Spiritual Confidence

I once read about an organization, and this was the name of it, Dependent Order of Really Meek and Timid Souls. This was a real organization. I want you to think about the first letter of every word. Dependent Order of Really Meek and Timid Souls. D-O-O-R-M-A-T-S. Doormats. That's what they call themselves, the doormats. This was their motto. I wish I could have made this up, but this is true. This was their motto. The meek shall inherit the earth if that's okay with everybody. Now, of course, the reason for the organization, and there was a year or two of them, was they were trying to help people who had little confidence. They just didn't have confidence. I think with a name like that, you could say that the issue with that group of people was a lack of confidence. We all have various degrees of confidence. Confidence is the ability or capacity to understand your own abilities and personal strengths, and realize that they have value, that you have the courage and energy to use those abilities.

You have confidence. You understand that you have certain abilities. You understand you have certain strengths, and you have the courage and the energy to use those, because they value, they help other people. Now, we also all know people who have what they think is confidence, and it's really just arrogance. What they see is their abilities, or they see as their capabilities, and they like to see themselves as superior to everyone else. Sometimes they do have great abilities, and sometimes they don't. They've exaggerated their own abilities. But right kind of confidence is necessary for any success in any aspect of life. Why get out of bed in the morning and go get in your car if you don't have the confidence that you can drive? I've known people that have reached the point in their life. I remember my dad reached the point in his life, and he had been a great driver all his life. And there was a point in his 70s with his failing health. He said, I no longer have the ability to be a safe driver. Therefore, he wouldn't drive anymore. He just stopped driving. He handed the keys to my mother or me or whoever else was around and said, you're going to have to drive. I no longer have the confidence to be a driver, because I've become a danger to other people.

Now, all his life, he had had a proper kind of confidence. He was a good driver. He reached the point where he said, no, I don't have that confidence anymore. Success at anything depends on a certain amount of confidence that you can do what you're supposed to do. Now, some people have a lack of confidence that's very chronic. They actually have a worthlessness, a sense of worthlessness about them. And like I said, there are people that are arrogant. They think what they have is self-confidence, and it's really not. It's arrogance.

I'm going to talk about confidence today, but I'm going to talk about confidence not in the healthy capability to understand your own abilities and work hard and use those abilities. I want to talk about spiritual confidence. Spiritual confidence gives you the ability to live with a sense of faith in God, spiritual purpose, emotional calmness, and have healthy relationships with other people. In other words, with spiritual confidence, you have a faith in God. You have a confidence in God. You have a spiritual purpose, and you have confidence in that purpose. It gives you a reason to get out of bed every morning. It gives you a reason and a purpose. You have emotional calmness.

That doesn't mean that we don't suffer anxiety and worry. We all do. But there's a certain calmness that comes from having spiritual confidence. We'll talk about that in a minute. It also gives you the ability to relate to other people. You have a confidence in how to relate to other people. Let's talk about spiritual confidence. It helps you get out of bed every morning. It helps you be able to go through life, especially in a decaying world. Last week we talked about certain prophecies. I will be giving over the next few months more of sermons on prophecy, basic prophecy like we covered last week. We will be going through the basic core principles of prophecy and showing and going through things like the tribulation or what does the Bible mean by duality. We will be going through those basic concepts and going through the Bible and showing the prophecies in the world that we're in and where it's going to head. But as we do, it's easy for people to become anxious, although what's going to happen? We can grab onto all kinds of ideas of what's going to happen. We become anxious, we become worried, and we drift around with fears of this is going to happen and that's going to happen. Well, if we have spiritual confidence in what we're going to talk about today, you can have calmness even in the face of a deteriorating world. I'm going to use an example of confidence to show you something. This has to do with Hezekiah.

Hezekiah is one of the greatest kings of ancient Judah. And one of the reasons why is he turned the people towards God. He went throughout Judah, he tore down the statues, he tore down the altars, and he turned people towards the temple and the worship of the true God and tried to reinstate God's law into the country. So let's go to 2 Chronicles 32. We're going to look at two instances in his life. 2 Chronicles 32. It has to do with confidence.

