Total Confidence

Luke Davydaitis
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Everyone puts their confidence in something. Paul says that anything other than Jesus, however good it may be, is total rubbish in comparison to Him, so we must make sure that we put our trust in Him only.


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Philippians 3: 1-8

Tony Schwartz, New York Times: “Our shared core hunger is for value, we desperately want to matter and feel a sense of worthiness.” There’s something really right about this – we were made to live lives of purpose. Where this goes wrong is when our achievements become the basis of our confidence, our identity.

Paul had, for his standards, the dream CV, but when Jesus encountered him, his perspective on it was completely changed. What he had considered gain, he now considered loss. In fact, the word translated “rubbish” by the ESV could be translated as “crap”. Confidence in other things is ridiculous when you could be enjoying a relationship with Jesus! C.S. Lewis: “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because they cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

This is what a life of confidence in Jesus looks like: “worship by the Spirit of God and glory [or boast] in Christ Jesus and put no confidence in the flesh” (verse 3).

  • No confidence in the flesh: not that we don’t do anything but we don’t let these things define us.
  • Glory in Christ Jesus: filling our minds with who He is and what He has done.
  • Worship by the Spirit. Our competence comes from Him, and we’re led into situations by Him where we have to put our trust in Him only.

Questions

  • What’s your instinctive response when Paul says (yet again) “rejoice in the Lord”?
  • What would you honestly say you put your confidence in?
  • Thomas Chalmers spoke about “the expulsive power of a new affection”. How can we fill our minds and our lives with Christ so that our confidence will be in Him?