By Rosalind Jukic
Have you ever grabbed your Bible and prayer notebook, sat down and suddenly felt you weren’t good enough to pray?
Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve really prayed or read your Bible. A good long while.
Maybe just yesterday you blew it and did something you know offended God, and now you feel totally unworthy to talk to Him.
Maybe you ran into someone at church who has been walking with God for a long time, and you look at yourself, compared to her, and you just don’t feel like you measure up.
This week in our Good Morning Girls’ study through Psalms 1-50, we read this passage:
Who may ascend the hill of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart; who has not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully (Ps. 24:3-4).
We read that and think, “Yep, I knew it. I’m not good enough to enter God’s presence because I have broken so many of God’s laws!”
Can I tell you a secret? So have I. So have all of us!
James 2:10 says that if you break even one of God’s laws, you’re guilty of them all, because they’re not individual laws, they are one law. You’re guilty of breaking the whole law.
And that could be so discouraging—because literally no one on Planet Earth has any hope of ever being good enough to enter God’s presence. None of us has clean hands.
The concept of clean hands is a legal term meaning that you stand before the court completely innocent. There is no wrongdoing that the court can accuse you of.
No matter how good we are, we will never be that good. None of us has a clean heart.
So when you don’t feel good enough, begin meditating on the eight war-room verses below to remind yourself that the blood of Jesus makes you good enough!
8 War-Room Verses for When You Don’t Feel Good Enough
1. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; your walls are continually before Me” (Isa. 49:15-16).
2. “I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Phil. 1:6).
3. “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities nor powers, neither things present nor things to come, neither height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38-39).
4. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless before Him in love; He predestined us to adoption as sons to Himself through Jesus Christ according to the good pleasure of His will, o the praise of the glory of His grace which He graciously bestowed on us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:3-6).
5. “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirits that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs: heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified with Him” (Rom. 8:16-17).
6. “For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34c).
7. “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Rom. 8:1).
8. “Look at the birds of the air, for they do not sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns. Yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they?” (Matt. 6:26).
The writer is a missionary living in Croatia. She and her husband and her two boys live in the country. She holds an associate degree in practical theology and is passionate about discipling and encouraging women.
This article originally appeared at rosilindjukic.com
