Confidence is important and gives us so many benefits, but it’s also important for what it helps you avoid. When you walk in confidence, you starve three harmful things to your Christian life: inadequacy, lack, and scarcity.
Resources Mentioned:
Free Confidence Affirmations: https://ashleyvarner.com/affirmations
Mindset Reset: https://ashleyvarner.com/mindset
Renew180 (formerly 180Confidence): https://ashleyvarner.com/mastermind
Highlights From the Episode
CONFIDENCE SERIES
Confidence is important and gives us so many benefits, but it’s also important because of the things that it helps us to avoid. Whenever you walk in confidence, you starve three harmful things to your Christian life. Those three things are inadequacy, lack and scarcity. And that’s what we’re gonna talk about in today’s episode.
Hey there. And welcome back to the Renewed Mind. I am so glad that you’re here. If this is the first time that you are ever on this channel, I just wanna say thank you for being here. If you are a long-time watcher and listener to the podcast, then I also wanna say welcome. Thank you so much. You guys mean so much to me and I love bringing you content that is going to help you in your mindset and in your confidence.
I’m really excited to announce that this month we are going to be having a confidence series. I wanna share everything that I have learned about confidence with you, and it is so important for us to have confidence because of all the benefits that it has to our lives. And I’m sure there are tons of resources and videos out there talking about how great confidence is for you. But one thing that I wanna talk to you about today is three things that confidence helps you to avoid.
Inadequacy
Now, these are things we don’t wanna have in our lives. These are mindsets that we wanna get rid of. And the first is inadequacy.
When you feel inadequate, you do not step out in obedience. Feeling inadequate stops you from going out and talking to that person or starting that business or selling that product.
I wanna give you a couple of examples of how feeling inadequate might negatively impact your life and what confidence looks like on the other side of that, the first is an example from my own life.
This has to do with the fact that my husband and I are foster parents. So we have been foster parents for about three years now. And we have had dozens of kids come through our home. We’ve adopted one of them and we were discussing our license. If we should keep it open after the adoption of our son.
Part of me in my heart wanted to just close our license and I was feeling somewhat inadequate. I was thinking that maybe I don’t have enough of the skills that I need to help children who have gone through a lot of trauma. And in our hearts, we knew that the Lord was calling us to keep our license open because I was able to walk in confidence. And because I get my confidence from the Lord, we were able to keep our license open.
We were able to step out in faith and in obedience to what God has called us to do. Now, if I allowed those feelings of inadequacy to run my life, I probably would have closed our license, to be honest.
But whenever you walk in confidence, that’s the benefit that you get. You’re able to put inadequacy aside. You’re able to put any kind of feelings of being inadequate on the back burner and say, I know that God has called me to do this and I know that he will equip me to do this.
A biblical story that I wanted to share about feeling inadequate has to do with Moses. And when he was called by God to go and free the Israelites from Egypt, he had some inadequacies that came up in his mind. He was thinking, you know, I don’t speak very well. I’m nervous. You know, I have a stutter and he had a lot of these inadequate feelings that came up. However, he was able to walk in the confidence that was given to him by God to actually go and speak. God gave him his brother Aaron to help him. But if you look in Exodus, whenever they’re talking to Pharaoh, Moses is the one who’s stepping up and actually speaking to Pharaoh, God gave him that confidence.
Whenever your confidence comes from your identity in Christ when it comes from knowing who you are and walking that out in obedience, that’s whenever you start to see your world transform through this inner confidence, that doesn’t change whether or not your bank account changes or your followers change or your weight changes, whatever it is, your confidence remains stable and unshaken because it’s based on the truth of who you are in Christ.
Lack
The second emotion that confidence helps us to avoid is lack, this feeling of lack. And what lack is, is not acting out of God’s divine provision.
God has provided for us, He’s provided our salvation. He’s provided physical things for us. And whenever we are having emotions of lack, what we’re doing is we’re not acting out of the knowledge that God has provided for us.
This is something that I see over and over in my clients. I teach a lot in 180 Confidence about this idea of lack and how we act out of this idea that there is a limited source of confidence or a limited source of ability, maybe a limited source of favor from God and the God I serve is unlimited.
Whenever we have full confidence in Christ, whenever you walk confidently, it puts lack out of your life. It puts that emotion out of your life and so I wanted to give some examples, things like stepping out in faith or planting a seed, even tithing, which is a biblical command in the Bible to tithe 10% of your income to your local church or wherever you’re being fed, that is an act of confidence to say, I’m going to step out in faith, even though I don’t see how 90% of my income is gonna go further than 100% of my income, I’m choosing to walk in confidence and choosing to act out of the knowledge that God can provide for me in a divine way.
