Garden of the LORD

Garden of the LORD

Friday, July 8, 2011

Confidence 101

I have a confession to make. At any given moment, if I am not careful, I could turn into one balled up mass of insecurities. While I want so desperately to be a fully confident woman, I am inevitably rocked by the ebb and flow of life’s hardships and the entanglements they bring. I am also unavoidably moved by the emotions of those I hold close my heart. It seems if they are having a bad day, then I having a bad day. Do I hear co-dependent?

Why do I put myself through all of this turmoil? Why can’t I just get my act together and not be moved by situations and other people’s issues? I am wondering if it is just plain old insecurity. I don’t like it when things are out of my control. I don’t like it when the tide of life’s issues is way over my head. My heart aches when people I love have hard heart conditions that I can’t remedy. To put it bluntly, I get insecure when I can’t handle things that come my way. My confidence wanes and I feel helpless.

Not too long ago, I came face to face with the reality that it was time for me to deal with my insecurity. I learned that my bent towards self-doubt wouldn’t just affect me it would affect everyone whose lives I touched. Many years ago, I had a Bible teacher who pointed out to me the importance of dealing with my weaknesses. He told me that you don’t reproduce what you know, you reproduce who you are. Woah! As an aspiring Bible teacher whose passion is to truly affect people with the word of God, I knew that dealing with my stuff was going to have to be a career choice and not just something that I could dabble in here and there. If I was going to make a difference, I was going to have to live the truths of God’s word until they became a reality in my life. So I set to work, with God, to learn how to become a confident woman.

The first thing I did was look up the word confidence in a dictionary and found one of the synonyms to be secure. I reasoned then that if a synonym for the word confidence is secure then an antonym for confidence could be insecure. My problem might not be that I lack confidence but that I am insecure. I realized that mustering up more confidence wasn’t going to help unless I dealt with the underlying insecurity issue first.

As I travel on my journey to becoming that confident woman (I haven’t arrived yet) I have come across scriptures that have prodded my understanding in achieving that end. Here is one of them;

And the people gained confidence from what Hezekiah the King of Judah said.” 2 Chronicles 32:8b

This is the kind of thing that sets my mind reeling. What could Hezekiah have said that the people would gain such confidence? Is it possible that confidence isn’t just something that you conjure up on your own? Is there something that we can actually say to each other to birth a more secure way of looking at things? It would seem so. Well then Hezekiah what did you say?

Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged because of the king of Assyria and the vast army with him, for there is a greater power with us than with him. With him is only the arm of flesh, but with us is the LORD our God to help us and to fight our battles.” 2 Chronicles 32:7-8a

In a nutshell, Hezekiah was saying that God would help them. While God might not actually take away the battle, He would help them through it. Hezekiah could be saying the same thing to us as we fight our battles.

“Be strong and courageous.”

- God will help you when you get that pink slip

“Be strong and courageous”

- God will help you when you receive that bad diagnosis

“Be strong and courageous”

- God will help you when your heart is breaking because of someone you love

“Be strong and courageous”

- God will help you when it seems life is against you

“Be strong and courageous”

- God will help you when it seems like you are failing

“Be strong and courageous”

- God will help you when every part of your body hurts and typing on a keyboard is painful.

It isn’t so much that I don’t have confidence that God can do great things, sometimes my doubt lies in whether He would be willing to do them for me. Could my habit of looking at life through an insecure lens spill over into how I relate to God? Am I insecure with Him? Could my insecurity lie in a deeply rooted idea (picked up somewhere along the way) that God isn’t really for me?

As I wrestle with chronic pain that often erupts into rather serious flare-ups that seem to be visiting in alarming frequency of late, do I feel as if He isn’t helping me? When circumstances seem too overwhelming do I fall into a familiar pattern of condemnation thinking that I blew it and God has left me on my own to deal with it? When my loved ones are fainting with their own individual walks with God, do I berate myself for not praying more and now God won’t help them? Or do I cast my insecurities aside in my relationship with Him, not look at what I see, but exclaim verses like:

I know whom I have believed and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” 2 Timothy 1:12

So we say with confidence, the Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What can man do to me?” Hebrews 13:6

So do not throw away your confidence, it will be richly rewarded. You need to persevere so that when you have done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.” Hebrews 10:35-36

Before I can conjure up the confidence I desire as a woman of God, I am going to have to seriously deal with the root of this fruit. If I want to be genuine in how I live, I am going to need some work in this particular insecurity. The only way I know to do that is to take these verses and repeat them until they become part of my belief system. I am working on it and good news, while I haven’t arrived, I am better then I was. I think that Bible teacher was right more then I knew back then. Its best I deal with my stuff.


When in his mercy God leads a soul in the higher path of sanctification, he begins by stripping it of all self-confidence, and to this end he allows our own schemes to fail, our judgment to mislead us. We grope and totter and make countless mistakes until we learn wholly to mistrust ourselves and to put all our confidence in him.                               
                                                       Jean Nicolas Grou

1 comment:

  1. This was really good! I can really relate to your point about trusting God's word for others but not so much for yourself. Hebrews 10:35-36 was one of the verses that I had put on my missing cards.

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