Our culture continually reminds us that confident people are successful people, and it stresses that confidence opens the door to great opportunities in life. Confident people are attractive, and we are drawn to those who are confident and self-assured. We teach our children to be confident and poised, and it is one of the qualities we focus on in developing in ourselves and those entrusted to us.
What does it mean to be a confident person?
Definition of Confidence (According to Webster’s dictionary): Having a feeling or belief that you can do something well or succeed at something
Definition of Confidence (According to Strong’s Concordance -Greek G2292): to be of good courage, to be hopeful
There is a worldly confidence or what our culture calls “self-confidence”, and there is a Godly confidence.
What is worldly confidence?
Worldly confidence has an outward appearance of having it all together. We tend to be very focused on outward appearance. Many people believe “first impression” is everything. We put a lot of stock on how a person presents himself or herself and teach people to “dress for success”. However, we all know individuals who look great and sound great, but after spending sometime with them, we find that they don’t deliver as we expected them to. Their level of competence does not match their level of confidence. There is no substance to their confidence.
The world system tries to train us in self-confidence. While self-confidence has some positive results, according to the Bible, it can be very dangerous!
A wise manfears and departs from evil, But a fool rages and is self-confident. Proverbs 14:16
The Lord looks down upon self-confidence, and He considers it foolishness. Self-confident people can be presumptuous and have an irrational expectation that things will turn out to their favor without taking responsibility for their part. Self-confident individuals have a tendency not to look for feedback and impulsively jump into something without giving it much thought.
Generally a self-confident person has a high view of their level of competency and ability to achieve something. For example, some people are habitually late because they think they can accomplish more than it’s possible in a given amount of time.
Everyone can suffer from presumption or impulsivity from time to time. The issue that makes the self-confident person stuck in these situations is that they don’t learn from their mistakes. They believe the last mistake was either an anomaly or someone else’s fault. That’s where the Bible calls a self-confident person a foolish person. The foolish part of the self-confidence is that they don’t learn from past missteps. They continue to go on doing things their way without being willing to change or receive input from those closest to them.
It’s important for all of us to have people whose feedback is important in our lives. It’s also important to consider how we are raising the younger generation. If self-confidence goes unchecked, it turns into arrogance!
As believers, God has given us a different kind of confidence, and that’s the subject of the next devotional.
