A God-given Confidence (:

Perhaps one of the hardest concepts to understand, today I am going to talk about confidence because it is so important.
 
      Confidence:  full trust;belief in the powers , trustworthiness, or reliability of a person or thing.

In order to be confident, or have confidence, you must be able to rely on God and on people around you. You must not only trust the people around you but most importantly trust God. You have to trust that sometimes when your feeling lonely and down, that the people around you that love you will come and comfort you. You also need to trust God by knowing that although things don’t seem to be going the greatest at the moment, that he has an awesome plan for you.

I have to be honest with you, Confidence is not an easy thing to accomplish. With a generation today that is so concerned about how they look, or what people think about them, we meet very few people who can honestly say that they have confidence.  Self Confidence is “the acceptance of oneself”. Once again we see that in order to be self confident you have to work at accepting yourself and not worrying 

about what other people say.

In reality it is a lot easier to hear about cofidence and self confidence and think oh ya, I’m confident in who I am ,then actually living with no regrets and walking in a confidence that people can see. Confidence isn’t the ability to feel better then everybody else, it isn’t a free card to feel higher or more important then your friends, self confidence is simply knowing that you are secure in who you are and believe that God made you for a reason.

I just recently started High School, and I can’t help but notice a lot of over-confident people. They are the ones that feel like all the attention in the world belongs to them and that they have a right to have an opinion on everything. They walk the halls thinking they are the hottest, best, thing that has every walked the face of the earth. We may look at these people and think I want to be like them, but over-confidence is always a result of a root or a seed planted in ones life. Maybe those girls are so over-confident because they have never been loved and want to feel important, maybe they try to be over-confident to try to hide their insecurities. We never know the problem, and we never may know but that is not important. The important thing is that we continually ask God to give us a confidence that will allow us to stand out in a crowd, a confidence that will allow us to talk to people and not shrivel up in embarassment, and most importantly, a confidence that allows us to look in the mirror EVERY morning with thankfulness and say, “God I am so thankful for the way you made me.”

Once you achieve confidence, people will notice it. They will see that you are a happier, more caring person who can talk to people and not feel embarrassed, they will want to be like you, and self confidence draws people to you because they want to be able to feel a God-given-confidence.

One thing that my youth leader said that really stuck to me was that, you are the only Jesus that some people may ever see in their life. I took that to heart because many people are never given the opportunity to come to church or read the bible, and many can’t even talk to their parents so I decided that I would be different because I wanted people to see in me something that they wanted, a God, a love stronger then all love, and a confidence that no one can break…

Proverbs 3:26 “For the Lord will be your confidence, and will keep your foot from being caught.” <3