Confidence

As we try to raise and teach our children, one of our constant concerns is trying to give our six-year-old and four-year-old confidence.  We want them to be able to believe in themselves and not be afraid of failing, and yet we struggle to know how to do this.  How do I help my daughter when she is petrified in front of her first grade class and won’t speak a single audible word when she is supposed to?  How do I instill feelings of confidence in my four-year-old son who when I tell him that he is a good boy he responds, “No, I’m not good.  I make mistakes.  I hit people.”?  John wrote in his final epistle: “Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God” (1 John 3:21).  Perhaps this scripture contains at least part of the answer: confidence comes from the heart, and ultimately our confidence must be in God, not ourselves. 

                That confidence or trust must be in God instead of in ourselves is, it seems, a consistent message of the scriptures.  The Psalmist wrote, “By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou answer us, O God of our salvation; who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the sea” (Psalms 65:5).  God is the “confidence of all the end of the earth,” which I take to mean that it is in God that we must have confidence—and that is for “all the end of the earth.”  The writer of Proverbs said, “In the fear of the Lord is strong confidence: and his children shall have a place of refuge” (Proverbs 14:26).  Fearing—or trusting and honoring—God is what brings us “strong confidence.”  John wrote in another epistle, “And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us” (1 John 5:14).  Confidence in God means that we trust that He will respond to our prayers, and that if we ask according to His will He will hear us.  It is having the faith of Paul that “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Philippians 4:13).  It is believing with Ammon that “in his strength I can do all things” or with Isaiah that “in the Lord have I righteousness and strength” (Alma 26:12, Isaiah 45:24).  Perhaps part of what is missing for my children is trust in God that He can and will help them in whatever they are doing if they have faith in Him.       

                The second part of the verse from 1 John that stands out to me is that we have confidence when our heart doesn’t condemn us.  Confidence must come from the heart, not from outside sources.  It comes from having a clean and pure heart, and from knowing in our heart, as Joseph Smith said in the Lectures on Faith, that “the course of life which [we are] pursuing is according to [God’s] will.”  When our hearts are “full of charity” and “virtue” then will our “confidence wax strong in the presence of God” (D&C 121:45).  I have to somehow help my children develop true faith in Christ’s ability to empower them, and I have to help them listen inside their heart—and not to the world around them—to find true confidence.  And, of course, I have to first figure out how to do that myself before I can teach it to them.