I don’t know where it came from, but now it seems to be everywhere. I hear it on podcasts and TV shows. I’ve seen it on T-shirts and social media graphics. A quick search for it on Amazon brings up hundreds of results, ranging from books for kids and adults to silver charm bracelets to hoodies of many colors to embroidered makeup cases to wall hangings and throw pillows and stickers to place on your rearview mirror. I’m talking about the simple, uplifting mantra for our times: “You are enough.”

Surely you’ve seen this too. But have you stopped to consider why this phrase, in these settings, is so popular? I see at least two implications.

Burden of Inadequacy

Insecurity about our worth is a massive problem in our culture. I’m not just talking about how wide the problem must reach if this phrase pops up all over the place. I’m talking about how deep the problem must go. How low must my self-view be if I get a boost from a statement made by who knows who, about no one in particular, and mass-produced for sale at suburban HomeGoods megastores?

This phrase’s popularity fits perfectly with what French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg argues in The Weariness of the Self, his history of depression among contemporary Western people. It’s not a book about how to cope with depression, all the mysterious factors that cause it, or how to get rid of it. It’s a book about what depressed people say about themselves, about how they describe their experience.

He believes depression has spread the way it has, when and where it has, because of the cultural expectation that it’s up to each individual to define the meaning and value of his own life. The defining feature of modern depression, based on interviews of sufferers, is a suffocating sense of inadequacy. Here’s how Ehrenberg puts it: “Depression presents itself as an illness of responsibility in which the dominant feeling is that of failure. The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself. . . . The depressed person is a person out of gas.”

“You are enough” is a symptom of a deep and pervasive problem in our culture. Many people feel relentlessly, hopelessly inadequate and long for relief.

Desire for Justification

Many people feel relentlessly, hopelessly inadequate and long for relief.

Humans have an inevitable craving for validation. We desperately want to measure up. We need to hear from someone else that we do.

The theological category for the validation we crave is justification. Think of it like a courtroom where a judge gives a verdict on your standing before him. The biblical vocabulary word for a statement like “You are enough” is righteous. To be righteous is to have right standing before the proper authority, to have a life that measures up. It’s being exactly what you’re supposed to be. When you’re righteous, you’re enough.

We aren’t wrong to crave justification. It’s supposed to matter to us whether we’re good enough. This is core to our humanity. But everything depends on where we look for this validation, on what basis, and when.

The only person authorized to tell us we’re enough is the God who gave us our lives in the first place. Right at the heart of the gospel is the promise that God already sees us as righteous because of Jesus’s righteousness received through faith. Paul says in Romans that “since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:1). That means there’s “now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8:1). Justification is something we already have if we’re in Christ, a guarantee of our righteous standing before God that we must remember and rest in every day.

And yet the gospel also looks forward. “By faith,” Paul writes, “we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness” (Gal. 5:5). Like so much of what God has promised us, justification has an “already” and a “not yet” dimension. Already by faith we’re righteous in God’s sight because of Jesus. But we’re waiting for righteousness too.

We desperately want to measure up. We need to hear from someone else that we do.

We don’t yet see ourselves as God sees us. For now, we walk by faith and not by sight. With painful clarity we see our failures, not the spotless righteousness in which Jesus wraps us.

On the day of judgment, we’ll trade our faith for sight once and for all. We’ll stand before God and receive publicly, unmistakably, and irrevocably what he has promised us already—his pronouncement of our righteousness in Christ. We’ll know from experience that we’re enough not because of what we’ve done with our lives but because of what Jesus has done with his. On that day, and only on that day, will we be finished wondering whether or not we measure up.