We pick up the story. What happens here in chapter 32 of 2 Chronicles? Ishenacharib, one of the kings of Assyria, invades Judah. And Hezekiah realizes he's coming to basically force their will on their country. What the Assyrians would do is they would invade a country. They were basically the Mosiah. They invaded your country and said, if you pay us taxes, if you pay us protection money, we'll go away. Miss a payment, we show up again, and we trash your country.

Miss a payment twice, and we destroy your country. And so here they're faced with the Assyrians coming in, and He begins to prepare Jerusalem for a major siege. Verse 6, Then He sent military captains over the people, gathered them together to Him on the open square of the city gate, and gave them encouragement, saying, Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or dismayed before the king of Syria, nor before all the models that is with him. For there are more with us than with him. Now this is a statement that you see happening earlier in the history of Israel, meaning that God and His angels are there with them. With him is the arm of flesh, per se. But with us is the Lord of God, who help us and to fight our battles. Because the people were strengthened by the words of Hezekiah, king of Judah. Now that's confidence. This is confidence. But you notice He didn't say, Look, we're better fighters than the Assyrians. And we have more chariots than the Assyrians, and we have more horses, which they didn't have. And we know that we can go out there and we can whip anybody. So let's just, you know, let's beat our shields with our swords. Let's do some kind of war dance here, and we'll go out and we'll slay the Assyrians. You notice that's not where his confidence came from. At the core of Hezekiah's being was a trust in God and the promises of God. And when we talk about spiritual confidence, there's only one way we can have this built in us.

Because eventually we either have confidence-based in trusting God or confidence-based in trusting something else. Because all confidence is based in trust. And where you get your confidence from depends on what you trust in. Where you get your confidence from depends on what you trust in.

Now, I remember a time when I could play softball, and I could play a whole game catching, not make any errors, get three guys out at the plate, and bat at least 500. And I had confidence in that. Now if I was going to go to play a game of softball, I'd have to fast and pray beforehand that I wouldn't get killed. I'm going to pick on Mr.

Brooks. Last summer we played a game of softball, and he came around third. He's a pretty good athlete. He comes around third because he's not what he used to be. But he's a pretty good athlete. I caught that ball, made a fake throw, and started running towards him. He stopped, turned, and he's running back towards third, and I'm chasing him. And he dives in the dirt, slides in, just as I tag him. He's safe by that much. And in my mind, I was 28 again. And so one of the women came out of the stands and came up and said, you know, that rundown — it was Donna Caruthers — that rundown is on the hookup today.

So Donna ended up picking on you, you know. It was the slowest thing I've ever seen. You're just sort of poppin' and you're not movin' at all. And Jeff, she didn't say you were a whole lot faster than me. Now, I don't have the confidence — and, you know, by age — but I used to have some confidence to be able to do that, because I trusted in my own abilities.

Was that sin? No. Did I think I was a great softball player? No. I understood the limitations of those abilities, which are extant. But in the Church Softball League, it didn't matter, right? So you understand competency, you trust in something. Here Hezekiah realized he did not have the ability to do what was presented before him. But God did, and his trust was in God. And because of that, he had a feeling — and confidence has a lot to do with emotions, by the way.

It's more than intellectual exercise. He had a feeling, he had a trust. God will take care of this. Interesting, because if you read through, Sonakarib sends a message to the people of Judah, and he says, how has this man convinced you to have confidence in your God? I've restored every nation I've come up against. You really think Hezekiah can somehow get help from your God? Where do you get this trust from? It's interesting, in the two stories of Chronicles and Kings, it's translated trust in one and confidence in the other, because they're connected to each other.

Our confidence comes from what we trust in. Chapter, or verse 20 says, Now because of this, King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah, the son of Amoz, prayed and cried out to heaven. Then the Lord sent an angel who cut down every mighty man of valor, leader and captain in the camp of the king of Assyria. So he returned shame, faith to his own land. We had gone into the temple of his God. Some of his own offspring struck him down by the sword there. And thus the Lord saved Hezekiah in the inhabitants of Jerusalem, from the hand of Sonacharib, the king of Assyria, and from the hand of all others, and guided them on every side.

Now you read in verse 23, it says, people sent gifts to Hezekiah from all over the world. He trusted in God. He had confidence. And now, not only was the nation saved, but all this wealth poured into Judah.

