Alisa Childers & Allie Beth Stuckey: The LIES of the “You Are Enough” Mantra | Kirk Cameron on TBN

Alisa Childers and Allie Beth Stuckey join Kirk Cameron to break down the lies behind the “You Are Enough” mantra. What does the Bible have to say about where we find true fulfillment and what happens if we try to find that fulfillment within ourselves? Find out with these insightful viewpoints on Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN!

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I think that to tell someone you are enough, there’s nothing you need outside of yourself to be made complete or full all the tools that you need for yourself are are going to be found inside of yourself.
When we tell people that we’re really putting burden on them that they can’t carry.
Actually, the journey to trying to be enough to try to be enough for yourself or your kids or your husband, that actually depletes you.
It actually exhaust you.
So, Alisa, let’s jump into your book here.
Can you share, uh, a few of the other lies that you Unpack in the book?
Yeah. Well, I think one of the big ones, and we see this stitched on pillows.
We see it in books, and we see it in media.
And it’s the phrase you are enough or I am enough. Now that phrase, I get what people are thinking.
If there’s somebody in your life who has been spoken over with a bunch of lies.
Maybe they’ve been told you’re nothing. You’ll never be anything. And Yeah.
You kinda that’s the thing you wanna say to them. Right? You wanna be like, no. You’re enough.
And and I get why that feels encouraging, but let’s follow the logic down the rabbit hole a little bit.
I think that to tell someone you are enough There’s nothing you need outside of yourself to be made complete or whole.
All the tools that you need for yourself are are going to be found inside of your off.
When we tell people that we’re really putting a burden on them that they can’t carry because deep down, we all know I know that I’m not enough.
I know that especially when I I I this truth became really clear to me when I was a young mom with new babies of first time mom, and I just felt like I was blowing it all over the place.
I tell the story in the book where I I was just sitting at the mall one day just feeling like, is this ever gonna get easier and and how odd that message would have been to me if somebody would have just said, you know what?
You’re left. I would have said, no. I know that I’m not.
I know I’m blowing it all over the place.
And so what we’re actually telling people when we say you’re enough is we’re basically saying that you have to solve all the problems that you’re causing.
Uh, my friend, Ellie Besseki, uh, she wrote in her book, she said the self can’t both be the problem.
And the solution. And I think that’s such a great quote because we’re putting a burden on people saying, you have to solve all your own problems, and we know that we can’t because as Christians, we know that if we dig down to find those tools within ourselves, we’re gonna find a broken moral compass.
We’re gonna find a person who is, uh, bent towards sin, and we can’t fix that in and of ourselves.
That’s why we do need to go outside of ourselves to the person who really is an And this is why I love to give this message because the answer to I am enough is that Jesus is enough, and that’s such good news because he’s better than I’ll be anyway.
I like to think of it this way.
If we think about how the Bible talks about the righteousness of Jesus, of course, Jesus living that perfectly sinless life, that you and I could never have lived or accomplished.
And then that righteousness that he accomplished, when we trust in him, the Bible talks about that being imputed onto us kinda covering us, like, a garment covers a person.
And so when god looks at us, he doesn’t see arson. He sees the righteousness of Jesus.
So I say it like this. I’m not enough. You’re not enough, but Jesus is enough.
And when you trust in Jesus, his enoughness gets put on you so that when god looks at you, he sees the enoughness of Jesus.
And Jesus is way better than the best person who’s ever lived. And so wouldn’t you want that on you?
Wouldn’t you want to be covered in that rather than be scrambling around inside yourself to try to solve all these problems that yourself started in the first place.
Allie, you’ve read the book called You’re Not Enough, And That’s Okay. Escaping the Toxic culture of self love.
And then in the very beginning of the book, you talk about your own struggle with this issue of self love.
Can you just, um, recount that journey for us?
So I decided to write this book.
I think it was in 2018 because I just noticed that a lot of my fellow women and especially fellow Christian women were talking a lot about self love, self care, self empowerment, and it was just strange that I was hearing this from Christian women, and Christians are supposed to die to self.
