Insecurity

Question: Are you willing to admit a time you dealt with “insecurity" on an over-the-top silly level?

Romans 12:2

Do you believe that God calls insecurity sin, too. Why? Our cultural instructors (tv, etc) disapprove of our insecurity because it is an offense to individual worthiness. God disapproves of our insecurity because it is an offense to his Son’s worthiness. Paul defines it as "confidence in the flesh”. Phil. 3:3, Gal 6:14

Philippians 3:3 KJV 1900

3 For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.

Galatians 6:14 KJV 1900

14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world.

But how does it make sense that insecurity and confidence can be related? Every coin has two sides.

On the top side, confidence in the flesh is the self-assurance that comes from possessing those attributes that supposedly determine worthiness.

Bottom side of the coin is just as dangerous: the insecurity that comes from not possessing them. In both cases, we place our confidence in personal attributes.

4 Ways this is sin? Sin brings suffering. Insecurity is sinful for more serious reasons than that. Here are at least four of them:

1. Distraction with Self

A. Insecurity messes up our ability to do what God made us to do: love him and others. B. How many times have you been in a situation where you should have offered care to someone or approached God privately in prayer, but your mind is slogging through another round of how awkward you look in your pants that morning or how much smarter the person you’re talking to is? C. Being self-conscious is being conscious of self. We are not loving others when we are obsessing with ourselves; we are not in humility counting them as more significant and more worthy Phil. 2:3 D. Some much to distract us today.

Humans “create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003.”2 The average adult in the West wades through the equivalent of 174 newspapers worth of information per day.3

a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention

2. Dissatisfaction with God

A. Insecurity is often nothing more than grumbling for better manna. We are sick of adequate nourishment; we want extraordinary flavor. B. We don’t like what God has given—money, position, appearance, personality— and we grumble for something better. (1 Tim. 6:9). C. Our dissatisfaction with self is often nothing more than our dissatisfaction with God. D. Insecurity is not sin primarily because it is an insult to our value (though it is), but because it is an insult to God’s wisdom. Who was that person growing up you always wanted to impress? (Beat Keith in Trivia Crack)

3. Justification from Others

A. Insecurity reveals that we long for justification before people more than before God. B. He does not care whether you rent or own or what school you went to. We know this, of course. But we still care . . . because they still care. C. We care more about the attributes we think make us worthy before people than we do about what makes us worthy before the Almighty. D. Righteousness is what pleases the Lord. But we would rather have something that would make others jealous. E. When our minds are pining after more Facebook attention or a better career as a boost to our worthiness, we forsake the righteousness of Christ that actually makes us worthy (Rom. 1:16-17). F. Example of King Saul. 1 Samuel 15

As King Saul shows us, it’s a dangerous fear because insecurity can lead to great disobedience.

Saul is a sober reminder to us that we obey the one we fear. He feared the people — he loved his reputation — and despised God.

Being little in our own eyes can be either righteous or ruinous.

It’s righteous if we see God as big and us as small. This actually frees us from fear. v.17

But it’s ruinous if the approval of man is what’s big to us because it always leads to disobeying God. v.24

4. Justification by Works

A. Insecurity shows that we are still in some way believing that our justification is based upon our own attributes and accomplishments. B. Most of us are not tempted to think ourselves worthy because we are of the tribe of Benjamin, but we may wish we at least had a bigger church, more impressive children, another degree behind our name. But finding confidence in those things is a direct rival to finding confidence in Christ. C. And this is the sanity the apostle Paul brings to us in our insecurity: “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Phil. 3:7-8a). D. Paul tells us to abandon finding our worth in anything other than Christ and his redemptive work on our behalf. E. The shaky confidence we maintain in ourselves cannot be compared to the surpassing worth of confidence in Christ. F. If Paul had a parting message, it certainly would not be that you are special. It would be that you are righteous in Christ, and the crowning proof of this awaits you at the finish line, so press on in faith (2 Tim. 4:6-8). We should not be so concerned with being special that we fall short of being found in Christ. Solution: Beholding is becoming. 2 Cor. 3:18

Introspection must give way to amazement at glory. When it does, becoming happens. If there is any key to maturity, it is that. Behold your God in Jesus Christ. Then you will make progress from where we are to where we know. Seldom do any of our habits or flaws disappear by a process of extinction through reasoning or “by the mere force of mental determination.” Reason and willpower are not enough. “But what cannot be destroyed may be dispossessed…The only way to dispossess [the heart] of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.” A young man, for example, may “cease to idolize pleasure, but it is only because the idol of wealth has become the stronger and gotten the ascendancy” and is enabling him to discipline himself for prosperous business. “Even the love of money ceases to have the mastery over the heart” if it’s drawn into another world of ideology and politics, “and he is now lorded over by the love of power.” But “there is not one of these [identity] transformations in which the heart is left without an object. Its desire for one particular

object may be conquered, but… its desire for having some one object” of absolute love “is unconquerable.” It is only when admitted “into the number of God’s children through the faith that is in Jesus Christ [that] the spirit of adoption is poured out upon us. It is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominate affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires, in the only way that deliverance is possible.” So it isn’t enough to hold out a “mirror of its imperfections” to your soul. It’s not enough to lecture your conscience. Rather, you must “try every legitimate method of finding access to your hearts for the love of him who is greater than the world. - Thomas Chalmers / The Expulsive Power of a New Affection