A friend of mine spent years as a high-school counselor. One day, a senior girl came into her office crying. She told my friend that her mom wouldn’t let her attend the college of her dreams. Even though she had been offered a scholarship for her high GPA and test scores, the remainder of tuition and fees would cost more than her family could afford. The girl would have to go to her second choice school instead.
Then the girl told my friend something that really stuck out to me. She said, “All my life, my mom told me I could do anything if I just tried hard enough. I tried as hard as I could, and it didn’t work.”
May I suggest that the idea of a limitless future is a recipe for disappointment?
Everybody has limitations. For instance, it doesn’t matter how long I practice, I will never slam dunk a basketball or win an Olympic long-jump event.
Until you learn to accept your limits, you will always be frustrated –especially in our achievement-driven culture.
Today’s word of the week is “limitations.”
Limitations usually have a bad wrap –nobody wants to hear about them. But limits are actually a blessing.
- Time-limits help us stay motivated toward finishing a project.
- Speed-limits protect us from reckless drivers.
- Limited lifespans encourage us to set priorities on what is important.
- Talent and skill limitations help temper our pride.
In the Garden of Eden, God created man and woman with limits. They had limited knowledge, limited power, and limited rule. Most notably, God limited them from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil –for their own good!
It wasn’t until Satan tempted them with the promise of unlimited knowledge that sin entered into the world.
In Genesis 3:5 Satan dangled the carrot of an unlimited, god-like state before Eve when he said, “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The desire to remove all limits from our life –whether limits of skills, abilities, knowledge, or morality- is a temptation to take God off of his throne and place ourselves in his seat. That is dangerous ground. Limits remind us that we are the creation and God is the unlimited creator!
So we ought to praise God for limits –and for the painful reminder of our limits when things don’t go our way. Why? Because they point us to our need for a savior. Christ’s power to save has no limits. There is no sin too grave and no sinner too foregone to escape the saving grace of Christ.
And, by the way, you will never come to fully embrace the blessings of your limitations until you trust in the unlimited sufficiency of Christ’s grace.