Enough is enough!
‘My grace is enough; it’s all you need.’
(2 Corinthians 12:9 MSG)
We all know that feeling when enough is enough!
You might feel it when you’ve dined at an all-you-can-eat buffet and have consumed more calories in one meal than you usually would in a week … and you can’t get up from the table … Or maybe it’s when someone is making you laugh so hard that tears flow and your sides ache and you just need to stop and take a breath …
Or what about that point of exasperation when the demands of life come thick and fast, one after the other, heavier and heavier, and we get to that point when we feel we just can’t take any more …
Enough, by definition, is ‘as much as is required’ – an adequate amount. And yet, ironically, we often use ‘enough’ to mean ‘less than’ or ‘more than’. ‘I am not tall enough to reach that shelf in the supermarket’ is something I may say, or ‘I’ve had enough of this cold – I just want it to go away!’
All of us will have been through times in our lives when, as Christians, we may have questioned the ‘enough-ness’ of God’s grace – when it has appeared less than we need it to be in the circumstances we are facing. Rather than trusting that his grace is enough, we strive of ourselves to make things happen, to put them right, to push through until we find what we think we need.
But God’s promise is that his grace is always enough – and nothing we do can make it be anything other than enough. All he asks of us is to receive his grace as a gift, to rest in the sufficiency of it, to trust that it is enough. But for most of us, at times that is easier said than done!
The Scripture text that is the inspiration for this year’s Riverbank conference is taken from Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth:
‘… my grace is enough; it’s all you need.’
(2 Corinthians 12:9 MSG)
When God says he is enough, he means what he says! Enough is always enough; it cannot be any less and will never leave us wanting for more.
The concept of God’s limitless grace is awesome but also a challenge for our faith. In these very uncertain days, there are many areas of life that give us cause to worry if we’ll have enough. Let us hold on to the truth that God will always be enough, whatever our circumstances.
As Annie Johnson Flint writes in the song ‘He giveth more grace as our burdens grow greater’:
‘His love has no limits, his grace has no measure,
His power no boundary known unto men;
For out of his infinite riches in Jesus
He giveth, and giveth, and giveth again.’
(SASB 30)
In her book When strivings cease, Ruth Chou Simons writes this:
‘If, as Christ followers, we were to cling to what is true about God’s faithfulness, forgiveness, and [grace], we’d be unstoppable for the Kingdom of God.
‘Unstoppable in our ability to comfort others rather than be absorbed in ourselves.
Unstoppable in using our God-given gifts without comparison and self-assessment.
Unstoppable in proclaiming where our hope comes from to a hopeless world around us.
Unstoppable in offering others the same grace we’ve received from God.
Unstoppable in mercy.
Unstoppable in speaking a kind word to someone who deserves otherwise.
Unstoppable in living life to the fullest and wasting nothing, not even our suffering.’
May today each of us be unstoppable in living life to the fullest because we cling to the truth that God’s grace is always enough.