Now not long after this, something else happens, and he's given another opportunity. Let's go to 2 Kings. Let's look at this in the Kings. Second Kings, chapter 20. And let's start in verse 12. So this is sometime after that. Hezekiah goes through a period where he's ill, and they tell him he's going to die. He prays to God to heal him. And God does. And it goes out through all the world. This miracle's taking place. So we have in verse 12, at that time, Berodok Baladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters that are present to Hezekiah, for he had heard that Hezekiah had been sick.

And Hezekiah was attentive to them. It's an interesting phrase in Hebrew. It can mean he was glad to see them. The point being made here, it wasn't just like Hezekiah saying, okay, I am the king. If there's emissaries sent to me from Babylon, I must listen to them. I must take them in. He brought them in as if they were friends. He brought them in, and we'll see in a minute why.

Verse 13, and showed them all the house of his treasures, the silver and gold, the spices and precious ointment, and all of his armory, all that was found among his treasures. And there was nothing in his house or in his dominion that Hezekiah did not show them. Now, it's interesting. It doesn't say, Hezekiah said, let me tell you about my God, who I have confidence in.

Let me tell you about the God that helped me defeat, or the God that defeated the Assyrians, just so you Babylonians know, if you ever have a desire to come to Judah, who you're fighting. For some reason, and it's interesting, in the chronicles of the Calp, it says God left him to see what he would do. And it says God was guiding him, but the recent point, God said, okay, Hezekiah, let's see what you'll do here.

And for this brief time, Hezekiah no longer had confidence in God, but he had confidence in his armory. He had confidence in his dominion. He had confidence in his wealth. And he showed the Babylonians, don't mess with us. We are rich people, and we have a powerful army. He showed where his confidence was. You read on the rest of this chapter, Isaiah comes to Hezekiah and says, do you realize what you've just done? Some day after you're dead, the Babylonians are going to want to come take this country because they're going to know, boy, are they wealthy, and God is going to let them take this country.

In other words, his lack of confidence in God had set in motion events that would go beyond his lifetime and actually help bring about the destruction of Judah. Interesting. Which shows how all of us are in life. Our confidence changes. It should be constant, but it isn't. One moment our confidence is in God. The next moment our confidence is in our bank account.

The next moment our confidence is in our ability. Our next moment our confidence is in what? The U.S. government. There's lots of people whose confidence in the U.S. government is collapsing right now. Hezekiah is known for the time when he had great confidence in God because he trusted the God and of the bad effects that he would have on history because there was a moment in time where his confidence was in something else. It is, remember, confidence is based in what you trust and more importantly, who you trust. Let's go to Psalm. Psalm 118. Starting in verse 5 here, David is writing about a time when he was having great difficulty in his life.

And he says in verse 5, I called on the Lord in distress, and the Lord answered me and sent me in a broad place. There was a sermon or sermonette here for the last couple of months where someone talked about being sent in a broad place. There's a time when God gives us a rest. And when those times come in your life, enjoy them.

Have them. So I feel guilty. Nothing bad is happening in my life right now. I always say, don't worry, this too shall pass. When you're in a broad place, when God gives you a broad place, be glad that you're in a broad place because it too will pass. In fact, that's become my favorite saying whether a person's in a trial or in a good time. This too shall pass. It's part of the life that we live. He says, the Lord is on my side.

I will not fear. What can man do to me? Now notice where his trust is. Notice where his trust is. This sermon is interesting. It started, and I have another sermon I'm going to do now sometime because this sermon was supposed to be a different sermon. I was going to deal with something I've been thinking about for a long time and I was just reading a book on, and it was how human beings have difficulty trusting one another, and how to deal with trust issues, especially if somebody's hurt you or something bad has happened to you.

And I was reading a great book on it, and for all six months, I always have a list of a year's worth of sermons I want to give. I'm always adding to the list, taking off the list, and this idea of trusting in relationships. So I sat down this week and I said, I'm going to do my sermon on trusting in relationships, but I never got there. I stopped here. And that is, where does it come from? Where does the confidence come from to even heal relationships?

Most people will not attempt to heal a relationship because they don't trust. They don't trust the other person. Why should I try to heal a relationship with someone who punches me in the nose every time I go to talk to them? Peacemakers, people who work in healing relationships, are people whose confidence is in something else. People who adore being hurt by others instead of fighting back, it's because they have a confidence in something else. Their trust comes from something else. If my trust comes from, I never want to be hurt, eventually I'll only gather around me people who won't hurt me.

