel inadequate. When he sees the awesome work that God is doing, then he says he feels inadequate about it because he knows it’s something that God is doing. Now, one of the things that caused Paul to say what he said was this. And that is the awesome work that God had done in his life. So he’s feeling this inadequacy and writing about it because, first of all, he knows he couldn’t do it. And second, when he looks in his own life and sees where he was, where he’d been, what God had done in his life, his whole attitude about it. You see, here’s what Paul learned. Here’s the key. Paul learned to look beyond his inadequacy to the adequacy of Christ who lives within him. And this is the key. You can feel inadequate, but you and I have to learn to look beyond our inadequacy to the adequacy of Christ who lives within us, who promised to enable us to work in our hearts, that whatever He called us to do, He would enable us to do it. So when he says, at this point, when he says, who, who can be adequate for these things? And he knows that he could not. Now, remember what he says in Philippians 4, 13? It almost sounds like a contradiction. He says, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. He did not say I can do all things, but Paul had learned that in Christ Jesus, because of His relationship to Him, that He could do anything that God called Him to do because He’d learned this principle. Listen, whatever God requires of you, God will enable you to do. Whatever He calls you to do, He assumes responsibility to give you the resources to enable you to do it. So therefore, while feelings of inadequacy are legitimate, We don’t just stop there. We don’t let feelings of inadequacy slow us down. We don’t let those cause us to miss the blessings of God, God’s best, His plan, His purpose, His future for your life. We’re all going to have those feelings, but how do we respond? So when Paul looked at all of this and recognized how God was working in his life and that it was God working in him and through him, what motivated him? This is one of the things that motivated him, and that’s this. He looked back to see what God had done in his life. He looked back, for example, to the Damascus Road experience. Here he was, as he said himself to Timothy, an aggressive persecutor, an aggressive persecutor of the church. And then God struck him down, blinded him, and put him away a few days to just think. And what happens? When he looked back to realize that God transformed him as a sinful, a sinful, aggressive persecutor of the very Christ whom he now believes, he recognized and understand his total inadequacy to ever become that. It had to be an awesome, miraculous work of God. And the truth is the fact that God saved you is a miracle. The fact that He saves any of us is a miracle. It’s an expression of His love. Then, of course, Paul also recognized that when he realized that the Holy Spirit came upon his salvation in him to endue him, enable him to no longer be the Saul of Tarsus, but now Paul the apostle. Listen, Paul never got over the fact, he was always in a state of wonderment about this, that holy God could call this sinful, vile man who was trying to persecute God in the flesh, eliminate Christianity from the earth of his day, and the fact that God would love him enough to do that. He never overcame that. What did he say in his last days? He said, I’m chief among sinners. I’m chief among sinners. That is, he saw himself in that light, inadequate because of what God had done in his life. And then, of course, to be able to know the resurrected Christ and to be able to receive these awesome revelations over and over and over again, when he wrote, for example, from the prison. And he wrote Romans, for example, and Colossians and Ephesians and Galatians, and his letters to Timothy and Corinthians. All of these, the awesome work of God in his life. He was overwhelmed by that. When God gets a hold of your life and you begin to walk in obedience to Him, there are no limitations to what God can do in your life. Paul speaks of this with, he says, confident now. And also, he says, he asks the question, who also made us adequate as servants of the new covenant? And he answers this, who this is? It is the Holy Spirit. It is Jesus Christ. And so as he calls upon the Lord Jesus Christ, he has had experience after experience after experience. And what’s happened? Going through all that persecution, being jailed, being beaten, stoned in Lystra, left for dead in the streets, all the things he’s been through. And you ask him, Paul, are you adequate? No. always ready to give a, listen, to give a testimony of the Christ who lives within him. That’s why here’s what he said. He said, It’s no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives within me. And the life which I now live, I live by the faith of the Son of God. God had given him the faith to believe Him, to trust Him, and that no matter what he went through in life, What happens? He was watching God prove him adequate no matter what. Whether he was standing before some tribunal being accused, or whether he was being falsely accused by the Pharisees and the Sadducees, or whether he was there in Rome and he was debating the philosophers. All the people, for example, all their philosophers, all their pagan ideas. And here’s Paul, this aggressive persecutor of the church, now defending the very Christ whom he tried to remove. And so, Paul was overwhelmed with the awesome power of God in his life. When you and I look at our inadequacy, we likewise have the same, listen, the same capacity and the same privilege of claiming adequacy because of our relationship. Paul never spoke of, he never spoke of what he did or what he accomplished. He always spoke in terms of what Christ did within him. These feelings of inadequacy are absolutely legitimate because God has a purpose for allowing us to feel inadequate. And so when you look through the Scriptures and you see what God did here and you see how God worked in this person’s life and that person’s life, in light of all this we say, well, I don’t want to feel inadequate. Well, you go into it at times. But the question is, how do you turn that feeling of inadequacy into adequacy? That is a sense of confidence, a sense of assurance that whatever you have to do, you’ll prove to be adequate. Wherever you have to go, God will get you there. Whatever God wants to achieve in your life, you will be able to achieve it because of your relationship to Him. So, what is it today that you feel inadequate about in your life? What is it that you’re feeling? Well, you know, if I could just, if I could just handle this, if I could just learn a better way, if I could just, if I just knew how to handle my finances, if I just knew what to do about my children, if I just knew how to handle this relationship that I desire, if I just knew how to deal with my job in a way that I could be acceptable. In other words, all of us have those things in life we have to deal with. So, will we be defeated by inadequacy? Or will we learn the secret, learn the key? Will we be able to look beyond our inadequacy to the adequacy of the Christ who lives within us? Very important that we understand that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for listening to Inadequacy, a barrier or a blessing. For more inspirational messages like this one, visit our 24-7 online station. And if you’d like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.
