Good morning, brothers and sisters.
Let’s begin with a word of prayer.
Father, we come to You today, Lord, in humbleness, as children handling a very powerful thing. Lord, I pray that You would show us Your Word, show us Your life, and reveal Yourself to us today. I pray that You would make Your Word known through me today. I pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.
Well, I have a very simple message for today. Unlike the typical three points and a poem, I have one point and no poem. Brenda tells me that she likes nice, simple, short messages. I do not know if it is going to be a short message, but it is going to be a simple message.
Also, I want to issue my standard disclaimer: what I am up here talking about today is not something that the Lord has perfected in my life. I am up here because it is something the Lord is showing me, working out in me, and prompting me to share with all of y’all. So do not take this as me preaching to you; take it as me sharing with you something that the Lord is still doing.
What I would like to talk about today is a fundamental principle of the Christian walk: faith. But I am going to talk about it in a little different way. I am going to try to talk about it without using the word faith very much. Once we get into it, I will use another word for faith, and we will talk about that other word.
If you need a title for today’s message, you can call it “Confidence in Christ,” or maybe just plain “Confidence.” Let us begin by reading Hebrews 10:39.
Hebrews 10:39 says:
But we are not of them that shrink back unto perdition, but of them that have faith unto the saving of the soul.
Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.
Hebrews 11 defines faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen, as another translation puts it. That is the standard definition of faith for a Christian.
I do not know about you, but for some reason, that definition of faith has never really hit home with me. It has always kind of missed the mark. I have read it and thought, “I still do not know what faith means. What does this mean?”
Because of that, I want to talk about faith today using a different word. One reason is that it is not good to define a word by using the word in its own definition. But the real reason is that the term faith, I think, has a lot of confusion around it. I want to hopefully clear things up by sharing about faith while not talking about faith.
Faith is a word that we have all used a lot, and I have used it a lot in my Christian life. But it is like a lot of other spiritual terms: I have used it, but I do not really know if I know what it means.
When I was thinking about this, the famous words of Inigo Montoya came to mind: “You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.” Some of y’all know who Inigo Montoya is.
That is kind of the way I felt about faith.
There are a lot of reasons why I have never really liked the term faith. For one, it is too spiritual. Well, how can something be too spiritual?
It is used a lot in spiritual contexts, and I think it is often used in a rote fashion. We have an issue, or somebody has an issue, and we come up with a word—boom—we slap it on the issue and say, “There, that fixes it.” We do not really know exactly what that word means or whether it is even appropriate.
Doing it in a rote fashion—slapping the word on the problem—is a lot easier than actually seeking the Lord and seeking Him about what the right approach is, what the right thing to say is, and what the right thing to do is. When we are just slapping answers on people, I think that is when it becomes too spiritual.
Another gripe I have about the term faith is that it is overused. It gets applied all over the place for all manner of things, both in the church and by the world.
I think it is a strategy of the enemy to take a word that is rich and full of meaning the way the Lord intended it, and use it all over the place with a slight twist here and a slight twist there, until the original, true meaning is gone. It is obliterated in a blizzard of false meanings, and you cannot weed out the true meaning of the word. I think faith is a victim of that overuse.
One of my favorite bizarre uses of the term faith was when I heard this quasi-Christian, feel-good preacher say that we should have faith in faith. Think about that. What does that really mean? What has faith ever done for me? Did faith die on the cross for me? Did faith bring me new life? No—Jesus did.
When I was a kid, I had this game I would play—because I had a warped childhood—where I would take a word and say it over and over and over again until the word was completely silly. The sound of it was silly. That is kind of what has happened with faith. We have said it over and over again until it has become detached from its true and real meaning.
Another reason I have always had trouble understanding the term faith is that, for some reason, it has never been used with any context that I could understand or glean meaning from.
When you learn a new word, unless you are looking at it in the dictionary, you hear the word and figure out its meaning from the context around it. Faith was always kind of a standalone word: “You have faith,” or, “You have no faith.” It was never given much context.
When I was thinking about this, the example that came up was if I looked at somebody and said, “Alan, you have a lot of tadi. Michelle, you have no tadi. Tom Robertson—oh, ye of little tadi.” Does anybody know what tadi means?
Tadi means facial hair in Hindi. Alan has a lot of tadi. Tom does not have much. That is kind of how I felt about faith. It was used, but I could never attach enough context to it to understand what it meant.
There was really nothing concrete to nail the term faith to and really understand it. Maybe the Lord was never really revealing that to me. But another reason the term faith had never hit home was because it was too nebulous.