And that usually leads people I can control, right? You'll gather around you. Only the people that won't hurt you are the people you can control. David here says, and he shows that where we're going is we have to understand, the basis of all trust is a confidence.

A confidence that says, I will have a relationship with you and I'm going to give you trust, and you even may break that trust. The option is, I'm going to go through life not trusting anybody, which is spiritually and emotionally unhealthy.

But if I trust people, I'll get hurt. Yes. So your confidence has to be something other than the fact that that person will never hurt me because I don't care who you trust, right? Husband of wives, children of parents, best of friends, occasionally hurt each other. If your trust is I'll never get hurt, you'll never have a relationship except the ones you have power over, and that's not healthy. So that was where I was going with this sermon and realized before I could even discuss those issues, we have to talk about the kind of confidence you have to have to even face relationships.

What you'll do is just keep breaking relationships. Every relationship that gets difficult, you'll break it. Every friend you have and you have trouble, you'll break it. Every time someone treats you bad, you'll break it. You'll just keep breaking relationships because you have no confidence in something other than yourself and the other person.

Here we see a whole different confidence. The Lord is on my side. I will not fear what can man do to me. If I know God, and it's a hard place to be. I can honestly say I haven't been there too many places in my life. But there have been times I've been in a broad place and I've been here, and that is, it doesn't matter what you say or do.

God will take care of me. Therefore, I have no need to put you back. When you're there, it's great. Staying there is hard. Because part of confidence is the emotion. We may know all the doctrines, and we may know the Bible intellectually, but until we deal with the emotions, we are only half converted. God doesn't want half converted people. He wants fully converted people. So we have to deal with this emotion called confidence.

It is based on who you trust. Verse 7 says, The Lord is for me among those who help me. Therefore I shall see my desire of those who hate me. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes. The Lord is on my side. Now if your trust, this is really important to understand as we go through this, if your trust is in yourself, you'll say the Lord is on my side, but He isn't.

There's a danger here. If we're right with God, then the Lord is on your side, and then you have confidence in Him. So let me show you what I mean. We're going to go through three keys to growing confidence towards God. The first one is found in Proverbs 14. The great danger we have is that we can trust in ourselves so much that we take actions. We live our lives thinking we're obeying God. So this is a very basic, basic sermon. It's very basic concepts. If I'm truly going to have confidence in God, I have to have trust in God.

If I'm going to have trust in God, there's some things I have to do. Nobody can do for you. We all have to individually do. What is Proverbs 14.26? Proverbs 14.26. In the fear of the Lord, there is strong confidence, and His children will have a place of refuge in the fear of the Lord. Confident in God begins with a simple premise. It is understanding the overwhelming greatness of God.

His power, His righteousness, His wisdom, and that you aren't those things. Confident in God begins with not trusting yourself. Now, once again, I'm not talking about trusting whether you can drive your car, or maybe you're very good at your job, and you trust. You know your abilities. You have confidence in your abilities.

We're not talking about that. We're talking about this view of life that gives you a spiritual purpose, that drives you to obey God, that motivates your relationships with other people. Because most relationships are driven by insecurity. People are insecure, so we treat each other a certain way because we're all insecure. Embrace in God helps deal with our insecurities because we want, we recognize, I'm insecure. I am insecure. On this deep spiritual, emotional level, it's easier for me to talk about, you know, I just love going through proving God isn't a trinity because I can do that intellectually.

This is harder because we're dealing with these deep-seated insecurities. Different people hide it by simply being arrogant. But it's a deep-seated insecurity, a deep-seated lack of confidence in life itself because it's a spiritually-based problem. Or what we do is we become very successful. You'll see people that drive themselves to become very successful because they have great abilities, they use their abilities, and they accomplish a lot of things, but at the end of their life they still say, somehow I'm empty because they had confidence in their abilities, which wasn't wrong, but they didn't deal with this deep-seated spiritual insecurity. We had it. We were bored with it.

This deep-seated spiritual insecurity. So it keeps us from being calm. It causes us to have fear and anxiety. It causes us to desire to seize power and control because we're afraid. It is a fear-based way of viewing life. Well, confidence in God begins with understanding His great power. It's something you think about. It's something you study. You know, the Sermonette on evolution.

