Session 4: Confidence (The 5 C’s of Biblical Manhood)

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I am going live and I'm going to do it just a little bit earlier than normal so that I can accumulate some people that might want to join in. Let me see if I'm actually going live here by checking my Facebook page. Welcome everyone. Good morning. Ah yeah, here we go.

We are going live and I have an opportunity to see anybody who might be joining. If you want to just leave a little comment down below or say hello or ask a question, be more than happy to answer. There's people that are joining already. I see Jeremy just joining. Thank you guys for tuning in.

This is my Monday morning, 10 o'clock Facebook live. We've been doing this now for a good week or two. Sean, me, buddy Sean just joined in. How are you doing buddy? I miss you.

I'd love to be getting together with a lot of you guys. I'm sequestered of course but the other day or yesterday I guess was the last day of the sequester so technically we can go out. The problem I have is that my wife is such a high risk. I can't afford to risk bringing anything back so I'm kind of staying home for a little bit longer. But every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I've been coming on and doing a Facebook live and talking about the five C's of biblical manhood.

Compassion, conviction, commitment, confidence, and courage. We've already done compassion, conviction, and commitment. And today we're talking about godly confidence. But just to rehearse, the compassion had to do with the compassion, loving God and loving others. In other words, my intimacy and my relationship with God and the closer I get to Him the more I'm allowed to see other people through His eyes.

It's pretty incredible. The closer I get to God and the more I crawl up in His lap and become intimate with Him, I end up with godly compassion which by the way guys, it's the key to everything. It is the key and the secret to everything. No matter what our trials, struggles, the things that we're going through especially right now, nothing, nothing can harm us. And we can have that confidence as we get closer to God.

And as we have godly compassion and we study God's Word and we're in the Word and we're learning more and more about Him, we end up with godly conviction. I am now, I now have conviction. God is real. There's no way He's not real. I'm reading my Bible.

I'm understanding more and more about Him. And as I become more convicted about how real God is, I end up with godly commitment. And commitment is the bridge you must cross to transform the old man into the new man that I talked about the six stages for change. Event, awareness, decision, what I call the cycle of hopelessness. And by the way, for you guys that weren't tuned in, if you scroll down on this page, on our Facebook page, and you'll find those other sessions, sessions one, two, and three, dealing with compassion, conviction, and commitment.

But the six stages of change, the cycle of hopelessness is event, awareness, decision. I attend an event and I made a where that something needs to change. And so I am aware and then I make a decision, I'm going to change it. And then what happens is Monday comes. I just came down from that weekend getaway and the Lord convicted me that I needed to do thus and such.

Monday comes, I'm right back into the world. And all of a sudden, that decision didn't, didn't take root. Commitment, there's a big difference between a commitment and a decision. And if you look it up in the dictionary, it's pretty impressive. So commitment, what I like to say is the reason why we don't have a lot of real committed people today is because they haven't experienced godly compassion, which leaves the godly conviction.

If you go through this in this order, you'll become a committed person. And that of course, then leads us to godly confidence, the confidence that God is there, no matter what, he's, he's got my, my back. It's my, my level of preparedness, godly confidence. I want to start with this. The godly confidence knows the limitations of self and the all sufficiency of God.

I know where Vince begins and ends. Some of you have heard my story and I've said this before that my proximity to God, by the way, is in direct relation to my distance from Vince. The closer I am to this guy, the further away I am from God. But the more I let go, the more I allow God to humble me, interestingly, the more confidence that I have. It's counterintuitive.

Listen to this. Jesus says, my peace I give you. And by the way, Jesus talks about peace a lot. Okay. My peace I give you, not the world's peace.

Have you ever wondered about that? What's the difference between the world's peace and the peace Jesus is talking about? Here's the difference. The world's peace is power, manipulation, and control. If I can just get this set of circumstances to exist, I might not lose my job.

In fact, I might get that promotion. My friends might think differently about me if I could just get them to understand some of these things about me. It's all about manipulation. Will that bring you peace? Oh yeah, it can, albeit false and temporary.

But what Jesus is saying is his peace is counterintuitive. Now listen, guys. The peace that Jesus is talking about is only made available to you and I when we truly recognize how little we bring to the table. Wow. That seems counterintuitive, doesn't it?

Well, why is that true peace? Because think about it, guys. I can have confidence. It's not going to be something I have to deliver on. I'm confident that my Lord is totally sufficient to bring anything that I need.

That's the kind of confidence that we can have when we get close to God, when we're seeing other people through God's eyes, and we have convictions and we're committed believers, it can lead to godly confidence. Hebrews 13, 6 says, so we say with confidence, okay, the Lord is my helper. I will not be afraid. Listen, guys, dear ones, in the midst of this crisis, we have to have the confidence that our Lord has our back. There is absolutely nothing for us to be afraid of.

