“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do” is maybe the most relatable passage in Scripture for me. If I could toggle off every negative thought process and impulse, I would be in great shape—though I suspect I’d find some way to complicate things anyway, just as we all would. (Yes, you would have eaten from the tree with Adam and Eve at some point.)
One particular thing that plagues me is the idea of sufficiency in Christ, that I am enough in Him and He delights in me. The paradox is that knowing and feeling are at times opposed to each other. I know that God delights in me, but feeling can be a different story. Theologically, I can assent to my own belovedness; psychologically, it’s another matter entirely. The gap between these two realities is where doubt takes root.
This struggle is particularly slippery because when we think about hating the things we do, we usually imagine more active sins—anger or lust, where there’s a clear beginning and end. But when your mind is plagued with thoughts of distance from Christ, it becomes a malaise that slowly infects your entire psyche. With anger, you can demonstrate freedom by not being angry; with lust, by no longer being drawn to it. But these deeper doubts? They linger and whisper. They masquerade as realism, as spiritual maturity, as honest self-assessment. That’s what makes them dangerous.
The text to examine here is Ephesians 3:16-21:
I pray that out of His glorious riches He may strengthen you with power through His Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.
If Paul ever offers a formula, this is it: grasp the dimensions of Christ’s love, and you’ll know a love beyond comprehension, and thus be filled with God’s fullness. The mechanism here isn’t self-help—it is displacement. You do not cure doubt by arguing with it. Instead, you cure it by filling the space it occupies.
That sounds pretty good, right? I have the thought here of darkness and light unable to occupy the same space—the fullness of God displacing thoughts of inadequacy and all the other things we hate doing, because we’d simply be consumed with God. This isn’t denial or avoidance. It’s a kind of sacred preemption: you can’t harbor both simultaneously.
That’s all I have for today. I’m praying earnestly for you to know this love. Would you pray for me?
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