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Adopting Confidence

2 Timothy 1:7 

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind” 

We all know a confident person. There’s something about them: it could be the way they walk, the way they talk, their demeanour, however, these are all by-products of the root to their confidence: reassurance. The most consistent thing seen in all confident people is reassurance about themselves. They trust in who they say they are, and they associate reliability with themselves. By definition, “confidence is the feeling or belief or trust a person or thing is reliable”. Whether the confident person you know is someone external or even yourself, I think we can all be a little more confident.  

When we try to link the idea of confidence and this verse, we see there’s a similarity. We are shown that the characteristics of God’s spirit doesn’t display “fear”, but one of “power” and “love”, yet how many times have we been fearful? Fearful about people, fearful in circumstances, fearful about ourselves. Fear isn’t disbelief in God, but rather not having reassurance on who God says He is. God desires us to have a “sound mind” meaning there should be no room for doubt and fear. Our minds should be positively consistent, in other words reassured. Reassurance in who? Well not in ourselves, though confident people do have reassurance in themselves, how much more confident can we be if we find our confidence in the author of our lives? If confidence is reassurance about yourself, then who better to confirm who you are than the person that created you. 

Growing up, I was the type of person that didn’t like confident people, and in some ways, I still have that. I perceived them to be arrogant, cocky, prideful: all words I threw around to hide what I was really feeling: jealousy. I was jealous of these people because they had something that I wanted. It was only when I found out more about myself was when I started to share the very thing I was once jealous of.  

The more we read our Bible, the more we know about God. The more we know about God, the more we know about ourselves. The more we know about ourselves, the more reassurance we have. The more reassurance we have... the more confident we become. 

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