Partner in Confidence

I am 36 years old, and I like to play basketball. LeBron James is 39 years old and plays in the NBA, and when I think about that, there’s a little part of me that lights up with hope like Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber and says “So you’re telling me there’s a chance!” If you’ve seen me play basketball, and can’t tell just by looking at me, you know there is, in fact, no chance, no hope.

being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. —Philippians 1:6

The Apostle Paul is writing this letter to encourage his partners in ministry who are struggling with a lack of hope and confidence. Their circumstances do not seem great. Paul, their spiritual mentor, is in chains. The other churches that he planted do not seem to share their concern for him; they’re not helping. The church is experiencing real persecution, and the hope of an imminent victory in the kingdom of God seems delayed. There’s a lack of confidence leading to a sense that maybe this is not going to work out the way they had hoped.

Do you ever feel that way?
 
My NBA dreams are certainly not working out, but I did play varsity basketball in high school. One of my favorite memories of playing basketball in high school was at an all-school retreat; an impromptu basketball tournament began and teams started to form. My friends and I were trying to get a team together, but we were one person short and we couldn’t find anyone to join our team. We tried recruiting some of the upperclassmen, but they already had teams. Then we tried to reach out into our own grade, but none of the other freshmen wanted to be embarrassed with us. We started getting desperate; we started just asking people walking by. We just wanted to play, but nobody wanted to be on our team and our confidence was low. We all have circumstances that cause our confidence to be shaken. My guess is that there are areas in your life where you feel hopeless, where you are struggling, where you lack confidence. So what do we do about it?

One popular answer is to look within—to look to ourselves. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume presented the idea that it’s important to feel good about oneself in order for us to explore and to manifest our true potential. Two hundred years later, his thoughts would become foundational for philosophers and sociologists as they started to run wild with the possibilities of promoting self-esteem as a way to fix all of society’s ills. A leading figure in this movement was the psychologist Nathaniel Branden, who stated “I cannot think of a single psychological problem from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spousal battery or sexual deviancy, that is not traced back to the problem of low self-esteem.” It was a commonly promoted movement throughout the 1980s and 90s, and it wasn’t until early in the 21st century that it was largely abandoned. There have been countless articles and books that examine why the self-esteem movement did not fix all of our problems, but at the same time we have not exactly moved on from it, have we?

Self-esteem—in the bootstrap mentality of self-improvement—has proliferated in the last half century. The number of self-help books published each year continues to rise. There were over 45,000 self-help books published in the year 2020 alone—and can we all agree that was not our best year? The global self-help industry is now worth 40 billion USD, and it continues to grow. So here is the 40 billion dollar question: Is it working? Are you and I one more book away from achieving our true potential? Am I one book away from becoming the next Billy Graham? One book away from having my NBA dreams fulfilled?

Of course not.

You know I’m not the greatest basketball player, we’ve established that, but here’s the thing—I’ve been joking about my failures at basketball because it’s safe and inconsequential. It’s unrealistic for me to hold dreams of becoming a professional athlete, but what about the things that we really do care about; what about the things that really do matter? For instance, I care a lot about being a husband and a father: That matters to me. I love being a pastor, and I know I’m biased, but I think that’s really important. And there are times where I feel just as lost at home and at church as I do on the basketball court. The reality is, I am not a perfect parent or husband, and I think it’s pretty easy to make the case that I’m not the greatest pastor either!

I’ve been at my church for seven years now, and we struggle. When I first started, I dreamed that we would quickly turn things around. We started taking attendance, and I remember watching the numbers start to go up. And if your church is small enough, little things can make a big difference. For instance, my wife and I had our second child, and that increased our weekly attendance by something like 3-5%. Praise God! We started to gain some traction, we were starting to get excited. We renamed the church, we rebranded, and we were moving forward; we were excited to enter this new season of ministry… and then the pandemic hit. And we have struggled to bounce back. And I started to wonder if I was the right person for the job.

The Apostle Paul does not shy away from the problems facing the church, and yet he maintains confidence in the midst of struggles. Notice he doesn’t say, “being confident that he who began a good work might get back to it if he feels like it—and isn’t busy next Tuesday!” He doesn’t say, “he who began a good work expects you to finish it; expects you to carry it on to completion.” No, Paul roots his confidence in God, not us. It is God’s faithfulness not ours. The reality is that God does not need you to accomplish his plans, but God chooses to use and utilize people to enact and to carry out his plans in the world. We are being invited into his plans!
 
