The night drags on forever... waiting void your voice

Am I bitter? I don't want to have been effected so much by certain things, by these feelings of inadequacy and failure, but it's hard. It's so hard.

Last night Pastor Tom Sterbens came to Lee. I LOVED him. Probably one of the best, most sincere guys I have ever listened to, and I mean that with all sincerity. He said some pretty memorable things.

First of all, he told us that forgiveness is refusing to allow anyone but God to fill our need or validate us. It's saying that where someone else didn't show us our worth, we won't remember that or hold onto that because what they said doesn't define us. God wants to be the one to fulfill us, and by forgiving we allow Him to be the one who tells us who we are.

So I have to forgive, and believe God when He says that I am adequate, and I measure up.

Confident: to be persuaded, to be convinced, to trust.
He asked us to examine our confidences. We are all confident about something, even those things that are not right. I was confident that I wasn't worth fighting for. I was confident that those who thought they were better than me were right. But though God's redemptive purpose, He wants us to surrender what we are confident about and allow Him to define our confidence though Him. Pastor Tom told us that Paul was confident about who he was, even when God knocked him off his donkey. But God erased all that Paul was convinced of, all that he was sure of. Later on, Paul tells us about the confidence that God replaced his with:

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." -Romans 8:38-39

I want that kind of confidence to completely replace the false confidences that this life has convinced me of. I am not less than them, I and my relationship with Christ is no less valid. Paul knew that Christ's love was beyond anything in life. His trust was placed in the fact that God loved him, and Paul refused to allow anything to come between him and his confidence, his sureness, his trust in God's love.