“Be bold and strong! Banish fear and doubt! For remember, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”
JOSHUA 1:9 (TLB)
Doubt will cause you to miss God’s best. James 1:6 (TEV) says, “Whoever doubts is like a wave in the sea that is driven and blown about by the wind.” When you doubt, you let your circumstances control you.
There are two things that rob your confidence and cause doubt.
Comparing yourself to others causes doubt. 2 Corinthians 10:12 says that people who compare themselves to other people are foolish. You should never compare yourself to anybody else because you are unique. God made you to be you; he doesn’t want you to be somebody else. Most people start off in life as originals and end up as carbon copies – and poor carbon copies at that! God says not to compare yourself for two reasons: You’ll either find somebody who’s doing a better job than you, and you’ll get discouraged, or you’ll find somebody who is doing a poorer job than you, and you will be filled with pride. Don’t compare yourself. You are unique, so you are incomparable!
Past failures cause doubt. You might think that because of certain things in your past, God could never use you. Have you ever read the Bible? The spiritual leaders of the Bible did not exactly have stellar records. Moses was a murderer. David was an adulterer and a murderer. Abraham gave his wife away – twice! Jacob stole the family inheritance from his brother. Paul was a religious terrorist before he met Jesus. Peter was a hard-driving, hard-drinking, hard-living fisherman – a salty sea dog! And he probably cussed like one, too. God uses people with checkered pasts because none of us are perfect. God uses average, ordinary, dysfunctional people. If God only used perfect people, nothing would get done in this world.
Believe the Bible when it says that God has a purpose for your life, and that even before you were born he had a plan to use you for ministry. So “be bold and strong! Banish fear and doubt! For remember, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9 TLB).