And actually scripture said that in the end days, people will be lovers of self, and they don’t say that in a good way.
And so I kinda thought that this was strange.
But then when I I realized I was kind of looking back at my own journey in life, I realized that I had kind of struggled with this idea too.
Of wanting to be the solution to my problems, wanting to be enough for myself, trying to prove that I am self sufficient that I didn’t need god, that I didn’t need his rules.
And I think that’s what a lot of women are doing today when they are latching on to kind of the self love movement.
So for me, it was really it started in college.
And I was raised a Christian and a Christian home, and I really did take my faith seriously, um, end of high school beginning of college.
And then I, um, uh, a few things happen, which I talk about in the book that kind of sent me into this spiral of trying to figure out who I was, what my purpose was.
I had kind of a crisis of faith, my senior year of high school. I started uh, drinking too much.
I had bad relationships. I ended up having an eating disorder, and it was all really trying to find acceptance and wanting to be loved and wanting to be wanted and really wanting to be enough in trying to prove that I didn’t need a boyfriend that I had had.
I didn’t need god. I didn’t need any anyone. I could be fulfilled and have fun and be independent.
Without needing anyone else and certainly without needing any standards or rules.
And that obviously put me at a dead end.
Now thankfully, providentially, as I talk about in the book, there was a Christian counselor who rather than just, you know, coddling me and telling me a lot of the things that, unfortunately, women here today Um, she just said, look.
You are killing yourself through this eating disorder and through this destructive behavior.
And if you wanna die when you’re 22 or 23, keep it up, basically. And I didn’t want that.
Really, the image of that happening, the idea of that happening, and then kind of coming to terms with the fact that I was addicted to the lie the lifestyle that was simple, but that also wasn’t good for me.
And then I could’ve really heard the people around me. It really kind of stopped me in my tracks.
And then I had let sin get so far, and I had let things snowball so much even though I knew better.
And it really just filled me with a lot of shame.
And I know that shame is typically used today in a completely negative sense.
We’re told that we’re not supposed to feel ashamed of anything, but I actually think that we are supposed to feel ashamed of sin.
I think we’re supposed to be feel really sad and really grieved over sin.
And it took a Christian counselor telling me a really hard truth.
Um, and telling me what my destructive behavior was doing to kind of, I don’t know, awaken that shame in me.
And I really think the lord for that shame.
Like, I think the lord for feeling so guilty and so bad and so sad over just how far I had gone and his faithfulness to me and sharing that hard truth with me and bringing me back.
Um, and what I realized in all of that of course, later as I’m thinking through this these messages that we see on social media that you are enough, you’re good enough the way you are, you’re perfect the way you are, all of these things, is that I had actually bought into those lies.
And so I talked to a lot of different women as I was writing this book, like, did you have you struggled with these life?
Um, there was one woman that I talked about in the book.
She uh, was she was a mother, and she had 2 babies right in a row.
And, you know, for moms who are in that newborn stage, you’re in a thick of it.
It is so hard. And gosh, you ever know that you’re not enough.
It’s kind of in those days when you’re so tired and your energy is just zapped, but she said that she was turning to um, these Facebook groups that were telling her that, you know, all she needs to do is focus on herself.
All she needs to do is, you know, more self care and more self focus and really kind of talked about her kids as she, as they were burdens.
And she really turned to this stuff to try to make herself feel better.
Long story short, um, that didn’t work. She actually ended up being almost suicidal, and it wasn’t until again.
She kind of had this reckoning with her husband and telling him, you know, how she’s struggling and all of that, that she realized that actually the journey to trying to be enough to try to be enough for yourself or your kids or your husband that actually depletes you.
It actually exhausts you. Um, we’re not enough.
And the good news of the book is that that’s not just okay. It’s really good news.
Because Christ is our sufficiency. If we were an offer or salvation for sanctification for a strength, we would not need Christ.
But we needed him so much that he actually died on the cross a brutal death that he did not deserve because we’re insufficient.
Our sufficiency in all things, salvation, and otherwise comes from Christ and trying to find our sufficiency in ourselves or elsewhere is just going to exhaust us.