LET GO OF YOUR DOUBT
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 teaches that whoever doubts is like a wave in the sea that is driven and blown about by the wind. When you doubt, you allow your circumstances to control you. There are two things that rob our confidence and cause doubt.- Comparing myself to others causes doubt. 2 Corinthians 10:12 teaches that people who compare themselves to other people are foolish. You don’t compare to anybody else, because you are unique. God made you to be you; and God 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 wants us to stop comparing 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 prideful. Let’s stop this comparing. You are unique and 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 sterling 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 an insensitive know-it-all! 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.