It goes on to say, what can man do to me? What can man do to me? No, I've got my Lord. Humility is the key. I found this quote from G.K.

Chesterton in Christian theology, theology in plain language in a paper he wrote. He says this, what we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved to the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth, this has been exactly reversed.

Get that, guys. We've reversed it, okay? We have confidence in ourselves, and we're going to get blown away, guys, if we don't place our confidence where it truly belongs, and that's with the Lord. And so anyway, this idea of true peace being counterintuitive is very, very important. And the other thing about confidence is if you're really confident, that can lead to a really having a healthy attitude.

You have a positive attitude about everything that comes your way. In 2 Corinthians 4, 8 to 10, Paul is my hero, because he had such confidence, did he not? I mean, no matter what came his way, he could handle it. I don't know about you, but I want to be more like Paul. I imagine Paul when it came to trials in his life, you know, and then all this stuff that was, well, listen, what he says, we are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed, perplexed, but not in despair, persecuted, but not abandoned, struck down, but not destroyed.

We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. Paul had such incredible confidence, again, born out of going through these first three things, I'm convinced of it. He was so confident that no matter what life threw at him, it didn't matter. Here's my impression of Paul, by the way. When it came to tough stuff in his life, Paul, I get this picture of him with his stern look on his face.

When it came to the stuff the world wanted to throw at him, taking this kind of a posture, watch, bring it on. Well, I'm not sure I'm quite there yet, but I'll tell you what, that's where I want to be. Isn't that where you want to be? Don't you want to be in a place to matter that you have such confidence in God that no matter what is thrown at you, you'll take it. You'll just know God has got your back.

And guys, listen, there is no way that you can have that happen in your life if you're not going through these stages. If you're not spending time in God's Word, if you're not getting to know him at a much more deeper and intimate level, if you're not asking him to reveal people and circumstances through his eyes, if you're not allowing him to be the lens through which you view everything in life, it isn't going to work. And then if you're not convicted that really God is real, this is real, I don't have any doubts whatsoever as a result of my getting to know God at that level and sensing his presence in my life. And if that leads you to Godly commitment, that you've got your life in order, that you're living a disciplined, obedient life, that you're getting rid of the clots which I talked about in the last session and all the garbage in your life that's hindering you from being all that God wants you to be, if you're not able to do these things, it's very, very difficult to come to a place of Godly confidence. And man and woman of Godly confidence has the right perspective, has the right attitude, doesn't suffer from negative effects of what we call the Pygmalion effect, which suggests that my attitude and assumptions about people, places and things can actually be the reason why they are the way they are.

So you see in the glass half full or the glass half empty, we want to see the glass half full, we want to have a positive attitude, we want to believe the best about people and we're not so insecure that we have to put other people down, we are confident in who we are in Jesus. And that's the kind of men and women that we want to be guys. So I want to encourage you to date tomorrow or not tomorrow but Wednesday at 10 o'clock. I want to come back in and finish this series by talking about Godly courage, Godly courage, because that's one thing that I think is really lacking in the body of Christ today, is the real kind of courage that Jesus is calling us into. And I'll talk much more about that on Wednesday, but I've said this before, we in our culture move from the home of the free and the brave to a land filled with slaves and cowards.

Dear ones, we are ideological slaves and practical cowards. It's hard to find anybody in our culture that's willing to die for anything anymore these days. But listen man, when you when you're so in love with Jesus and you go through this and Jesus is the center of your life, that's the kind of courage that you need. I'll do anything for my Lord. I'll die for him.

And that's where we God wants us to come, where God wants us to live. So we'll talk about that as we kind of wrap this up on Wednesday and then on Friday we'll start something new. We'll have some fun. Anyway, I thank you guys so much for tuning in. I want to try to keep these things as brief as I can.

And again, if you want to leave your comments, I would happy to respond to them. I'm seeing that a number of you are checking in. I see a lot of little flashes coming across the stream, a little lot of little like things. But again, thank you guys so much. I love all you guys.

I miss not being able to be with many of you who are here in Colorado Springs that are local. But it'll be over soon. So Lord, just thank you for this time. Thank you for this day. Lord, we're asking you to bless us by helping us process those one or two little nuggets of truth that you intended in this brief message just for us.

And that's the way I'd encourage you to pray, dear ones. Just pray, Lord, don't let me miss what you're trying to teach me, first of all, through this trial, through this struggle. But Lord, as I expose myself to teachings like this and other things that I might expose myself to, don't let me miss those little nuggets of truth that you intended just for me. Help me to be the man, the woman that you intended, Lord. And I thank you and praise you and honor you, Lord, today for all that you're doing and just in Jesus' name that we pray.

And all God's kids said, Amen. God bless you guys. See you soon.