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Topic: Make a Decision
I urge you to make a decision that you will not be a timid, insecure, doubtful person, but that you will be confident. When I am ministering to crowds of people, I have to just decide to be confident no matter how I might feel. I cannot always discern from watching people if they approve of me or of what I am saying, or even how interested they are. We cannot look to others to make us feel confident, because if we do, then we will always need a fresh fix of approving nods, glances, and words of acceptance in order to be stable.
I went through a lot of agony trying to minister to people for a long time. If anyone got up and left the conference when I was teaching, I felt sure that they didn’t like me or what I was saying. If anyone looked bored or sleepy, I immediately thought that I was the problem. I let their faces dictate my
level of confidence, and I had to stop it or be miserable the rest of my life. Do you want to spend your life looking for approval, or have the assurance that you have God’s approval and that is
all you truly need?
Confidence is not a feeling we have; it is a right mind-set.
We can think that people don’t like us or that they do, so why do most people lean toward the negative? They lean that way
because the devil is influencing their thinking, and they either are not aware of it or they don’t take aggressive action to
reclaim their thoughts. We can be afraid that we are going to fail, or we can expect to succeed
