1 Timothy: When feeling inadequate

New Zion Bible Study Series

De: Rick Noyes

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Have you ever felt you were inadequate? Perhaps your family excels where you do not and you feel their expectations for you are too high, because you believe they have set the bar far above your abilities. It could be, your instructors in your educational endeavors have moved too quickly for you to demonstrate competency and because you are behind your peers, you feel the weight of inadequacy.Maybe you, like me, lack the eye-hand coordination to do anything but flounder in sports. I also lack the skill to draw a straight line, to sing on tune, to solve quadratic equations, to know when a comma or a period is used or to do anything else which makes me feel less competent than another who can do them with ease. My dad used to tell me, “There will always be someone better at anything you do in life”. It was a revelation of reality designed to help me cope with my own feelings of inadequacy, but rather than that truth making me feel better, it only made me feel like I was even more of a failure.We all have the desire to excel and be the best we can be, but the truth is, only a few know the kind of achievement resulting in the notoriety of their accomplishments and even they too feel inadequate. People often present an egotistical cover up, claiming to be the best and brightest, but I have learned over the years, people who do that are only fooling themselves.Do you know why we feel inadequate? The truth is we are. It is rooted in the very nature we are all subject to as sinners. The answer for this sorry state of inadequacy is to find our adequacy in another. For we who are called of God, it is the Lord Jesus Christ. However, even those called by the Father into a relationship through the Son, can forget that we can do nothing apart from our Savior. We feel like the task we are call to as God’s children to is too immense, too hard, too difficult for us. Then feelings of inadequacy begin to erode at us until we are as useless as we feel. The more we dwell on our inability, the more we doubt our effectiveness to be anything but a failure. It is a downward spiral that is hard to break.God’s family and God’s Word are the cure to feeling inadequate. I believe the letter to Timothy, which we are about to study, was written to help Timothy find deliverance from his feelings of inadequacy and to strengthen him to accomplish the task that Paul had entrusted to him. Therefore, this letter can likewise be for you and me when we feel inadequate.