When my friends and I were trying to recruit people to join our little basketball team, we were getting desperate. We were asking anybody walking by. A guy was walking by and we asked, “Hey, can you join our team? We need one more person.” And he looked around like, “Me?” We were like, “Yeah, you, you’re a human, join our team!” It was the new Spanish teacher. None of us had Spanish, we didn’t know him, but it seemed like we could have done worse, I mean, he looked relatively in shape. And so he joins the team, and we start playing. We’re just excited to have an opportunity to play. But as the game unfolded we started realizing, “Oh, there’s more to this Spanish teacher than we thought!”

I remember he got the ball around the free throw line and he pauses, and turns, and faces the hoop, and goes up, and shoots the shot. It was one of those moments where time stands still, there’s perfect rotation, and it just goes beautifully into the hoop. Then on defense he makes a play; he blocks the guy. We’re suddenly on a fast break and we’re like, “Whoa, what’s going on?” So we got this new play on offense, it’s called, “get the ball to the teacher.” The embarrassment that we were expecting to happen, it wasn’t happening! Our confidence was beginning to grow and it had nothing to do with our competence; it had everything to do with our super qualified teammate. I remember the joy of being on his team and the comfort of being able to pass him the ball and to trust good things to happen.
I know there are some of you who have lost confidence in one thing or another; who have lost confidence in their careers, in their family, in their churches, in their country, in the economy, in their marriage, in their health, in themselves, in their dreams, and who have no hope that things can change. There are those of us who are crippled by fear, who are consumed by shame or by anger. The problems go much deeper than low self-esteem. Many of these items are too big for us and we lack the competence to fix them regardless of what self-improvement journey you set yourself on.

But we are not alone. “He who began a good work will finish it.”

Here is the invitation to all you who are struggling: Pass the ball to Jesus. Let the one who began a good work in you take the big shots. Christians are never without hope because we are partnered with Jesus. The cure to every social ill is not increased self-esteem, it is increasing our esteem of Christ. The way to solve every problem is not to increase our competence, but to defer to the competence of Jesus. Our confidence is not rooted in our power, but in the power of the cross. And the good news is Jesus is not competing against us, he is for us! He’s inviting us to participate on his team—he wants to help!
 
Generally speaking, there are two errors that we can make. Some of us want to take all the shots ourselves; we think that we’re going to do better on our own. And still others of us want to just sit in the stands as passive observers. I’m from Seattle, which means my NBA team hasn’t lost a game since 2008. But let me tell you something, there’s a big difference between not losing and winning. Not losing is not much fun if you’re not playing. God is inviting us to participate on his team in the Kingdom of God, and God is inviting us to become certain kinds of teammates—certain kinds of people.

But what is the good work that he is doing, and what is the completion date?
 
Here’s a simple fact of life: You are becoming someone new. You’re going to be a completely different person a week from now, a month from now, a year from now—we are all becoming someone new. If you are alive, stagnation is impossible. You are either moving towards health or unhealth. You are being shaped and formed into a new person, and the kind of person you become is largely dependent on what has your attention—where is your focus. The more that you look at yourself, the more God will start to look like you, and God will become small and incapable of helping you, because you have reduced him to your level. But the more that you give your attention to Christ, the more you might start to look like him. God has begun a good work in you, and he desires to move it towards completion.
As Lutherans, we call this the process of sanctification. This is the ongoing work of God: forming his followers into people who look more and more like Jesus, for the sake of others. Paul encouraged the Philippians to look at him and to follow his example as he follows the example of Christ. So if you’re looking for what’s next, what to do, look at Jesus and become like him until we meet him. That’s what it’s about.

But we need help with this; it’s not something you’re doing on your own. We partner with God, and with each other, to enact this—to do this. If this is our goal, it’s a fair question for us to ask of others, “Do I look more like Jesus now than I did a year ago? Are you experiencing me as more or less Christlike than I was last week?” And this is that shift from self-esteem to Christ-esteem. We do not look to ourselves for confidence rooted in our competence, rather we look to Jesus and find hope rooted in the confidence of almighty God. And when we do that, we receive a competence and a confidence that is rooted in our partnership with God, finding the power to change not only our circumstances, but our character.

This redefines success and greatness to align with our model, who is Jesus. Success for me does not look like me becoming more like LeBron James. Success is becoming more like Jesus, and learning how to love my enemies and serve my neighbors. It means partnering with each other instead of competing against one another; that we’re all on the same team, folks!
 
May we have hope and confidence because we have the best teammate in the world—in the universe! And we can trust him to finish what he started.

Rev. Alan Johnson is Pastor at Regeneration Church in Sammamish, Washington.