June 20, 2021
Don’t Throw Away Your
Confidence
Confidence!
A treasure of extraordinary value.
You must have it. Life cannot be
lived well without it. Lose it and all your water will be bitter.
What
is it? Confidence is the belief or feeling that you can rely on someone or
something. It is a feeling of certainty about the truth of something. It is
feeling sure of yourself and your abilities.
Think of it as trust. When you have
confidence in your boss, your pastor, your spouse or the team of people with
whom you work, it means that you trust them. Having confidence in yourself
gives you the self-assurance that you can accomplish a task assigned to you.
When
you are sick, you need confidence in your doctor, and in the medicine
prescribed for you. When your car or truck needs repair, you seek out a
mechanic you trust. In every arena of life, confidence is a necessary
ingredient. You will cease asking for the services of people in whom you have
no confidence.
Friendships
are often lost if we lose confidence in the loyalty of our friends. A
relationship is weakened if you begin suspecting that a certain friend is
speaking ill of you behind your back.
If
you lose confidence in the faithfulness of your spouse, your marriage will
begin to crumble. Cynicism may poison your mind if you lose confidence in the
integrity of your boss or your colleagues. Without confidence in your own
giftedness, you will not be able to work effectively. Confidence! You dare not
leave home without it.
Confidence
is no less important in the spiritual realm. Christian faith, for example, is
confidence in God. I ran across a delightful phrase in the New Testament book
known as Hebrews. In chapter ten, the writer implores us to not “throw away”
our confidence. And he explains why: so that our faith may be “richly
rewarded.” He goes on to say, “You need to persevere so that when you have
done the will of God, you will receive what he has promised.”
J. B. Phillips provides us with this helpful
translation: “Don’t throw away your trust now—it carries
with it a rich reward in the world to come. Patient endurance is what you need
if, after doing God’s will, you are to receive what he has promised.”
The
writer was addressing Christians who were being tempted, by persecution and
suffering, to lose confidence in God and in what he had done for them through
the sacrificial death of Christ. To persevere requires confidence in God, and
unless we remain faithful to the end, we shall not receive the rewards God has
promised. It blesses me to observe that the writer has confidence in the
Christians to whom he is writing for he closes chapter ten by declaring with
hope, “We are not of those who shrink back, and are destroyed, but of those who
believe and are saved.”
My
heart leaped within me when I read that! I thought, “Yes, Lord, I will not
shrink back when suffering and death tempt me to lose confidence in You. I will
stand firm with those who believe! So, I scribbled quickly a list of beliefs in
which I have the utmost confidence.
I
am confident that God is love. He is not the author of sickness but hurts with
us when we are sick. Because God is love, His mercies are new every morning –
and available to all who seek them.
God
is faithful. He keeps his promises, all of them.
God
is like Jesus. When I look at the Jesus portrayed by the Gospels, I am looking
at God, the Father of our Lord, and our heavenly Father.
God
does not lie. Satan is the father of lies. What God says, I can believe and
stake my future on its truthfulness.
God
can change a sinner into a saint. I know He can do it. He changed me. I have
seen Him change broken sinners into devout disciples of Jesus.
I
am certain the Bible is not just another book; it is THE BOOK. In it God gives us his guidelines for living. I am certain that
Isaiah was right: “The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God
will stand forever.”
God
sent Jesus into the world to die for our sins. God raised Jesus from the dead
and ever since the Risen Lord has invited all people of every race to come to
Him and be saved and be transformed into His servants.
Life at its best is life in Christ.
And that life does not end in the cemetery but continues beyond the death of
the body in the Father’s House.
In
all this I have unshakable confidence. If your circumstances are tempting you
to lose confidence in God, I know how that feels. I have been in that dark hole
of doubt. But Jesus led me out of that darkness! So, I plead with you, don’t
throw away your confidence! Keep it! Nurture it! Treasure it! Strengthen it! Hold on to it so
that one day you can claim the rich reward God has promised to all who believe!
You can do it – with His help! + + +