It always had a shifting meaning. I would think I saw it, grab for it, and it would disappear—like trying to grab smoke. I am a very concrete person, and I like yes-or-no answers. I could never really get a yes-or-no answer out of what faith was. That definition in Hebrews 11:1 never really struck home.
I think part of the nebulousness of the term faith was due to all the other misuses of the term floating around. Because faith was such a nebulous concept to me, it always had a measure of uncertainty to it.
When people talked about faith, it was always with some level of uncertainty: “Do I have enough faith? Is my faith strong enough?” I do not know. I am uncertain. And when there is uncertainty, there is fear. I am fairly confident that the Lord does not want us to be fearful.
We are not supposed to have a spirit of fear. But thinking about faith always brought uncertainty: Do we have enough? That put a wedge between me and my understanding of the term faith.
Recently, the Lord has revealed to me a different way to think about faith. He has given me a new outlook on this very puzzling term that has puzzled me all thirty-some years of my Christian walk. He showed me a different word for faith, and that word is confidence.
The term confidence has given me a fresh perspective on faith. This minor revelation came when I was reading Hebrews 10:39, and the words shrink back stood out to me: “We are not of those who shrink back to destruction.” What causes one to shrink back?
Lack of confidence. When you do not have confidence in something, you shrink back from it. If somebody asked you to go out there and fix the copier that is always broken, you probably would not have any confidence in your ability to do that, so you would shrink back from the duty of fixing the copier.
What happens when you shrink back? What does Scripture say happens when you shrink back? There is destruction. What happens when you have confidence and do not shrink back? There is the preserving of the soul.
Another example that came to mind was watching a child learning to catch a baseball. They have no confidence in their skill at catching the baseball. They stick the glove up, close their eyes, turn away, and wave their glove around. What always happens? They get smacked by the baseball.
I know that is a very earthly example, not real spiritual. It is not confidence in the Lord, but it is an example of what happens when you do not have confidence: you shrink back.
From here on out in the message, instead of using the term faith, I am going to try to use the term confidence when I am talking about faith.
What does the dictionary say confidence is? The dictionary has a lot of meanings for confidence, some relating to criminal activities, but there are two applicable meanings: a feeling of assurance, and a state or quality of being certain.
If we have confidence in something, we have assurance in that thing, or a state or quality of certainty concerning that thing. If we have confidence in a person, we are certain that person is going to do a certain thing.
So, when it comes down to it, I believe that faith and confidence are indistinguishable. That is my one point for the message: confidence is faith, and faith is confidence. The two are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.
The difference for me is that I understood confidence. I recognize confidence when I see it. I recognize it in myself when I have confidence in something, and I recognize it in someone else when they have confidence in something. It finally put legs on this issue of faith so it could walk around.
As I was meditating on this, I came up with several reasons why I think the term confidence works better than the other term—at least for me.
First, it is not spiritually overused. There are not people out there running around saying, “Have confidence in confidence.” It has somehow retained its original meaning. That may not seem like much, but any little ray of light in the dark is helpful.
Another reason I like the term confidence is that it gives shape and form to this nebulous concept. I could never put my arms around faith, but I know confidence when I see it.
Because I can recognize confidence, the Lord has been able to show me where I have confidence in Him, where I have confidence in myself, and where I have confidence in other things. As I have been reading Scripture and see the term faith, I go back and read it as confidence in the Lord. For me, that has revealed new meaning in Scripture.
Another reason is that confidence seems to be focused outward. For me, when the term faith was used, it always seemed focused inward: “Do I have enough faith? Is my faith strong enough?”
Of course, self-confidence is focused inward, and we will talk about self-confidence later. But the question of faith was always, “Do I have enough? Is my faith strong enough?” That is not where our focus needs to be.
With confidence, the focus is outward. The question becomes, “Can He do it? Does He have the ability to do it?” It changes from, “Do I have enough?” or, “Can I muster up enough?” to, “Is He strong enough? Can He do it?”
It is not, “Can I hold on to Him?” That is the wrong question. The right question is, “Can He hold on to me?”
Like Ed Miller said at the men’s retreat, if you are asking the wrong question, you are going to get the wrong answer. My perception of faith was causing me to ask the wrong question: “Do I have enough?” The right question is, “Can He hold on to me? Is He good enough? Can He do it?”
When we ask, “Can the Lord do it?” I think we all know what the answer is going to be. It is going to be yes. As I have mentioned in other messages, simple is good. Christianity should be simple. A question that has only one answer is a very simple question: “Can He do it?” Yes.
