RR. How to Handle Your LIMIT

What do you do with a part of yourself you wish you could change? 

Maybe you feel limited by your personality, your abilities, your age, or something your body can’t do. It’s easy to compare yourself with someone else and believe that if you just tried harder, you could finally become enough.

In this episode, John Ortberg invites us to practice radical acceptance of our limitations. Moses, Gideon, Jeremiah, and Abraham each had reasons to think they weren’t the right person for what God was asking. Yet their limitations did not limit God. John explores how humility can open us to wonder, why Jesus chose to embrace the limits of human life, and what Paul means when he says we carry treasure in “jars of clay.”

What limitation have you been fighting? Today, consider what it would mean to offer it to God as a place where you might meet him.

Scripture: 2 Corinthians 4:6–7; Exodus 4:10–12; Judges 6:12–15; Jeremiah 1:6–8; John 1:14

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Music Credits:
Welcome to the World by Sarah Watson
License# MB01XUUTGU633PL

0:00 I can’t, but God can
0:47 What limitation frustrates you?
2:13 From rejection to acceptance
3:06 Why trying harder isn’t always the answer
3:54 Your limitations don’t limit God
5:10 Humility, wonder, and the sublime
7:18 The people God chooses
8:50 Jesus chose human limitation
10:20 Treasure in jars of clay
11:10 Offer your limitation to God