We hear that stuff. It's easy for us to sit and say, oh, another Sermonette on evolution. We know we're going to get those moments every, what, two years. Oh, another. It was good points. I wrote them down. I intellectually understand it. But you know, that has to be more than an intellectual process. It has to be an emotional process that says, I know the power and the greatness and the majesty, and I'm in awe of the great God who is the Creator. There has to be an emotional impact. One of the greatest dangers always since then in the Church of God is that we will become an intellectual process. We sing our songs just because we know them by memory.

Part of it is because we see the absolute absurdity of things like Pentecostalism. So we see the absurdity, and that's not what God wants. But we go to the other directions of them. There should be a feeling of awe towards God that we experience in our lives because we see His greatness. We meditate on His greatness. If you don't trust in God's greatness and His power and His righteousness, His wisdom, what's going to happen is you're always going to be looking at what God doesn't do and not what God does.

Now think about this in life. You see people who say, wow, did you see the sunrise this morning? Isn't it amazing how God designed everything? Now the rest of us are saying, oh man, I didn't want to get out of bed. The sun came up and it hurt my eyes. I said, wife, get me a cup of coffee.

Right?

Now give me another cup because I'm blind, because that sun hit me there. We go through life not seeing what God's doing, but we always see what He doesn't do. I mean, I wish I had a dollar for a time as I'm going to God and say, God, why didn't You do this? Why didn't You do this and this and this and this and this? Why did You allow that? I do it all the time. And I find the only way that that balances out when I start to say, wait, wait a minute. Let's think about what God did do today in my life. Oh, it tends to add up to be a whole lot more than what He didn't do in my life. And lots of what He didn't do in my life is because I created the mess and I want Him to get me out of it. A lot of times He's saying, I didn't create that mess. It's Yours, son.

If we have lives centered on the greatness of God, we understand our weakness and we're always looking for what God did do, not what He didn't do. Because if we don't, what we'll do is we'll see God is inadequate to meet our needs. God doesn't understand my problems. God doesn't understand my problems. So we begin to trust in something else. And what we trust in, Jesus talks about in Luke chapter 18. Let's go to Luke 18. Luke 18, an oft-read parable.

But what's so interesting about this parable is how Luke introduces it. And remember, Luke wasn't there when this happened. So this has been passed on to him by people who were there. And these people tell him, Luke, here's why he did this. He should have been there. You should have seen these guys and you should have seen how Jesus dealt with this.

Verse 9 says, And he spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others. If we, if the premise, the basis of our trust, which leads to our confidence, isn't, God is great, I am not.

God is righteous. I am not, except what he leads me to, what he produces in me, what I submit to. God is wise. I must learn wisdom. God is more wonderful than I can imagine. Unless we have that premise, we eventually decide, I am righteous. I know what's right. And at that point, something interesting begins to happen. We begin to despise others. That comes down to, I am good before God, and let me see if there's anybody else. Years and years and years ago, many years ago, I had a friend whose little boy ran up to him before services and said, Hey, Dad, let's go around to the church and see if we can find anybody who's sitting.

His dad just looked at him like, isn't that amazing? What a human nature is! Let me find who is sitting, because I am the righteous one. Where is this person's confidence? He goes on, he says, two men went up to the temple to pray, what a Pharisee the other tax collector. The tax collector, of course, the most despised person in Jewish society, because he was a traitor. He worked for the Roman government. But I want you to notice something here. This man is a practicing Jew. He is in the temple. He is a Sabbath-keeping man who prays to God, who keeps the Ten Commandments.

He's in the temple, which is the point of the story. To the man who trusted in themselves, they couldn't believe this guy would even be allowed in the temple. This guy isn't one of God's people. He can't be. He stood and prayed with us within himself, God, I thank you that I'm not like other men. Extortia is unjust, adulterers, or even in this tax collector. This man probably didn't commit adultery. He's not lying here. He wasn't a tax collector.

He kept the Ten Commandments. He was a very religious, what we would call today, Orthodox Jew. Not only trying to keep the letter of the law, but keeping the oral law in great detail. I fast, twice a week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the tax collector standing afar off would not so much as he raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breath saying, God, be merciful to me, et cetera.