I want to give an example of what it looks like whenever you allow lack to be part of your life. The Israelites when they are in the desert, they’re going towards the promised land. They sent in 12 spies into the promised land, and they all saw the same situation, right? They saw what they believed were giants of men, but they also saw a land that “was flowing with milk and honey” they saw vines of grapes that were just abundant. They saw this abundant land and they came back and 10 of the spies said, we don’t think that we can defeat these people. We don’t think that we should go in.
Now, there were two of these spies that went in, Joshua and Caleb, and they said, we believe that God is with us. We believe that he will provide for us. Let’s go and take this land. And because the people were acting out of lack, they didn’t believe that God would provide for them, provide the ability, provide the victory for them. They ended up having to go back and circle back around the desert and that entire generation, except for Joshua and Caleb died in the wilderness. Now because Joshua and Caleb lived out and acted out of confidence, they were able to go and see the promised land. They weren’t able to go and experience all of this provision that God had provided for them.
So whenever you’re walking in confidence, see yourself as Joshua and Caleb, instead of the 10 spies that ended up dying in the wilderness, see yourself as someone who’s willing to step out in confidence, let your actions flow from the knowledge that you are divinely supported and divinely provided for by God.
Scarcity
The last emotion that confidence helps us to avoid is the emotion of scarcity and living from the emotion of scarcity looks like not living out of a holy expectation of an abundant life.
Whenever you are feeling the emotion of scarcity, you’re not living out of an expectation that God is going to do what He said He’s gonna do. And this is a story that I wanted to share here about a Scottish pastor. There was a huge drought at the time and this Scottish preacher, his name was Dr. Guthrie. He prayed for rain in the morning service at church and as he went to church in the afternoon, his daughter Mary said, hey, dad, here’s your umbrella. And he said, what do I need that for? And she said, you prayed for rain this morning and you don’t expect God to send it? And they carried the umbrella to church. And whenever they came home, they were so glad that they had it because of the drenching storm.
I want you to have the confidence of little Mary. She said, why would you pray for rain if you didn’t expect it to happen? My God can do things that are bigger than I could even imagine. I am believing God for more in my life, whenever I’m watching and praying with expectation, what I’m doing is living out my confidence in Him.
So when you have confidence that God is for you, that He wants you to have the abundant life that Jesus talked about in John 10:10, you start living with a holy expectation, that God is for you and wants to provide for you, you will start to see that feeling of scarcity or those thoughts of scarcity run from your mind. Because what you’re seeing is God showing up. And you live expectantly, what happens is you’re looking for God to show up.
So this happened to me recently, I was asking God to show up in my life and to confirm some things in my life. And within days I was receiving confirmation that I was on the right path, that I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. If I hadn’t been living with that expectation, I would have never seen what God was doing as a blessing. I never would have seen that.
Let’s look at the example that Moses had from being confident. In Exodus 33, Moses is talking to the Lord and he says, I want you to show me your glory. In Exodus 34, just a couple of verses later in verse six, it says, and the Lord passed before him and proclaimed the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth. Moses in confidence went to the Lord and said, show me your glory. I want to see you, show me who you are. And so the Lord honored that and said, because you’re expectant because you want to see me, here I am. And the glory of God went through, passed through and later we find out that Moses’ face was like white because he had been in the presence of the Lord.
I don’t want us to skip over the fact that God said He is merciful, He is gracious. He’s patient with us. And He is abundant in goodness and truth. That’s the God that I serve, a God who is abundant in goodness, a God who is abundant in truth. I can have full confidence in that. So when you’re walking in confidence, whenever you’re wondering, you know, is confidence even important? I know that I need confidence to, you know, do the things that I’m supposed to do or to, you know, talk on camera or be on stage. But also remember what confidence helps you to avoid, feelings of inadequacy, feelings of lack, and feelings of scarcity.
I really hope that this video helped you. This entire month, we’re going to be talking about confidence, but if you want more in-depth teaching on this and coaching on this. I really want you to check out 180 Confidence. This is a six-month mastermind that I have created where you’re going to get group coaching from me, live coaching. You’re going to get instructional videos. We’re gonna talk about topics like confidence. We’re gonna talk about body confidence. We’re gonna talk about having confidence in your relationships and really just changing our mindsets to that of Christ.
So if you need confidence at work, if you want to uplevel your performance at work and really that stems from having more confidence, make sure that you check it out. You can go to ashleyvarner.com/180. And for all my subscribers this week, I have a free download. It is confidence affirmations. And what it is is a whole workbook that is completely free. You can download it and start to get God’s word deep in your heart to build your confidence. There’s gonna be some worksheets. There’s gonna be some verses in there for you. I will leave a link in the description for you, or you can go to ashleyvarner.com/affirmations to get it today. And I will see you next time.
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