Embrace Your Limits

When we understand and embrace our limits, we see God clearly and are freed to flourish.

Maybe it’s because I’m a keen Instagrammer or maybe it’s an effect of getting older, but I’ve become quite partial to pretty flowers. So, although Jen Wilkin’s None Like Him is written with women in mind, the flowers on the cover actually attracted me! Yet the truths about God and applications for us within this book are certainly applicable to women and men.

Women often have to read books written with men in mind, so maybe us men should read more books written with women in mind?

Anyway, None Like Him explores ten ways that God is different to us. He is infinite, self-existent, immutable, omnipotent. Each chapter is biblically based with real life illustrations in the honest and authentic way Jen Wilkin comes across on the Knowing Faith podcast (highly recommended!).

Each chapter also examines how we attempt to be just like God, with damaging consequences. Just like in the Garden of Eden, we naturally desire to go beyond our limits and rival God himself.

But if we understand our limits, not only do we see God for who is he is more clearly, but we can live a more flourishing life too.

If you believe in God or not, embracing the following three limits will help you flourish in life.

Non-omniscient

God is omniscient: he knows all things, has all knowledge, and all knowledge comes from him (Isaiah 40:28).

Yet we certainly do not know everything — even if we like to think we do. Maybe this has been exasperated by the internet age: now we think we can read a Wikipedia page or blog post and become an ‘expert’.

To stay ahead, we fill ourselves with reading online, learning skills through online courses, reading books, scrolling through Twitter. We must know everything to show our worth! Wilkin calls it “an all you can eat buffet of knowledge” and comments that we are “bellying up the buffet line” and moving from healthy learning to information gluttony.

We are trying to learn more than our brains have space, or use, for.

Embracing our non-omniscience means we are freed to focus on a few things that truly matter, and leave other things to other people. Let’s not be afraid to say “I don’t know” or “let me ask someone else and get back to you”.

So decide what your priorities are and focus on those: maybe it’s a skill, or the Bible, or investing in a relationship. We can aspire to become an expert in what we know, and humble ourselves to admit we don’t and can’t know everything.

Non-omnipresent

“All of God is fully present in all places past, present, and future” explains Wilkin. It’s not so much that he is present everywhere, but that he is unlimited in his presence.

“Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?’ declares the LORD. ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth?’ declares the LORD.” (‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭23:24‬)

Yet we are certainly limited in presence, even though we try to be everywhere.

Maybe it’s the very millennial trait of preferring a text or email than a phone call or face to face — we prefer to be where we are with the feeling of interacting with someone else elsewhere.

Or our attempts to multitask and do lots of things all at the same time (I am particularly bad at this). Double screening is a common example of this, like scrolling Twitter whilst watching TV.

Or it could be our increasing reliance and comfort with video call meetings and church services (even though this is sometimes necessary, of course). The essence of being somewhere else when you can be sat at home in your PJs is just not the same.

If we embrace our single-presence existence, we can be fully where we are without distractions, and give full relational attention to those we are with.

The more we try and spread ourselves, the less we can give to where we try to be.

Non-eternal

God is the one “who was, who is, and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8). He is the uncreated one, who has no beginning and no end. He is never early or late but does everything in perfect time.

Like children, we can’t see much further than the here and now, especially when it comes to eternity. We think we know exactly when something should happen and get frustrated when it doesn’t.

Most of all, we almost always, by default, assume invincibility — that we will last forever. But of course, this isn’t true.

If we embrace our finite existence, we can find the right priorities in life and won’t take them for granted.

As Wilkin suggests, we can let go of the past and avoid regret and sinful sentimentality. We can let go of the future, when we worry about what might be to come and sinfully anticipate an ideal future that never will.

Let’s make the most of where we are, in the here and now, and get to know the eternal one who was, who is, and who is to come.