Now he was there because he had to trust God. At this point, he didn't have a lot of confidence. His life wasn't cleaned up. I am a sinner. He goes to God and he asks for mercy. But what Jesus says next is very interesting.

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified. Justification means you're allowed to have a relationship with God. You're brought into a relationship with God. This man came into a relationship with God rather than the other. But the other was a good guy. We would feel comfortable with the Pharisee.

He was a good guy. He obeyed God. But notice the problem here is what was his confidence in? His confidence was in, I'm a good guy. Rather than the other, for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. The tax collector was aware of the greatness of God and his weakness.

It's interesting he didn't compare himself to the Pharisee. The tax collector would look at the Pharisee and say, now that's a good guy. I wish I was like him. And Jesus says, no, there's something wrong here. But it has to do with where his confidence came from. And his confidence came from where was his trust. Second point. And it sort of leads right into the second point. So the first point of confidence is that we have trust, the spiritual confidence, in God's greatness and our weakness. But if that's all there was to this, we'd say, well, God's great, I'm weak.

Wow. I have no hope. So the second point of trust. Remember, we're dealing with very basic things here. I can come up with 7, 12, all the magic numbers. I just came up with three. Of all the numbers of, we can do the seven-point sermon, the twelve-point sermon. Here are foundations of trust with God. But I just picked three basic ones. Because the second one is, just like this parable shows us, confidence in God is based in trusting in His mercy and His salvation. It is recognizing our weakness. It is recognizing that we have sins and problems, that we have to go and confess before God, and He has to help us overcome.

Where Christoph Hairsty was always centered on finding everybody else's sins and helping them overcome. This man was looking his, because his confidence was only in God. But he also understood that God had to have mercy. He does not compromise with sin, but He is a God of mercy and of salvation. Psalm 13. Let's go back to the Psalms. You know, emotionally you will find this concept brought out in the Psalms more emotionally than any other place in the Scripture.

You'll find it explained in the Scripture, although there are places where Paul explains it emotionally. But David really grabs hold of this emotion of confidence in God, because I trust in certain aspects of who He is. And if I don't believe that's the way He is, I can't do this. Psalm 13 verse 5. But I have trusted, David says, I have trusted in your mercy, my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

There was a joy that came to Him, because God is going to bring me salvation, because God's going to show me mercy, even though I'm an incomplete, failing person at times. We can have confidence in God because of what the Passover reminds us every single year, that Jesus Christ was sacrificed for our sins. And that was the ultimate act of mercy. The ultimate act of mercy. Why would He go through all that just to throw us away? Why would He go through all that just to say, you know, I'm having a bad day, and I'm sort of tired of all those folks.

Let's just wipe them out and start all over again. That's not the way God is. Look at Psalm 25. Have you ever gone to God? I want you to think about the emotional impact of what David is writing here. If sometimes you can't express these things to God, write them down and read them to Him. David wrote them down and sang them to God. And I find it amazing because he expected everybody else to read this and sing it.

I sure want my personal notes between me and God, given to anybody else. Of course, I don't write down my prayers, but you know, I wouldn't want what I say between me and God for anybody else's ears. David wrote them down, gave them out, and said, everybody go sing this. Forgive me, I am a sinner. Create of me a clean heart. Forgive me my presumptuous sins.

If you forgive me, I will sing this song. Wow. That's really bearing your soul in it. Psalm 25, verse 16. David says to God, turn yourself to Me. It's like God has His back to Him.

Okay. Turn yourself to Me and have mercy on Me, for I am desolate and afflicted. The troubles of my heart have enlarged. Bring me out of my distress. Look on my affliction and my pain, and forgive all my sins. Consider my enemies, for they are many, and they hate me with cruel hatred. Keep my soul and deliver me. Let me not be ashamed, for I put my trust in you. David could have said, bring me some wine into dancing girls, and let's have a party, and I'll feel better.

Or hey, guys, come here. Bring in some assassins. I'm going to put out contracts on all my enemies. He could have. He was the king. If he trusted in his own power, that's what he would have done. Where's his confidence come from? Not even from his power as king. Now, was David one of these people that were...what was the group's name? In order of really weak and timid souls. If you look at David, nope, he had abilities.

