The Core Truths, Part 2 of 4

It's time for the third key truth about confidence, and this is the one that I put first in my book: Your view of God and your view of yourself will determine how you view everything else in life.

If you see God as holding out on you, as a great cosmic killjoy who burdens you with rules, as a weakling, or as cold and distant, you will not be depending on Him for your sense of self-worth. You may view Him as your source for things, but you view these things as giving you your value. I did this for years, pleading with God to give me a girlfriend. My value was in that, not from Him.

And if you can't depend on Him for your value, then you will turn somewhere else. God will be at best a source for the things you're turning to and at worst a hindrance to what you believe is your happiness. Either way, you won't want to get to know Him because a relationship with Him isn't important to you with these viewpoints. It's still all about you.

Which brings us to how you view yourself. If you think you're either better or worse than others, you're going to treat them in ways you shouldn't. For the former, you'll be proud and haughty, very likely unmerciful or at least condescending. For the latter, you'll get into either arrogance or self-condemnation because you're trying to earn affection and acceptance from others. With either path, when someone does something you don't like, there will be judgment, either against them or yourself. Also, whatever path you see as being most likely to give you happiness becomes right in your eyes, regardless of morality or how it affects others. You may care about people, but you care about yourself more.

Essentially, if you see God in any but the right light, He will not be enough for you to get your need for value met, and so you will turn elsewhere. And if you don't see yourself the right way, you can't love others. The affection and acceptance you're seeking you will see as existing in a limited quantity, and always at risk of being taken from you. It becomes this massive competition with no end game, no final victory, nothing but casualties and memories. You always have to get some share of the acceptance pie from people and you feel threatened when someone else becomes more popular or is better at your job or has the coolest toy or is better-looking.

If you try to avoid this by seeing everyone as equal in an evolutionary worldview, then we all have the same value, but that value is 0 because we're nothing more than the product of random chance. If you worship another god, all of them offer works-based salvation, so you don't know if you've ever done enough. Most of us, though, simply worship ourselves, trying to get all the glory and love we can.

The point is that you need to see both yourself and God the right way to have confidence. If you don't, everything becomes works-based and you'll see what you seek to be in limited supply. The truth is that there's more acceptance and love than you can even handle waiting for you for free, if you only know where to look.