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

I want to start by inviting you to think about some area in your life where you have a limitation that frustrates you. I think about when I was growing up, I would look at somebody else who is more athletically gifted and feel like uh my lack of greater coordination or strength or speed was frustrating to me. I would look at somebody who is more talented than I was in music, or at Shane who was smarter than me. And then and then as I grew up, instead of going away, that sense of limitation in some ways even grew stronger. And I would look at I would speak, but somebody else who was a better speaker than me, or somebody who was a better leader than me, or a guy who could just get on a platform and command it in unbelievable ways. So for you, what's an area of life where you have a limitation and it frustrates you? Maybe that has to do with your body. Maybe it's aging. Maybe it's personality. Sometimes I find I'm basically an introvert. I look at extroverts, they just walk around and light people up and fill up rooms with energy and I think, oh man, I wish I could be that. And it's frustrating to me just the limitations of my own temperament. So pick an area and then think on that scale of acceptance from rejection, condemnation. I just I condemn myself for this, I reject this part of me, to resisting. Yep, it's there, but my negative emotions about it leak to tolerance. Okay, this is simply true. To acceptance, God has made me this way, and God must know what he's doing, to actual embrace. God, I'm so thankful that you have made me, that you chose to create me. Just the way where are you on that scale for this area? What would it like to uh be able to move one direction? Generally in our world, what we're told a lot, especially in our culture, in our society, is you can transcend your limitations, never be limited by any part of you, just try harder. And motivational speakers will tell stories of great athletes like Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school basketball team. The message being that he worked really hard and he became Michael Jordan. And if you just try harder, then you can do what Michael Jordan did. And if you're not Michael Jordan, you're not trying hard enough. But of course, Michael Jordan was not cut from his high school basketball team. When he was a sophomore, he played JV because he was only 5'10. His big growth spurt came the next year. And the point is, you and I are not Michael Jordan. And trying harder is not going to enable us to transcend our limitations. And actually, what we're invited to do instead by God is to offer him our limitations and to say, God, you have made me finite a creature, and I'm also broken by sin, so I'm limited in many ways. And the wonderful news is that our limitations do not limit God. Very often in Scripture, we will find God coming to somebody and wanting to use them, and they will object because of their limitations. God comes to Moses, go and speak to Pharaoh, and Moses says, But I'm slow of speech and slow of tongue. I'm not good at that sort of thing. I'm not a good public speaker. God comes to Gideon and says, the angel says, The Lord is with you, mighty warrior. Gideon says, I don't think so, because my tribe is the least in all of Israel, and I am the least in all of my tribe. God comes to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah says, No, no, no, I'm too young. God comes to Abraham, and Abraham says, No, I'm too old. Over and over, God comes to people, and there's this sense of, nope, I'm not good enough, not quick enough, not strong enough, not old enough, not young enough, not smart enough, not spiritual enough, not gifted enough. But here's the thing uh uh not only do our limitations not limit God, our limitations can become a place where we can meet God. It is people with a keen sense of their own limitations and uh their own fallibility and their own inadequacy that have a kind of humility to be open to God. I was reading an article yesterday. If you have somebody on your Christmas list that's the person that has everything and you're trying to figure out what to get them, I have the answer for you. This is by Henry Wismeyer, who's a writer, often focuses on travel. And he writes about how now it's possible to get a ticket for about half a million dollars or so. So some of you might not be able to afford it this year, for a ticket on Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic to fly into um outer space. Hey, somebody just got here, not sure who that is, but I gotta keep going because the sun just came up. Uh Wismeyer writes, philosophers call the type of sensory and aesthetic stimuli that provoke it the sublime. That is, we search for something called the sublime. Now, beauty is goodness and delight in the world that we can understand. The sublime is beauty that is beyond our power of understanding. There's something transcendent about it. And Wismeier writes, the appeal of the sublime has been a subject of conjecture and interpretation for as long as humans have pondered the stars. Existing at the intersection of joy and fear, the feelings it can elicit are best understood as a paradox, the sensation of feeling enriched by way of feeling diminished. In other words, it's my limitations and the humility that they bring that open me up to experiencing something grander than myself. And that's why buying a ticket for half a million dollars to go into outer space at a very carefully controlled flight where there's champagne at the end of it is not likely to evoke that sense of wonder, awe, and the sublime that we're searching for. Because we're not in charge of it. We can't buy it and sell it. It is not a commodity. We don't control it. Only the humble are able to experience it. And it's interesting that the Advent story, the Christmas story, involves people who are profoundly limited. Mary, of course, this young, powerless, impoverished woman, and Joseph, they were so poor that when Jesus was born, they could not afford a lamb to sacrifice as a thanks offering. The shepherd, shepherding was a very low status vocation. The Magi that came from the east, they were not even a part of Israel. They were religiously very limited. The one guy in the story that had kind of unlimited power and wealth and means, of course, was Herod, and he didn't really get to be a part of it at all. Advent is a time where we meet Jesus in our limitations. And we discover the sublime story of Christmas. Subliminal. Liminal spaces we talk about sometimes in our day. And those are quite literally those in-between spaces, a hallway in a house. Uh the liminal is a word that's associated with the word for limits or subliminal, sublime. I I'm here and the sun has now come up this morning because dawn and twilight are liminal spaces in time. And the Advent is liminal space. It is that space that exists when heaven is going to penetrate earth and they're going to come together, and they do that through Jesus. That is why Jesus is the most sublime human being that ever lived. He came as the bringer of heaven, the one who brought heaven and earth together. And he did it by limiting himself. To the reason that you and I can accept, embrace our limitations today is the great miracle in all of the Christian faith, the one that is at the absolute core and center of it, is the incarnation. God became flesh. And the incarnation was not God expanding himself, the incarnation was God limiting himself. God took on a human body, God became poor for us. Oh man, that's my friend Mark. He's on a tractor. So I'm just about done. But I gotta do this because now the sun is up. In the incarnation, Jesus knew what it was to be hungry, to be tired, to be weak, uh to have to work as a carpenter. He bled when he got cut. He died when he got crucified. God's greatest expression of love came not through expansion, but through limitation. God's most sublime gift of love came when God, the creator of everything, chose to limit himself. And so now all of heaven and earth can be a liminal space where heaven penetrates earth. And God does that not in spite of our limitations, but because of our limitations. Wonderful, wonderful text from Scripture for today from 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verses 6 and 7. Paul says, the same God who said, Let there be light, it comes up again every day. He did it with great beauty in the creation. That God also caused his light to shine in our hearts, so that we could see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay. So that we can be aware that the surpassing greatness is his and not ours. So today, whatever your limitation is, a body, of intellect, a background, of experience, of personality, don't deny it, don't resist it, don't live in frustration. Offer it to God. God, you knew what you were doing. Thank you, though you made me me. And just as Jesus in the incarnation embraced, accepted human limitation, and used that to live and die on a cross and become one with us, so God, I now humbly receive my limitation as the place where I will meet with you. I will have this treasure in my jar of clay. I'll see you tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

As you were listening to that teaching from John, what were some limitations that came to mind for you? Maybe let's just think back through that list John gave us. Limitations in your body, in your intellect, in your experience or your background, limitations in your personality. Did anything rise to the surface of your heart and mind? Let's bring it to God together right now. Heavenly Father, we bring before you our limitations. And God, we don't want to reject these things. Lord, we want to see how you plan to work through our limitations to bring love to the people around us. I pray for my friends today that they would learn what it means to embrace their limitation as a gift from you, knowing that nothing is impossible for you. I'm glad that you're here. My name's Tim, and at Become New, you can spend 10 minutes every weekday with Dr. John Ortberg to get a passage from Scripture, a helpful perspective on life, and a little practice that you can take with you into your day as you are becoming more like Jesus just one day at a time. To find out more information, head over to become new.com to make sure you never miss an episode. I encourage you to just text the number 51504. You can text the word new to 51504, and that'll make sure that you always get these videos whenever they're dropped. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time.