He used his abilities. He had confidence in his abilities. But underneath that was something else. Holding that up was something else. Holding that up was this confidence that came from God because he trusted God. And so here, he approaches this totally different than any other monarch in the entire ancient world. You think there's any other monarch doing this? They're having a party and wiping out their enemies about this point. And that's not what David's doing. He trusted in God's mercy towards him.

Now, when you trust in God's mercy, that doesn't mean that gives you a license to sin. And that's very, very important. When we trust in God's mercy, we must dedicate then and commit our lives to his ways, to obedience, to his laws. Look at Psalm 37, verse 5. Psalm 37, verse 5. Another Psalm of David, he says, commit your way to the Lord. Trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass. Commit your way to the Lord. Go along with God. There's different ways that can be translated. And he will trust in him, and he'll bring it about. Now I believe that as you go through life, and you go through all these different experiences into life, and you try to grow with God, there's certain things you start to believe, et cetera.

I truly believe that the more our thoughts and actions are based in God's ethical standards, the more stability we have in life, because those the Scripture tells us are actions. Usually we're acting out of emotion.

I mean, I think of the Scripture of Peter where he says, think of wives, I know it's hard to sometimes to deal with your husband, but remember the women of old, what's it say? Who trusted in the Lord. It doesn't say they trusted in their husbands. Now there has to be trusted in the husbands of a wife, but you understand, underneath that was something else. Their actions were based in their confidence in God.

That God was going to do certain things in their lives because they were doing the right thing.

And that same book Peter says, and if you are punished for something you didn't do and take it patiently, this is commensable to God.

So where's that? You know, wait a minute. If Rob is being done to me and I have to take it patiently, he says, yes.

Well then you have to have something underneath your confidence, you're not going to do that.

That confidence has to spring because if my confidence comes in myself and you mistreat me, I'm going to punch you back just as hard as I can, right?

We've all been there. We've all been there.

But if our confidence is in God, we have a different reaction. Now we might feel the same anxiety, the same hurts, the same emotions, but our actions to that, our reactions to those emotions are different than what is normally the human interaction. Our interaction is godly because we trust in our confidence.

The last point is Psalm 31 verse 19. Psalm 31 verse 19.

So we have confidence in the greatness of God. He knows what he's doing. He has wisdom.

Let's face it. You and I, when we don't obey God, there's one primary reason why we don't obey God. Let's be honest.

We want something else.

We don't trust that what he says will work. We don't trust it.

I must divorce my wife because I don't trust that God can give my life needing if I have to be married to her. I can't tithe because I don't trust that God will take care of me financially, and I just can't deal with the suffering. I can't lose my job over the Sabbath, and then we deal with reasoning. We say, well, you know, my family will suffer, so I can't lose my job over my Sabbath. I do not trust that God will see me through that trial.

The reason we don't do things, the reason you lie in order to get the big contract at your job, is because you don't trust God, and if you lose the contract, well, I won't make as much money.

True? Yeah. Yeah, but you don't understand. Yes, we do. We have to be honest.

When we don't obey God, it's because we want something different, and we don't trust Him to get us through the problem. We still trust Him.

So you have an argument with someone at church, and you don't want to deal with it, and so you stay home the next week, and then the next week, and the next week, and the next week. And then you don't want to go to the church anymore. Why?

What we say is because the other person, but wait a minute. If my confidence is in God, if my confidence is in God, I have a different set of reactions. The Bible says, oh, wait a minute. I have to go make up with my brother. Oh, yeah, but my brother didn't accept it. Okay, go back 70 times 7, then let's talk.

That's what Christ said! Jesus said, go back 70 times 7.

Whoa, no, he didn't mean that. He really didn't mean that. See, if we have a real biblical, ethical code, we have a different reaction to emotional experiences. And this is where Christianity gets real hard. It is a whole lot easier to attack Christmas, especially if you're a second or third generation Christian and you never kept Christmas.

Bam! Boy, those people don't understand Christmas. Well, we should attack Christmas.

But if that's all the farther we go, we're only half converted. We're only half converted.

We have to get into an ethical standard that's based on this absolute confidence in God, so that our actions are not determined by the other person's actions. No, I've never met a person that has this mastered. I haven't met one person yet.

