Confidence and Courage In Fear and In Faith

“The Lord is my light and my salvation;

whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life;

of whom shall I be afraid?”

— Psalm 27:1 (NRSV)

CONFIDENCE always seems in such short supply for the majority of us, yet it is overblown in those puffed up people who tend to have life at their fingertips. But none of the world’s conceptualization for confidence runs close to the idea for confidence framed in the ancient word given to David; that which is portrayed in Psalm 27.

Such is David’s confidence in God; he is able to find himself ever more reinforced by the Lord’s light, salvation and fortress. The more fear David experiences, the more his faith pulls him into the orbit of God; the more access is made of God’s eternal light of guidance. The Spirit is his salvation and his fortress – of whom, truly, is he to be afraid?

Psalm 27, it is said, is two opposite halves of a whole picture – the first half the confidence of fear-conquered faith and the second half, the shaky reality of doubt presented as unbridled fear before faith, again, becomes the antecedent.

The existence we know to be life is replete with mountaintop views and valley depths. With one or the other, and with both, we have God. We thank him for the one, and we cling to him for the other.

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The child of God, in keeping with his or her faith tradition, finds themselves encamped, as it were, in beholding the beauty of the Lord where fear encroaches. Faith has become the default. Fear has such short shrift that faith is the refuge in all but the tiniest vestige, which might normally just be rebuffed with a smiling glance.

In the time of trouble we have a thing to do: to gaze upon the splendour of God.

When there is anxiousness, the anxiousness is met with the fullness of the Lord, which subsumes that anxiousness in the knowledge that Jesus overcomes.

When we are weak and fainting, because life has become too much for us, just now, we then climb into the cave of the Almighty and seek a rest.

And when we cannot decide or are struggling to trust or we are afraid of the dark, then we enter into the light, which is our salvation. God has ample light for each of us with which to see, to decide, to trust in.

© 2014 Garments of Praise. Written by S. J. Wickham.

Visual: tee shirt design from Garments of Praise collection.