Really, the issue of confidence—and likewise, the issue of faith—is not how much we have, but in Whom we have it.
I do not think the Lord is sitting on His throne, looking down at us and saying, “Well, he did not have enough confidence when he prayed that prayer, so I am not going to answer it.” I do not think He is setting a threshold.
Confidence is, to me, kind of a binary term. If y’all deal with computer stuff, binary means either it is there or it is not there. It is either yes or no. There is no in-between, no maybe, no halfway.
Faith always seemed to be a halfway thing, whereas confidence is either there or it is not there. Now, I know the grammar police—Linda—will get on me and say that the Lord talked about little faith, and that there are measures of faith and measures of confidence. That is true.
But my perception has been that confidence is very much a binary thing, while faith was very much a measure thing that you may not have enough of to satisfy the Lord.
When it comes down to it, the Lord knows how much faith we have. He knows how much confidence we have in Him. When He puts our confidence to the test, when He puts us in a situation to test our confidence, He knows that we have enough.
He said that He will never put us in a situation beyond what our confidence in Him will bear. He knows that we have enough. For all intents and purposes, we have all we need.
As He tests us and that confidence is proven true in us, our confidence in Him is proven true. When that is proved, then we have a greater measure of confidence in Him.
It is like you have all the confidence you need one day, and then the next day you have more. It is like what Ed Miller shared at the men’s retreat: you are full one day, and the next day, as you see more of the Lord, you are fuller. It is a miracle of the Lord that we can be complete one day and more complete the next.
Confidence, like faith, cannot be faked. People can pretend they have confidence in something, but when it becomes shaken, when it is time to lean on it, you will see whether they have confidence or not.
Just like with faith, faith can be faked. But when it is time to really rest on it and lean on it, you will see what people really have their faith in.
Using the term confidence has opened up new areas where the Lord is showing me my life—where I have confidence and where I do not; where I have confidence in Him, in myself, or in other things.
Perhaps that is another reason I have never liked faith: faith has always been treated as a very spiritual thing, and we say that we only have faith in the Lord. But in actuality, we have faith in a lot of different things. We just do not call it faith because it is not real spiritual. But we have confidence in many things.
I am pretty sure that when I see confidence, I know it is confidence. That helps me see it in myself. I had a tangible experience of confidence this week.
On Monday, I did a very foolhardy thing: I took seven children, including a three-year-old, to King’s Dominion all by myself. That was not the confidence-testing thing. The confidence-testing thing was my daughter shaming me into riding a ride called the Drop Zone.
The Drop Zone lifts you 350 feet into the air and then just lets you go. Oh, I do not like heights—especially heights when I cannot see what is supporting me.
On this thrill ride, you are sitting facing outward, so you cannot see any of the machine behind you. Your feet are dangling free in open space, and all you can see is open space around you. You are looking out 350 feet above the ground, knowing that this thing is going to let go any second, drop you about 300 feet, and catch you at the bottom before you splat.
To ride this thing, I had to have significant confidence in a bunch of engineers I had never met—to know they could design this machine to operate thousands of times, be operated by unmotivated teenagers thousands of times, and safely bring me back to the ground.
As I was standing in line looking at people drop, I thought, “I am going to do that, but I have confidence that this machine works correctly.” That is kind of a silly, tangible example of confidence.
But there are a lot of less tangible and much more important examples of where we place our confidence.
One way we can see where we are placing our confidence is by what criteria we use to plan our lives—to look at tomorrow, next week, next year, or ten years down the road and plan our lives.
We are sort of like gamblers in that regard. We look at all the factors that are going to be there, put odds on what is going to happen, and have confidence that this is going to happen and not confidence that something else is going to happen. So we plan based on what we have confidence in.
Sometimes we have trouble planning. We do not know what to do. We have a lot of uncertainty. I think that is because we do not have confidence in anything. That can be a good warning sign: we are planning, but we are uncertain and scared. Maybe it is because we do not have confidence in the Lord.
If we have put our confidence in Him, then we will know the path to take.
When you are planning like that and assessing the odds of things, you can ask, “Why am I having confidence in that?” Is it just something of the world?
I know that I most often see confidence in my life as self-confidence and confidence in my own ability. I have touched on this before—my son calling me arrogant—and how my self-confidence can be a very dangerous thing.
The world tells us self-confidence is a good thing, that we should train our children from the crib to be self-confident. But self-confidence is basically leaning on yourself and trusting in yourself.
