Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:00 — 4.1MB)
Have you discovered that self-confidence is very undependable? Just when you think you’ve got it down pat, it falls apart on you. Just when you need it the most, self-confidence seems to shatter. That’s been my experience.
I spent ten years building my life on self-confidence in my own achievements. I could list the successes I had in the business world during those ten years, and you might think I had done pretty well. I had self-confidence, but it kept falling apart on me all the time.
I thank God that my self-confidence was shattered many years ago because then I finally turned to my Savior and said, “I just can’t do it anymore. I’m a failure, I can’t cope, I’m an emotional yo-yo, I’m just a mess.” In spite of the successes I had stacked up in the business world, I was at the end of my self-confident rope.
Once that self-confidence was shattered, then I turned back to God. And then the God-confidence began and each day is another opportunity to grow in my trust of God and to operate now in his power instead of my own. But it began when my own self-confidence was shattered.
Paul wrote to the Philippians: “We are, remember, truly circumcised when we worship God by the Spirit, when we find our joy in Jesus Christ and put no confidence in what we are in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3, Phillips). He was reminding his Jewish brothers and sisters that outward rituals and signs are not the evidence of our relationship to God, but we are truly rightly related to God when we are Spirit-controlled, when we find our joy in Jesus Christ, and when we have no self-confidence.
I wonder, have you been on a misguided search for self-confidence? Though you know God through Jesus Christ, have you been running your life by the world’s principles, as I did for so long? Paul wrote to the Galatians: “ Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods. But now that you know God—or rather are known by God—how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again?” (Galatians 4:8-9).
Self-confidence can be an enslaving principle. We need instead God-confidence.