Dear friend: Am I bad Christian?
January 31, 2011 | Faith: Knowing Christ, Q&A: Dear Friend
Dear Suzie,
Self-doubt has plagued me my entire life.. but that only makes me more frustrated because I have heard that once you are fully focused on Christ, you won’t ever have confidence issues.
This often leads me to doubt myself more – “Am I a bad Christian? What’s wrong with my relationship with Christ? Am I not reading my Bible enough, praying enough, although this monopolizes my time some days?
Alicia
Dear friend,
I’m sorry, Alicia, that someone said that if you are a Christian you’ll never doubt or lack confidence.
I read through scripture and I find great men and women of faith who doubted themselves. Moses said he stuttered (Exodus 3:1-12; 4:10-11), and yet Stephen described him as a man of great speech and action (Acts 7:22). While Moses saw his shortcoming, “Lord, my tongue gets tangled,” God saw a leader. (See the video teaching on this.)
Paul described himself as ordinary, not an eloquent speaker (2 Corinthians 10:10), and sometimes torn between what his flesh wanted to do and his desires to do right (Romans 7:14-25). But in God’s hands, this man established churches, prayed for the sick and they were healed, and suffered for Christ with joy.
Becoming a Christian is one of the most powerful choices we can make in life because we discover God’s love and His purpose for our lives. We get to share that good news with others as we experience it for ourselves. We discover what the presence of God feels like, and how that transforms us.
Reading your Bible does transform you, but not because you do it “enough”. Praying changes you, but not because you do it “enough”.
You change when your confidence is removed from your abilities, your successes or failures, your feelings to the truth: God is enough. It is His strength. It is His might. It is His power working in You that is enough.
That’s my prayer for you today, Alicia. That you simply rest in that truth. That you pray and read the Bible just to know Him. That you allow Him to take that self-doubt and replace it with God-trust.
Rejoice in that, sis. Take it and run with it. He loves you. He is working in you.
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I have been reminding my children that our hearts will lie to us. Jeremiah tells us our hearts are deceitful and desperately sick. Who can understand them? So if that is the case, our heart will lie to us. They will whisper deceptions that are part truth part lie. “You are not enough.” “God can’t use you.” “You are a bad Christian because you_____.” Part truths because we are never enough, but Christ in us is more than enough. I am teaching my girls to tell their hearts the truth in light of the lies.
When their hearts say, “No one loves you.” Say God loves me (quote a verse like Jn 3:16). Tell your heart you may not feel loved, but your mommy and daddy love you.
Easier said than done, but being aware that their hearts lie has helped them identify when they are being deceived.
I struggle here too. I am learning to feed my deceptive heart scripture. It helps when I don’t “feel it.” I can at least know it and knowing it long enough engenders feeling it in time.
Blessings!
January 31st, 2011 at 12:03 pmSuzie, what a great answer to that question. I have heard a wonderful Joyce Meyer teaching about this – “do it afraid”. We will always feel fear and self-doubt, but we need to do our best. Once we get to that place where we cannot go on any longer, our Papa meets us there and will carry us the rest of the way.
Thanks for your blog – I am a new follower and I am just drawn to the Proverbs31 sisters
God bless!
January 31st, 2011 at 12:20 pmReading your Bible does transform you, but not because you do it “enough”. Praying changes you, but not because you do it “enough”.
You change when your confidence is removed from your abilities, your successes or failures, your feelings to the truth: God is enough. It is His strength. It is His might. It is His power working in You that is enough.
suzie how true) my prayer is to rest in him and only him !!
January 31st, 2011 at 7:06 pm