But it is the goal. It is where we're to go. This last one, Psalm 31, 19. Psalm 31, 19. Oh, how great is your goodness, what you have laid up for those who fear you, which you have prepared for those who trusted you in the presence of the sons of men.

The goodness that God has prepared for those who trust in Him.

One of our biggest problems as Christians is we don't believe in God's goodness. When you're really sick and God doesn't heal you, it's easy to say, where is God's goodness?

When you have a trial and it doesn't seem to get better, if the people at work are just beating you up, just persecuting you all the time, and you have a hard time at work, or your neighbor plays loud music all night long, and has parties, and you know they're over there selling drugs, and the police won't do anything about it, it's easy to get to the place and say, God, I don't believe in your goodness, because this isn't good. And of course, God's answer is, no, it's not. And don't blame it on me.

I'm not having parties. I didn't make you sick. We don't believe in God's goodness. We want something else. So what we say is, I can't trust in God, too. I can't obey that Scripture because, and it always comes down to, I don't have a feeling of confidence that God's going to take care of it.

I don't know how many times I've sat with a teenager, and at least the person said, I don't know, there's nobody in the church for me to marry. God's not, you know, God just doesn't want me to ever get married. Well, I can show you the Scripture where it does say God wants you to get married. Yeah, but I can't get married. There's nobody in the church for me to get married to. Do you have confidence that God will bring a person into your life when it's good for you to have a person brought into your life? What's good right now?

Come on. I'm 17.

All the adults laughed. All the teenagers went, here in my diary.

What happens? What happens is, since we don't believe in His goodness, we will try to fulfill that need with physical things. It's very interesting. Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy. Let's go to 1 Timothy, chapter 6. 1 Timothy 6.

He says to him in verse 17, Don't trust in your riches. I save money. You probably do, too. The old adage, you need 3-6 months of savings for emergencies, right? Well, I did that a number of years ago. Scrape, scrape, and scrape, so I've got 3 months worth of savings for emergencies. And since then, I've watched inflation. I got the same amount of money in there, but now I can survive about two months. At the rate we're going, pretty soon, it'll get me through a week. You can't trust in those things. You do those things. We should prepare. We should do the right things. But you know, he says, you can't trust in wealth, but trust in God. I find it interesting. He says, who gives us richly all things to enjoy? Once again, we're back to that concept. Let's look at what God's doing, what not, what we think God's not doing. Let's look at what He is doing. Let them do good, and let them be rich in good works, ready to give, willing to share, storing up for themselves a good foundation for the time to come that they may lay hold of eternal life. If we don't trust in God's goodness, we'll trust in physical things. We'll fill that need with physical things, and we'll begin to trust in those things. The problem is, you can lose any physical thing just like that, right? It doesn't take much. You can lose a car, a house, just like that. You can lose a job, a good job, just in a heartbeat. You walk in one day and they say, we're going out of business. Goodbye. You have no control over it. We must have confidence in His goodness, and that if we trust Him, He's going to help us and give us what we need. Now, it doesn't mean you don't have to work for it. You can't sit down and say, okay, God, give me a job. It doesn't work that way. Help me find a job is something else. Help me guide me, find a job. Help me in what I'm doing. All human beings need some healthy confidence in your own capabilities, so you can do daily tasks. Why get out of bed in the morning? But our physical abilities are limited. They can only give us a certain amount of limited success, and they can't give us true security, that feeling of security that we need. In order to have confidence, you have to have a certain amount of security. These are deep-need, seated emotional issues. Confidence is based in trust. Trusting God gives us spiritual confidence, and in this spiritual confidence, you will have the confidence to live in faith, to have spiritual purpose, to experience emotional calmness and distress, and to have healthy relationships with other people, even in the fact that all relationships are unhealthy. To one degree or another, you'll be able to have as healthy a relationship as you can with other people, because of the premises of what your life will build on, and because your confidence comes from God. So even when people hurt you, it will be like, well, who can hurt me if God is for me? A different approach, a different way of looking at life. You can grow in this kind of confidence, but it's going to take some time on your knees, it's going to take some fasting, it's going to take some real thinkingness through, some real meditation, because you have to learn to appreciate God's greatness, His power, His righteousness and wisdom. You have to trust in His mercy and salvation, and ultimately, you have to have absolute confidence in His goodness in your life.