A Ramble About Self-Confidence

As I was riding back from Las Vegas recently in the back of my sister's car with my dad, he said something which has gained a lot of traction in this world. He said something along the lines of “you can do anything you want if you have the self-confidence.” Self-esteem and self-confidence are big ideas, and it is true that those who possess them seem to accomplish more of their goals in this life. This world operates on self-esteem and self-confidence, and they are required in order to mesh your gears and get anywhere. And this is precisely the problem with them.

Self-esteem and self-confidence are totally opposed to the teaching and Path of Jesus Christ. They are one of the big three innocuous gates through which demons (literal or figurative the result is the same) flood through and open us up to worse enslavement to various kinds of manifestations of sin. Self-esteem is in fact the worst one because no matter how hard you try and stamp it out it crops back up.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ calls us to place our faith in God through Jesus Christ, not ourselves. Faith in oneself draws us away from placing one's trust in Him for something, and faith in oneself is misplaced faith because we are fallible, and He is not. We don't know which way is best for us, and He does. We don't know what's five minutes down the road, and He sees it clearly. We are blinded to seeing only the extremely short term, He sees the bigger picture. We know only what we want in the moment, He knows what we need in any given moment.

Self-esteem allows you to function and thrive within this world, but it does so at the cost of propelling you away from God and His Grace which is activated only by faith in Him working through love, and it is this Grace which effects our salvation. It is this Grace which energizes and enables the charismata, not self-confidence. Self-esteem or self-confidence doesn't amplify Grace, it dampens and quenches it.

St. John wrote:

"Don’t love the world, neither the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the Father’s love isn’t in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, isn’t the Father’s, but is the world’s. The world is passing away with its lusts, but he who does God’s will remains forever.” (1 John 2:15-17, WEB)

Adherence to self-esteem and self-confidence is loving both this world and the things of it. This is why those who adhere to it function so well in this world, because this world knows and loves its own. But for the Christian the cost of “fitting in” is far too high. This is why the Saints of old were at such odds with the world. They were poor, homeless, despised, and persecuted all because they weren't willing to pay that price and throw open the floodgates to be pulled away from Christ who is our life.

You either depend on yourself, or you depend on God. The scripture says in Jeremiah, “Cursed is the man who trusts in man, who makes flesh his strength.” Dependence on oneself only hastens the descent into the madness of Gehenna. The only way to reverse that descent is to stop depending on and trusting yourself and your own abilities. You are smoke and dust which blows away with the slightest breeze.

There is a cost to rejecting self-esteem and trusting in God alone. It is that you won't be able to function or thrive in this world. You will be rejected and despised. You will be poor. You will possibly be tormented and die for it. But in this you will be in good company, so were the Saints of old, and so was Jesus Christ Himself who is our pattern and our Master. We can do no better than for our lives to imitate His in every detail.