Confidence is Better than Certainty...

...because you can actually find it.

Confidence>Certainty

I recently had lunch with a friend from college, someone I hadn't really sat down and talked with for many years. We took a lot of philosophy classes together, loved arguing about ethics and literature, and we also both took our Christian faith really seriously. He was then and has remained a great guy.

Over lunch, we laughed at how similar our spiritual journeys had been over the past ten years. We started out in a very similar, somewhat evangelical world; we both went into work in full-time ministry (I as a Methodist pastor, he in a non-denominational college ministry while also attending a local Anglican church); we both had a time of serious crisis concerning if we were in the "right" Christian tradition (Roman Catholicism being captivating to both of us for a time); and then, perhaps out of exhaustion, perhaps out of the grace of God, we both just stopped and made the decision to work in the tradition where God had planted us (for me Methodism and him Anglicanism).

I asked him, what made you feel at peace with where you are? And he described how he had tried to write down all of his thoughts based on all that he had read, and he was trying, in his research, to find what you might call the "true church" or the "one church"; in that process, he found himself caught up in these little technicalities (lines of apostolic succession, the validity of particular ordinations, the cohesion of a tradition's theology), which residually started to feel silly and pedantic. And in the wake of that, he said:

"I just...stopped. And I came to realize that God really was at work in the community that I was worshipping with, and I just couldn't deny that anymore."

I laughed, because I had, in a very similar way, come to that exact conclusion. I had been trying, by my own research, by reading the church fathers, by thinking things through, by prayer, to find an authority that could give me certainty--if I could only find that, then I could have a worldview that was coherent, solid, respectable. But what I came to see was that the Methodist tradition, with all its beauty and all its flaws, even in the midst of an ongoing and painful division, was a tradition where God really was working and where God was calling me to be. I saw a lot of strengths in other traditions, but a lot of difficulties too.

What my friend and I discovered, separately, was that the certainty we were looking for was simply not there to be found. This is at first a painful but then a liberating truth. There are certain aspects of faith in God that finite human beings will never be able to fathom (why does God allow evil suffering? how do we make sense of genuine faith in other religions? where is all of this heading?). There is a hidden logic to a life in Christ, to the community of Christ, to the plans of God, that we will never be able to fully uncover (why are Christians so divided? how exactly are we supposed to read scripture? why are there so many unanswered questions? why is this so difficult to figure out?). And on, and on, and on.

And this mystery shouldn't surprise us. God never promises us certainty…

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord. 
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Isaiah 55:8-9

...but what God does offer is confidence--in him. And once we take hold of that confidence, we don't get certainty, or answers. We get peace.

It's so tempting, in particular for nerdy, intellectual types, to want to find what only God can give in a theology, in a movement, in a particular tradition or denomination, in a brilliant thinker or pastor, in a beautiful liturgy, in an ethical stance...but all of those things, while good, while needed, are only signs, pointers, to the one who can actually give us what we are looking for. Our confidence is totally, wholly, completely, only in God, the God who by the Holy Spirit raised Jesus Christ from the dead. Anyone or anything but God will fall short. Every time.

Certainty, if we found it, would puff us up; it would make us proud; once we had it, we wouldn't really even need God anymore, because we would have found the perfect system.

Confidence is different, because it is fundamentally relational; it is an ongoing, living thing. The word itself means to have full trust. Self-confidence refers to fully trusting in yourself; confidence in God is what God offers to us in the gift called faith. And this kind of confidence is a yielding of our will to his, a humbling of our hearts. We no longer fully trust ourselves, or in our own particular traditions, or in our own theological, intellectual abilities. But rather we fully trust in him. Confidence in God in that way leads us to peace, a peace that says: you don't have to know the answer to every question. You won't be able to get everything right. But (thank God) we worship a God who will honor our attempt and aid us in our weaknesses.

Of course this doesn't get us off the hook for loving God and neighbor, intellectual rigor, obedience to Jesus (see Matthew 5-7 for a starter kit in this), taking up our own cross and following him, loving our enemies, loving the poor, forgiving each other, making disciples of Jesus, being committed to a particular Christian community, living a cruciform life of self-denial, praying and fasting, loving and studying scripture, corporate worship, and all the other things that Jesus quite clearly calls us to.

But confidence in God does give us room to breathe in a very confusing and broken world. We will all end this life with many unanswered questions. We are certainly wrong about many things. But we can be confident in God and we can trust him.

For me and my friend, discovering this came as a relief. It helped us laugh at ourselves, take more joy in life, and brought us back to a simple focus on the actual place we are and the community God has called us to serve. We're still a work in progress on this, still asking questions, still curious, still earnestly seeking the true and the good. But it's so much different to pursue a deeper relationship with God than it is to refine an theological system. I'd encourage you today, in your pursuit of what is true and good, to give yourself a little grace. God really is enough, and God will draw you, by his power, where you need to be: into his arms, into his presence, and finally, at the end of things, into his kingdom. Be confident, not in your abilities, but in His.