Confidence. Everyone talks about the importance of it if you want to reach your potential – in your relationships, your work, and your ability to fulfil your purpose in life. So it’s clearly important to become more confident.
Do we need confidence to accomplish God’s will though? And if we do, what should that confidence look like?
According to the bible, it’s not actually confidence in ourselves or our abilities that we need. Nor does confidence in ourselves ‘qualify’ us to do what God is calling us to do. God qualifies us. But we do most certainly need confidence – but that confidence is confidence in God.
In fact, confidence in God goes by another name you’ll be very familiar with – FAITH! The dictionary definition of faith says this: ‘complete trust or confidence in someone or something’. The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary describes faith as ‘trust that somebody/something will do what has been promised’. The same dictionary says of confidence, ‘the feeling or belief that one can have faith in or rely on someone or something.’ Notice the similarity? And didn’t God tell us to rely on {ie. lean on} Him? (Prov 3:5). Yes He wants us to have confidence – confidence in Him that He’ll do what He promises to do, and confidence in His Word, that it IS what it says it is.
Contrast this with how we’re supposed to feel about confidence in ourselves – Paul the Apostle, who had every external reason to be super confident because of his ability, academic prowess and privileged birth, says : ‘…. we put no confidence in the flesh, though I myself have reason for confidence in the flesh also…’ Paul the Apostle said he had more reason for confidence in himself than anyone else – yet he counted all those ‘reasons’ as rubbish, basically useless. He was born ‘on the right side of the tracks’. He had our modern equivalent of a master’s degree. He was born into wealth and privilege and status. He had every reason to be a confident, charismatic, ‘I’ve-got-it-all-together’ person. But he knew it wouldn’t help him to fulfil what God had for him. Yes God could use some of that education (if He chose to)when Paul reasoned with people to convert them to Christianity, but God didn’t need Paul’s education. In fact, Paul mentioned how often he would persuade others to put faith in Jesus through simple messages and God’s power rather than through clever argument.
Let’s look at someone else who had a lot of confidence. And what kind of confidence they had. David – a young boy who oozed confidence and optimism, when everyone around him was quaking with fear. Why was David confident when he stood before Goliath to fight him? And how many of us would feel that kind of confidence confronting someone more qualified, more experienced and of a higher ‘status’ than us, who was literally taunting us? (Think of your modern equivalent, let’s say someone who doesn’t believe in God, who is trying to bully you and intimidate you at work? How do you feel? Confident??!) How could David, a young shepherd boy, who’d never fought a battle against another person in his life, be so confident?!! He could because his confidence wasn’t in himself. He was confident of the covenant he had with God, and he was very confident in the strength, the might (and willingness to help) of that of his covenant partner.
In biblical times, if someone formed a covenant with you, that meant that your enemies automatically became theirs, and their enemies became yours. They would fight for you if anyone came against you. They would lay down their lives to fight for you! David knew this. That’s why he could say with absolute confidence, ‘Who is this uncircumcised Philistine who dares to come against the armies of the Living God?’ Circumcision was a sign of covenant. Goliath was uncircumcised – in other words, he didn’t have a covenant with God, which meant he didn’t stand a chance against David and David’s covenant partner, God Almighty. All of God’s might and power and strength, as David’s covenant partner, stood behind David when he fought against Goliath. He could not lose.
So if God has told you to do something, don’t worry about your natural ability. You’re not supposed to rely on it anyway. ‘It’s not by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit’, says the Lord. We are not supposed to be competent in and of ourselves. (2 Cor 3:5 Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence is from God.’) The New Living Translation says it this way, ‘It is not that we think we are qualified to do anything on our own. Our qualification comes from God.’ And another version, the Amplified says, ‘Our power and ability and sufficiency are from God.’
We all have weaknesses. So did every man and woman of God in the bible, many of whom did extraordinary things for God, even while full of weaknesses. When we know and acknowledge our weaknesses, we are far more likely to rely on God. And that’s when His power can go to work, He can anoint us with His grace (ie divine ability) to do the job. 2 Cor 3:5 says, ‘And when we are weak, that’s when His power can rest upon us and His strength can work through us.’ Without Him we can do nothing, but with Him, we can do anything!
In a world where we’re conditioned to base our confidence and sense of worth on our accomplishments, how many Twitter followers we have, the number of Facebook friends, likes or comments on Facebook, the clothes we wear, the job status we hold and the car we drive, it’s easy for us to forget that none of those things count to God, and none of those things determine our inherent worth as a person. Also that none of those things will qualify (or disqualify) us when God calls us to do something.
So the next time you feel unconfident {is that a word?}, take heart, don’t throw away your confidence (Heb 10:35)and take the action you need to take, knowing He is with you every step of the way and He is WELL ABLE to help you complete every task you have in front of you.
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