When we have confidence in anything but Christ, that confidence is misplaced. We can look at our lives and plan a year down the road, thinking, “I will have all this great ability. I am going to go to college, I will be really smart a year down the road, and this is what I should do with my life.” We are really placing confidence in ourselves and our own ability.
I think as we place our confidence in things other than the Lord, He is going to shake those things. He is going to shake us loose from them so that we will cling to Him. Hopefully, we will not be shaken loose and cling to something else, but will cling to Him—the one thing that is unshakable.
We can have misplaced confidence in our country. We may base our future hopes and dreams on our country being the same twenty years from now as it is today.
We can raise our children with the assumption that they will be able to live, worship, and work as believers in this country just as we have been able to for the past thirty or forty years. That may be misplaced confidence. Maybe we should be raising our children to lean completely on the Lord and to be strangers in this country.
We can have confidence in our jobs. We can plan, “I know I will have this job a year from now, so I can spend money on this brand-new car because I know I will have a job a year from now.” We are placing confidence in our job rather than really seeking the Lord and asking, “Lord, what should I do with this money? Should I buy this new car?”
We can have confidence in Christ. This confidence in Christ is manifested by looking at Christ and planning on Him being the same next week, next year, and next decade—planning on Him being better than He is now. Not that He changes, but that our knowledge of Him will increase.
The more we know of Him, the better He is. The more we know of Him, the more confidence we will have in Him.
That is the opposite of the other things in which we place confidence. The more I know of myself, the less confidence I have in myself. The more I know about the work environment, the less confidence I have in my job.
Anything in this world that is not of Christ—the more we know of it, the less confidence we will have in it. But Christ—the more we know of Him, the more confidence we will have in Him.
This issue of self-confidence, and seeing ourselves, makes me think that it is the Lord’s mercy and a blessing that He has designed our aging process the way He has.
When we are young, we start out invincible, immortal, strong, with sharp minds. We know what we are doing, and we are ready to take on the world. We are very, very self-confident.
But as we get older, things start to get cloudy, things start to fall out, and things start to droop. We start to lose confidence in ourselves. We see ourselves and say, “I cannot do this anymore.”
I think it is the Lord gently pushing us and prodding us, saying, “Why do you have confidence in yourself? You are dying. You are fading away. Have confidence in Me.”
It is a wonderful Savior in Whom we can have confidence: He does not change, He stays invincible, He stays immortal, and He stays sharp.
I was talking to Ernie Heil several years ago, and I remember vividly that he said, “It is impossible for the Lord to abandon you. He cannot. It is not that He will not; He cannot abandon you, because He has promised to never leave you nor forsake you, and He is bound by His Word.”
So we can have confidence in Him that He will never leave us or forsake us.
Look down in Hebrews 11. Going back to faith and confidence, Hebrews 11 contains what people call the hall of faith, or the heroes of faith—people in the Old Testament who lived their lives by faith.
After this little revelation of confidence being faith, I was able to go back and reread those passages and get new meaning from them. I want to do that a little today: talk about some of these heroes of faith and substitute confidence in the Lord for faith.
Start with Abraham in Hebrews 11:8. Abraham had confidence. The Lord showed Abraham something and told him that a city, a heritage, and a great nation would be brought about. Abraham had confidence that the Lord was going to do it.
Reading from Hebrews 11:8:
By faith Abraham, being called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went.
By faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents, with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise:
For he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
Hebrews goes on talking about Abraham and how he had faith—how he lived by confidence in the Lord. He was placing his confidence in the Lord to bring about what the Lord had shown him.
He had such confidence that he was able to leave his family in the area of Ur, the city of Ur, and go out to be a stranger in a strange land. He had such confidence that the Lord would bring an inheritance and a nation that he was able to come to the verge of sacrificing his own son, because he had confidence that the Lord was going to fulfill His promise.
If you look at Moses a little further down in Hebrews 11, it says:
By faith Moses, when he was grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter;
Choosing rather to share ill treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season;
Accounting the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt: for he looked unto the recompense of reward.
By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the king: for he endured, as seeing Him Who is invisible.
By faith he kept the passover, and the sprinkling of the blood, that the destroyer of the first-born should not touch them.
By faith they passed through the Red Sea as by dry land: which the Egyptians assaying to do were swallowed up.
Moses had such confidence in the Lord that he was able to give up the most opulent life possible and live as a slave, because he knew that the Lord was going to deliver them.
He had confidence that the Lord would preserve them when he took the people and left Egypt, stirring up the wrath of Pharaoh.
