Sermon Tone Analysis

FACING LIFE WITH CONFIDENCE

If you go down to your favorite bookstore today—somewhere like a good Borders or a large Barnes and Noble—you could shop around for a couple of hours and come home with a shopping bag containing these books, which are currently in print and available right now in most large bookstores:

 

Ø      /Confidence:  How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End/

Ø      /How To Develop Self-Confidence and Influence People/

Ø      /Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence/

Ø      /How To Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People/

Ø      /The Confident Woman/

Ø      /Raising Confident Boys/

Ø      /Raising Confident Girls/

Ø      /Ten Days to More Confident Public Speaking/

Ø      /A Guide to Confident Living/

Ø      /365 Ways to Raise Confident Kids/

Ø      /Be Confident/

Ø      /Six Secrets of a Confident Woman/

Ø      /What’s Holding You Back:  30 Days to Having Courage and Confidence/

Ø      /The Confident Coach’s Guide to Teaching Soccer/

Ø      /How to be Your Own Therapist:  A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Confident Life /

Ø      /Bombproof Your Horse:  Teach Your Horse to Be Confident, Obedient, and Safe, No Matter What You Encounter/

/ /

All of us want to tackle life with confidence—we want that for ourselves and for our children, our students, and even for our horses.

Well, if you want to know the ultimate secrets to total self-confidence, then I’ve got a book in the Bible for you.

It’s this book we call 2 Corinthians, and this is the section of Scripture we’ve been studying in recent Sundays.

One of the themes of this book is that we should live confidently even when we’re under pressure.

Paul uses the words /confident /and /confidence /twelve times in this little book.

I believe the whole book of 2 Corinthians could be titled “Why I Am A Confident Person Despite Life’s Pressures, by the Apostle Paul.”

In our studies through 2 Corinthians, we’re coming to chapter 5; and notice these two verses:

 

Ø      Verse 1:  /Now we know…/

Ø      Verse 6:  /Therefore we are always confident…/

Ø      Verse 8:  /We are confident, I say…/

 

Here is a man who has been rejected, ridiculed, beaten down, battered, criticized and vilified.

But his opponents were totally stymied when it came to shaking his confidence.

He said, “I know, I am confident, I am always confident.”

Let’s read the whole paragraph and see what this is about:

 

/Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.

Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be found naked.

For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.

Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come./

/ /

/Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.

We live by faith, not by sight.

We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.

So we make it our goal to please Him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it.

For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad./

 

*1.

Confident People Think a Great Deal about Heaven (**4:17**-5:4)*

This paragraph is easy to dissect, and when we do so we come away with three characteristics of confident people.

First, confident people think a great deal about heaven.

We think about the unseen world which will one day become visible.

One of the troublesome things about this passage is the way the chapter division falls.

Verse 1 is really the direct continuation of the previous paragraph, which, in our Bibles, is at the end of chapter 4:

 

/Therefore we do not lose heart.

Though outwardly we are wasting away,  yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen.

For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal./

/ /

In this life we have momentary troubles, like little weights on one side of the scale.

But we are heirs of eternal life in Christ with all that comes with that—the new heavens, the new earth, the new Jerusalem, the new order of things—and when you put that on the other side of the scale, there’s no comparison.

So we fix our eyes on what is unseen.

Whenever we’re tempted to lose heart, we think about heaven.

Because we know that our bodies right now are merely tents that will collapse at some point, but we have an eternal house in the heavens, not made by human hands.

Let’s study this out in detail.

Verse 1 says:  /Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed/.

This is referring to our human bodies right now.

Paul is making a comparison, telling us that our bodies are like tents.

I haven’t gone camping in a long time, but I have a very nice tent that I bought years ago when our children were young, and this summer I hope to take it to the campground at Roan Mountain and go camping with my granddaughters.

It’s a lot of fun staying in a tent—for a night or two.

But for most of the year, I prefer my bedroom with my king sized bed, carpet under my feet, my bedside lamp, my temperature controls, and the adjacent bathroom.

Tents are temporary dwellings, and at some point we loosen the cords, pull up the stakes, collapse the tent, and pack it away.

The Lord is using that as a picture of our human bodies.

We are living right now in tents.

It’s a temporary dwelling place for our soul, because on this planet we are pilgrims and strangers.

But one day this body will be resurrected by the power of God and will be glorified and eternalized—and compared to this earthly, dying body, my new body will be like a solid mansion.

And so now we groan, we get tired of living in a tent, we long for our heavenly dwelling.

We think about heaven, and it gives us confidence about the future.

Let me read this extended passage in the Living Bible.

You can follow along on the screen, because I think this is a fair interpretation of what Paul is saying, and these words are so glorious: 

 

/Though our bodies are dying, our inner strength in the Lord is growing every day.

These troubles and sufferings of ours are, after all, quite small and won’t last very long.

Yet this short time of distress will result in God’s richest blessing upon us forever and ever!

So we do not look at what we can see right now, the troubles all around us, but we look forward to the joys of heaven which we have not yet seen.

The troubles will soon be over, but the joys to come will last forever.

For we know that when this tent we live in is taken down—when we die and leave these bodies—we will have wonderful new bodies in heaven, homes that will be ours forever, made for us by God Himself, and not by human hands.

How weary we grow of our present bodies.

That is why we look forward eagerly to the day when we shall have heavenly bodies which we shall put on like new clothes.

For we shall not be merely spirits without bodies.

These earthly bodies make us groan and sigh, but we wouldn’t like to think of dying and having no bodies at all.

We want to slip into our new bodies so that these dying bodies will, as it were, be swallowed up by everlasting life./

/ /

Now, this inspires confidence for obvious reasons.

When you for certain that something is going to end favorably, it inspires a natural confidence.

When our children were little, one of our daughters was deathly afraid of going through the carwash down the street.

I can understand why.

You drive into a tunnel sort of contraption, stop your vehicle, and suddenly it’s attacked by giant instruments while you’re trapped inside of it.

Intense blasts of pelting water strike the car from every side, creating a cacophony of confusion and sound.

Strange rotating balls of spinning terror fall from above and begin battering the car.

Monster-like devices reach out from the sides and spread their terror across the doors and windows.

So I can understand why she was terrified and would scream bloody murder whenever we went through the carwash.

But as for myself, I wasn’t the least bit afraid to drive right into the lion’s mouth, because I knew that three minutes and forty-five seconds later I’d be driving out again with a cleaner car.

When we know that the ending of something is going to be favorable, it inspires natural confidence.

So the first thing to remember is that confident people think a good deal about eternal life, heaven, and the weight of glory that shall be revealed.

/ /

/ /

 

*2.

Confident People Draw On Inner Resources (5:5)*

Second, confident people draw on inner resources.

Look at verse 5:  /Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come./

/ /

In other words, it is God Himself who is preparing us for the experience of putting on immortality and experiencing eternal life; and as a down payment, guaranteeing what is to come, He has given us the inner resources of the Holy Spirit.