One of the pillars of the Protestant Reformation was the Latin phrase sola fide, faith alone. To confide, literally means to commingle faith with another, which leads to a posture and praxis of personal confidence, and together with others the keeping of such confidences leads to faithfulness.

How does one become confident? Where does faith even start? Many over-qualify “hearing” the ῥῆμα found in Romans 10:17, at the expense of all the other Old Testament references in the rest of the chapter. Faith gets leveraged all over the map, becomes secretive, code-based, exclusive, branded, and insider– which is the antithesis of a shining beacon of light on a hill. Who bottles and sells sunlight? You might tinker with a small solar grid, but won’t harness a cosmic storm.

First off, faith in the self, or the system, is a bit of an oxymoron, its unfinished, not near enough. Fidelity is exercised in community, the foundation of confederations, where covenants, treaties and truces are signed. The word treaty is based on foedus, which leads to bread crumb building blocks like Foedus Cassianum, which is more than just a historical reference, it’s a cypher.

Confidence does not start with the “trust me, believe in me, follow me, sign up” kind of atmosphere that supposedly germinates faithfulness in others. It’s not “I have the power, the hammer, the forge, the fire”. We all have witnessed many fall on the sword of “just trust me, I know what I’m doing, my motivation is pure”. No, that is not where the flame is first lit, it’s not the coal bed, it’s not nearly elemental enough. It’s actually dangerous, erroneous, even porous, a hairsbreadth from a major breakdown, a posture already full of hairline fractures, mix all the metaphors you want. Put a number of  building blocks on top of those self-aggrandizing statements and eventually, but inevitably, as Shakespeare put it in Henry IV, “Prophetically do forethink thy fall.”

The threshing floor of confidence, is humility. The benchmark teaching on humility is the kenotic (see link) self-emptying of Jesus Christ in Philippians 2 (notice how the word κενός is translated in various New Testament contexts). Words like kenosis informed Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, that anxiety and dread are nothing and the fear of nothing– again it’s all circular, sympathetic antipathies and antipathetic sympathies. Danish, Latin, Greek, English, even Hebrew all have their limits. Music is a sacramental liaison of words, but to get up on the stage to hit that note, one had better have confidence, but I digress, or do I?

This is why we have to open our lives to one another, we can’t hide… we actually do live on display whether we like it or not, it’s part of being embodied. There on display before others, can I be confidently wrong? Based on the pure definition of confidence, no I cannot. I can be brazenly stupid. I can put what I call self-confidence in the wrong people, places and things. But, I can’t be confident in the wrong, that is not confidence, it is nothing, it is nothing put into nothing! Those who prop up invisible scaffolding around the wrong things, the wrong postures, the wrong praxis, they may appear confident, they may look like they have faith, but in fact, I’ll tell you right now, what they have and are literally full of, is fear. They are deluded, deceived, and dense, which reminds me of P.T. Forsyth teaching about hell being ceaseless, passionate, unending prayer, addressed to nothing and obtaining nothing.

Every one of us has to be willing to identify with the deluded, deceived and dense within ourselves, which means we cannot strive toward being confident enough. Once we lay it all down, and get as low as it all, for however long it takes to be made worthy of whatever gift and calling, we actually learn to become confident in the glory of God alone, another pillar of the Reformation, the great transference of all allegiances.

Is my confidence in God? Does my confidence come from God? Have I truly heard God? It all comes down to humility… I humble myself, or I do not. What is the foundation of obedience?

Maybe someone disagrees, “No, without exercising faith I cannot discover humility!” Well, that’s your mountain to climb. And that action, that exercise, that momentum, isn’t faith… it’s something else. Your brain can wrestle with the process all it wants. I’m not going to convince you, that’s not my job. And then you say, “Why, why should I trust you anyway? What makes you so confident?” It’s not me in your face at all, pilgrim. Yes, I’ve become confident in God’s grace and mercy, and am presently here with you as a witness of his glory, majesty and power…. because of a process God began.

Trip over all kinds of teaching on faith… it’s abstract, an exercise, it’s personal, and then a lot of people come together with the same faith, and they listen for God in one another, and that’s corporate fun, and everyone is standing up and sitting down at the same time, and all of that… it can also be a very shallow hiding place.

And it’s not that faith isn’t the thing… it is, but at the expense of other things we cheapen it, and thus erode our confidence in God and one another. We proof text things like, without faith it’s impossible to please God… Fine, then qualify it this way, without humility, finding faith is impossible, because God stands over-against the proud. And if God opposes the proud, guess what, they are not the least bit confident, are not the least bit full of God’s power– His dunamis, His dynamic Spirit energy that cannot be controlled or manipulated, His Word. No matter how loud they are, or how big their unopened Bibles wave around, they are gatekeepers of nothing, and the fear of nothing!

We are welcome to be humble participators in spiritual environments like the acts of repentance and forgiveness, the eating and drinking of the bread and wine, the washing of feet, the waters of baptism, the receiving of the teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. We say these are corporate expressions and personal exercises of our faith, and yes they are… but we grow into such confidence because of a much deeper fundamental.

Jesus told them, commanded them to put their faith in him. And they did, and yet at the same time, didn’t do it– it was a wrestling, a mind-numbing difficulty… years of it, back and forth, and he was relentless, calling them slow, wondering how long he had to put up with them… he put it a lot of ways, put them in positions where all the ugly came out, all the childish, all the preconceived and misconstrued exposed right out in the open… He left them ideologically naked all the time… What was he after? What was he doing?

He was showing them the way, and it all started with him emptying himself, and if he had never done that very thing, the most faithful and confident one of all, if he hadn’t become nothing…. hadn’t clothed himself in our nothingness, then we could never see or hear any of God… He, God, humbled Himself. period. full stop.

He was and is the embodied Faithful Confidant, full of the Holy Spirit, who’s fruit is faithfulness. The Faithful One was born to be believed, and is trustworthy. And when he was conceived, why was Mary chosen, favored? As God breathed within her, then in her arms, then took his last breath upon the cross, and then his next one– Mary remained humble, and as her family grew, so did her confidence, the outworking of His Spirit’s power in what was to quickly become the Church.