He had confidence in the Lord to sit still while there was destruction all around them, while the angel of death went and killed the firstborn of all Egypt.
Moses had confidence to sit still. I do not know about you, but I probably would have had confidence that the Lord was going to slay all the firstborn of Egypt. But when it came down to it, I would have been scared silly, with very little confidence that a mistake would not be made and my firstborn would not be killed.
It would have been quite a test of confidence to sit still while everyone around you was losing their firstborn, and to eat a meal that night trusting that the Lord would not make a mistake.
In Hebrews, there are many examples of people who had confidence in the Lord, both named and unnamed. It says that they lived as strangers and aliens in the land.
That leads to 1 Peter, which we have been studying—the believers in 1 Peter were strangers and aliens in the land, and we are strangers and aliens in this land.
It takes confidence in the Lord to live as an alien and stranger in the land that surrounds us. It takes confidence that the Lord is going to bring about His purpose and bring about His glory.
If we do not have confidence that the Lord is going to bring about what He said He is going to do, we are going to be pulled back into this world, because our confidence by nature will lie in this world.
As we started studying 1 Peter, I was really impressed—or depressed, you could say—by the fact that if you have confidence in the Lord and are walking with the Lord, you are naturally going to be an alien in this world.
I can look at myself and see all the entanglements I have in this world and all the attraction the world has for me, and ask, “Where is my confidence?” It must not be fully in the Lord.
After thinking about this and meditating on where my confidence was, and why I was not an alien, it became clear that my confidence was frequently in other places, not in the Lord.
If one has confidence in the Lord, one is not going to have confidence in other things. If you have confidence in the world, your job, or yourself, you are not going to have confidence in the Lord. They are mutually exclusive. You cannot have overlapping confidences.
There are a couple of general things, and a couple of specific things, that the Lord has shown me as areas where I do not have confidence in Him. One is the area of looking back.
In Hebrews 11, it says that all these heroes of faith did not look back to where they came from. If they had looked back, they would have had opportunity to return.
In my case, I keep not having confidence in what the Lord is going to do and looking back, asking, “What is the world doing? What does the world have to offer?” When we do that, when we look back, we have opportunity to return there.
I wonder how much of our personal struggle is because we are looking back at where we came from rather than looking to what the Lord is calling us to. Maybe it is because we do not have confidence in what He has called us to, simply because we cannot see it and are not surrounded by it.
If we look back, we will have opportunity to return there.
Another thing I struggle with—Brenda can tell you this—is that I am a people pleaser. I am probably not pleasing you right now, but I really want people to like me.
For some reason, I have a really hard time when somebody does not like me or when I upset somebody. It hurts me when people do not like me, because I really want them to like me.
I end up trying to conform myself to what I think they want me to be. I try to be a lot like them so that they will like me.
What this all comes down to is this: Do I really have confidence that the Lord loves me? Do I have confidence that He is enough? Or am I looking to other people to fill some need in me rather than looking to the Lord to fill that need?
Do I have confidence that the Lord really loves me and is enough?
Speaking generally, and speaking for my life, this may ring true in your life also: there is a general lack of confidence in the Lord and in the calling, because it seems like such a faraway, nebulous thing. It is like, “Is it really going to happen?”
I find myself not having confidence in that because I am not acting as if it is going to happen. We will get to that a little later.
The Lord says we will be sanctified and glorified. But instead of waiting for that glory and having confidence that glory will come, I end up seeking little glories now rather than waiting for the greater glory to come.
I think that is part of people pleasing. That may be at the root of it. There are all these little glories we can have now, rather than having confidence that the Lord is going to bring a greater glory later.
These little glories, these transient things of the world, are not really glories. They seem like it because they are glorious to the world, but they are not really glorious to the Lord.
Also, in another general way, at times I do not have confidence that the Lord is going to be just. Because I do not have confidence that He is going to judge righteously, I take that into my own hands.
If somebody offends me, because I am not trusting that the Lord is going to take care of it, I need to make sure that they know they offended me and have the opportunity to make it right.
Instead of trusting that the Lord is going to make things right and correct them in His time, I do not have confidence in His just and righteous hand.
I do not know if anything I have said this morning reminds you of yourself. But as you examine yourself, you may find areas where you do not have confidence, or where you have a lack of confidence.
So what do you do if you do not have confidence in the Lord? I think it is important, when I get up here and speak, to give something practical: if you do not have confidence, this is what you do.
I think Scripture gives us several guidelines for what we can do if we find ourselves lacking confidence in the Lord.
