The Confidence Factor

It may be a simple word but full of meaning and significance. You cannot live life successfully without confidence.

When his mother nurtures a newborn baby, he is receiving the first lesson about this topic. When the mother replaces her breast-feeding by the bottle, the baby rejects it right away. He wants his mother’s nurturing. He doesn’t want the bottle or anything else. He feels confident when being nursed by his mother. It means the world to him. He fuzzes with that transition until gradually he becomes “confident” with the new system of nurturing and embraces the bottle. Now when he is hungry, he cries asking for it. He has learned to trust the bottle as the new source of feeding.

The process is repeated all over again, when the mother introduces baby food. He rejects that food, spitting it out and making the ugliest and cutest faces any one has ever seen. He fights and fights until gradually he begins to understand; this is the only way he is going to satisfy his hunger. The wise mother from time to time gives him a bottle to help in the transition; until he finally graduates from the bottle and moves himself up into baby food.

This process is repeated throughout life. We cannot survive without confidence. We need to feel this way in order to be spiritually, emotionally and physically healthy. This is true if we are to become everything Father God designed us to be. You can never have too much confidence. It may have a negative connotation only in sports, other than that, in real life we need all the confidence we can muster up.

For the releasing of the person God wants you to be from the inside of your spirit man, confidence is a vital part of it. You cannot be everything God intended you to be, if you lack this virtue. There is nothing more deplorable than to see an individual in action who lacks it. Just about everything in life is affected by having, or not having self-confidence. From being your true self to being a father, a mother, a husband or wife, a sportscaster, to playing a specific sport, to being a speaker, a singer, a politician, a preacher, Pastor or teacher, a leader, a Fivefold minister, a friend or girlfriend. Everything in life is affected by this virtue. Is it a virtue? I truly think that it is because although it is fundamental to being your true self, not everyone has it.

It is normal to feel you don’t have it. What is not normal is for you to live life without it.

Carlos Lopez

Senior leader at Paul and Silas Ministries