If you are struggling with weakness, press toward faith in God in your moment of anxiety because that is where victory awaits you. What do I mean by weakness? I mean everything that takes away your confidence from who you are in God. I mean the loss of identity from forgone relationships (whether it’s loss of loved ones, breakups and divorces), the repercussions of bad mistakes (we all made them), or setbacks in your career (because of political or race issues). The loss of confidence comes from troublesome emotions and emotions don’t break us mortally and physically, it harasses us mentally in the quiets of night and in the noise of silence. It pervades our thoughts, slowly wreaking havoc until we are rendered useless.

Don’t be mistaken, you are not thrown to the wayside just because you lose your confidence or because your identity is in question. Doubt is a natural part of living life, but doubt is never supposed to destroy our lives, which it does so frequently. Further, the same doubts should not cloud us day after day, and year after year, it is not supposed to be as cyclical as the seasons.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. – Psalm 27:13-14David is having doubts about himself, about who he is in God. He sees the world coming against him. He feels alone. Everything he learned in church seems to be useless. His faith, which has been consumed by past success, is finally being met with having to choose a price for what he believes because now everything is going to cost more than just mere belief– his life is on the line. He is at a point in his life where he does not have any friends, but has also been abandoned by his family, the very people who share his blood. Even when he calls out to God in desperation, there doesn’t seem to be any response, it feels like God doesn’t care. What do you think all of that abandonment means for his confidence?

Isn’t this how we feel in our times of weakness? Isn’t this what we experience when we are so let down by everybody and everything in life? We are brought to our knees and faced with fight or flight; but you can’t take flight because there’s nowhere for you to go and at the same time, the fight will certainly bring death and still there is no answer from the all loving God. Then we give ourselves up to our doubts and dangle through life, hanging on threads of a meaningless life.

Our eyes become sullen, they look of misery and the fire flickers to a cold death. A few of us will grit our teeth and abandon everybody else and stop expecting anything from anybody before we become abandoned and turn to an insular self-reliance to deal with our painful dis-confidence. The results are the same whether we fight or take flight– confidence dies. Today, we need to all change. We all need to wait for confidence to come in our anxiety during our weakness. If faith is really confidence, like the Bible says, then we need to wait expectingly for it to come from God. Confidence is lost when we stop waiting.

Confidence is lost when we stop expecting. David’s confidence comes from knowing one thing: that in the end, faith in God ultimately triumphs over all difficulties which besiege and imperil our lives. Yes, faith in God will cost us something precious to us, but God’s mercy will protect us from the despair of that cost. Be strong and take heart, see the goodness of God in your life. See the people God brings to you who are not against you and embrace them because God embraces you always. So wait for confidence, wait for God in expectation.