How to Have the Right Kind of Confidence

I’m half Chinese, and so I’ve grown up using chopsticks at every meal. It’s become a skill I’m rather proud of, actually, and I’ve had the most hilarious time trying to teach some of my friends how to use them. Once when I was in youth group, we were playing a game that involved picking up tiny beads with chopsticks. I was excited since I’m not one known for being good at games, and I boldly declared, “I use chopsticks every day, so this won’t be too hard.” The other people on my team cheered me and commented on how glad they were that I was on their team. When it was my turn, something inside me seemed to turn off, and my chopsticks couldn’t seem to get the right grasp on that little bead. One rather annoying leader started laughing at me and denying my claims of having good chopstick skills, and at the time I was pretty embarrassed. I managed to get the bead the next time around, but a part of me felt completely defeated.

That’s a pretty insignificant example, and looking back I shouldn’t have taken it so hard. But I thought this story would help demonstrate my point about confidence today.

Whether or not you are a super confident person (normally I’m not, unless apparently I have a pair of chopsticks in hand), we all have times where we know we are good at something, but when we go up to demonstrate it, we fumble. We forget. We can’t seem to perform the way we know we can.

That’s why I have a little issue with the term self-confidence. When we have extreme faith in our abilities, we end up feeling so much worse about ourselves when we have an off-day. We are suddenly full of doubt, even though we are human, and therefore bound to make mistakes.

I want you to have faith and believe in yourself. But I don’t want you to have complete reliance on that.

The reason is that because we are imperfect, we will never get something right 100% of the time. We can’t fully trust ourselves because of that.

But there is someone that we can have complete reliance on, and that’s Jesus. Jesus is perfect and never makes a single mistake. When we have confidence in Him, we don’t have to worry about not proving ourselves to others. Jesus doesn’t require us to please others– He only wants us to please Him.

The best part of having confidence in Jesus is that He can help us do things that we’ve never done before. We often have the most confidence in ourselves when we’ve practiced an activity numerous times or rehearsed a speech so much that the words are on the tip of our tongue. When we trust Jesus fully with everything we do, we don’t have to doubt ourselves when we make a mistake, because by Jesus’ perfect grace, we are still loved anyway.

So today, think of something that you were previously afraid of doing, but feel like God is telling you to do. Then, after praying, go out and do it. You don’t have to wait to have peace after it’s over. You can have peace now because no matter what the results are, Jesus has equipped you for them, and His peace can overflow in your heart.

Now faith is the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see.

Hebrews 11:1