How many times do we hear that we need to have great confidence in ourselves to complete big tasks? Most of us grow up with a message, at least from our culture, that we need to believe in ourselves and step out into the world with confidence. If you don’t believe you can do it, you won’t do it. To achieve big things, you need to believe you can achieve big things. When it comes to the biggest task that any Christian can perform, we are told not to have any confidence in ourselves. In fact, an elevated confidence in self is more likely to see us fail.
Our Big Task:
In Matthew 28:18-20, Jesus gave his disciples that great commission. They and all disciples after them are to go out in the authority of Christ with the task of making disciples of all nations. This is a monumental task and the barriers to it are beyond human ability. The task of bringing another human being to deny themselves, turn from their whole paradigm of belief and hope, and put all reliance, hope, and trust in Christ is an impossible mission.
Someone might object to that being an impossible task. Why would Jesus ever call us to an impossible task? We just need lots of training. We need to become experts in apologetics so that we can dismantle the worldviews of our opponents and persuade them with biblical logic. We need to know methods and questioning techniques that guide the lost down a path that is too good to refuse. In short, we need to have lots of training and intense practice. We need strategic goals and cleverly thought-out programs that bring people into our doors.
As we have applied the great commission, especially in the modern context, most Christians have experienced some degree of evangelistic strategies that are purposed to give us more confidence in our mission. While some of this training and even some programs can be helpful, I’ve never seen any of this overcome the general lack of confidence that Christians often exhibit when it comes to our great mission. The more confidence we put in human persuasions, ideas, and strategies, the more we realize that we are inept and even incompetent for the job. Even when there is a seeming show of success and mass attendance, we are still left with the question… “Are these people really disciples?”
There is no amount of confidence we can put in a human being to obtain what can only be a super-human result. The transformation of any single human being from death to life can only be accomplished by One who has all power over human life. When we put confidence in humans or in human schemes for mission, it actually works against our confidence in mission. We find confidence for our evangelistic mission in one place alone – GOD. That’s why we never see the apostle Paul thanking any human for the work of salvation being wrought in another human. We have confidence because we serve a God who saves.
Romans 6:17-18 But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, 18 and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.