First, Romans 10:17 says:
So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
If you find yourself lacking confidence in the Lord, that confidence can come from the Word—from being in the Word and spending more time in the Word.
It is not that reading words about faith will increase your faith. It is that the Bible is the Word of God. It has power. It has power to change you. The Lord will use that to give you greater confidence in Him.
Over the past several months, the Lord has really encouraged my confidence in Him and increased my confidence in Him through the Word.
Last fall, I felt prompted that my quiet time had become dry and bleak. I would sit down in the morning and try to read through it as quickly as I could so I could get on with other things.
But the Lord showed me that I should start writing down what I read. Instead of just reading the passage and thinking I could remember anything I noticed in it—which is part of being old—the Lord prompted me to keep a journal of what I read in my quiet time.
As I read something, I take a little note about it. He convicted me that for every passage I read in the morning, I should write something down, even if it is just a simple recitation of the facts in that verse. When you get to genealogies, sometimes that is all there is: facts.
But I write something down every morning so that, when I am reading the Word, I have to read it closely and look for what to write down.
Sometimes it is simple facts. Sometimes it is an outline. Sometimes it is some new revelation in the Word that the Lord is showing me. But through carefully reading the Word—not just skimming over it—the Lord has increased my confidence in Him.
He has also brought new life and new vigor to a quiet time that had become dry and very much a ritual. So if you need confidence in the Lord, spend more time in the Word.
Another thing that brings confidence is spending more time with Him.
In 1 Peter 2:23, which Mac read this morning, it says:
Who, when He was reviled, reviled not again;
When He suffered, threatened not;
But committed Himself to Him that judgeth righteously.
I read that verse while meditating on confidence, and what I saw was the confidence Christ had in the Father. He had such confidence in the Father that, through the ultimate trial—the crucifixion—He was able to remain peaceful.
Why did He have confidence in the Father? Because of the time He spent with Him and the intimacy of the relationship He had with the Father. He had confidence in Him.
If we need confidence in Christ, we need to spend more time with Him. One way to do that is to spend more time in prayer and meditation with the Lord. When we do that, He will meet us, and we will know Him.
When we know Him better, we will have more confidence in Him.
I believe that our measure of confidence in the Lord is directly related to how much we know of Him, or how well we know Him. The more we know Him, the more confidence we will have in Him and the less confidence we will have in ourselves.
So if you need greater confidence, spend time with Him.
A third way to increase our confidence in the Lord is to exercise the confidence He has already given us.
James says faith without works is dead. To paraphrase: confidence in Christ without works is dead.
If we say that we have confidence in Him and never lean on that confidence, what good is that confidence? It is not really there.
When we lean on Him in confidence and throw ourselves on Him in confidence, we will know Him better. He will reveal Himself to us, and we will know Him better. Then, from that, will come more confidence in Him.
To bring things full circle to that first verse I read, Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is the evidence of things hoped for and the substance of things not seen.
If we have confidence in Christ, that confidence is going to be visible because we will act on it. Those visible acts become evidence of our hope in Christ.
Confidence in Christ produces evidence in our actions. Those actions, which are evidence, reveal something unseen in our lives.
That is the only way others can see our faith: through living it out, by placing our confidence in Him.
Without confidence-based actions, without leaning on Him, and without acting with confidence in Him, there is no evidence. There is no substance to our faith.
I think that definition in Hebrews 11 is only valid if we are leaning on the Lord, if we have confidence in Him, and if we act in that confidence. Otherwise, there is no evidence and there is no substance.
To wrap things up and summarize what I have said this morning: basically, my one point is that confidence in Christ is indistinguishable from faith in Christ.
For me, the term confidence is easier to grasp than the term faith. We place our confidence, and we place our faith, in many things, but it is all misplaced unless we are placing it in Christ.
If we lack confidence in Christ, Scripture tells us that confidence will be given to us as we read the Word and spend time in the Word. Confidence will be given to us as we spend time with the Lord, and that confidence will increase as we exercise what confidence He has already given us.
As we exercise that confidence, there is evidence of that faith, there is substance, and that substance will bring glory to the Lord.
Let us pray.
Father, thank You, Lord, for giving us confidence in You. Without that confidence, we would be tossed and thrown about as leaves in the wind.
Thank You, Lord, for being the source of all our confidence in You. I pray, Father, that You would seal these words. If there are things that I have said that are not of You, Lord, please take them away.
Father, thank You again for being there, for allowing us to place our confidence in You, and for making the way for that. I pray this in Christ’s holy name. Amen.