Knowing who You are in Jesus changes everything. There is a confidence about you that allows you to just know that you know that you know who you are. The devil fights us hard in this area because once we know we are bought by the Blood of Jesus, he can’t touch us or invade our lives and get us depressed and discouraged and feeling beat up. Pride comes in to cover a lack of confidence. Pride makes us beat others down in order to make us feel better about ourselves. With pride we can’t lift others up like it says in Philippians 2:3 KJV Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.
The New Living Translation says “Don’t be selfish; don’t try to impress others. Be humble, thinking of others as better than yourselves.” Pride causes us to compete against others and causes a false sense of identity. It causes a lot of hurt to others. We don’t know what people are going through and pride keeps us from helping someone who may be drowning.
Don’t be selfish. Don’t try to impress others. Both of these are spot on. The meaning of strife in Strong’s Concordance is a desire to put oneself forward. In the dictionary, strife means contention, conflict, rivalry, fighting, trouble. Vainglory in Strong’s Concordance means empty pride, a vain opinion, error. In the dictionary it means boastfulness.
Most of my life, I struggled with feeling that I had any value. It kept me feeling useless. It allowed the devil to keep me from seeing who I was in Christ. It kept me from believing God’s Word. It kept me from being able to receive or give love. I pushed people away because I didn’t believe I had any value, and I thought they would just use me or hurt me. Once the devil gets us to believe we are nothing and that we have no self-esteem, he compounds one lie upon another. We have no value. We are useless. Everybody else has it all together, everybody but us. We aren’t worthy of being loved. God must not love us, and He will never use us for His Kingdom. The lies go on and on.
Until we finally allow God to work in us and reveal the lies of the devil, the door will stay open for satan to keep us in bondage. The longer we stay in the darkness, the easier it is for the devil to keep us there and to lie to us and keep us from being set free. And it allows the devil to continue taking over every area of our life. We open the door through rejection and unforgiveness. Unforgiveness produces bitterness that becomes a stronghold in our hearts, and the longer we allow that unforgiveness, the stronger the root of bitterness becomes until it takes over everything in us.
Only through Jesus Christ can we be truly set free. As we allow Him to help us forgive, and cut the roots of bitterness in us, then we can start becoming who He meant for us to be. Confidence in God’s Word begins to push out that bitterness and suspicion and pride. And anything else that has been allowed to keep us imprisoned. We don’t realize how much territory we give the enemy when we disobey even the littlest command in God’s Word. The saying goes that if we give the enemy an inch, he’ll take a mile. Actually, he will take anything he can. And we have allowed it.
I realize I started writing this article on whether we have confidence in who we are in Christ, or if we are filled with pride, and I’ve ended up talking about unforgiveness and bitterness. But this is how the enemy works in us. As God has been working in me in this new season, He is revealing truth to me. It isn’t always pleasant, especially when He is showing us what we have been like and how we have refused to see what He has been trying to tell us. His Word is true. He will teach us and give us wisdom and understanding. But we have to want it. When we read the Bible, we compare it to what is going on in our lives and if it doesn’t line up with God’s Word, then we have to disagree with the devil and change.
It isn’t always easy to see the truth, but if we let God help us, as we start lining up with God, our confidence begins to grow, and it pushes out low self-esteem. We don’t need to beat others up in order to feel like we have value. We get an oversize case of confidence in knowing our worth without hurting others. In fact, it gives us the compassion and love of God that enables us to pass that love onto others so they also can be set free.
Confidence or Pride?
