And you shall be secure and feel confident because there is hope; yes, you shall search about you, and you shall take your rest in safety.
You shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid…
Job 11:18–19
I’ve read that insecurity is defined as a feeling of general unease or nervousness that may be triggered by perceiving oneself to be vulnerable in some way, or a sense of instability that threatens one’s self-image. It is a feeling or belief that we are not acceptable and that we are not what we ought to be. It is a fear that we will fail at an important time and everyone will discover that we have no value. Some people are a little insecure and perhaps only in one or two areas, but other people are almost crippled with insecurity and it shows up in everything they try to do.
Nearly every person in this world suffers from some form of insecurity. Whether it’s physical, emotional, or spiritual, insecurity is rampant. We might even say that we have an epidemic of insecure people in society today. In reality there is only one true form of permanent security, and His name is Jesus. He is the only one who never changes and He is the only one we can depend on to be present when we need Him. We can be secure in Him and His unconditional love for us.
In this section I will quote several Scriptures, and I suggest that you don’t skip over them. I am including them because I truly believe that God’s Word has power that will comfort us and set us free from fear and insecurity.
Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders.
Deuteronomy 33:12 (NIV)
You are the beloved of the Lord! You will have to choose to believe that before any true progress can be made toward enjoying a fearless and secure life. The unconditional love of God is the cure for everything that ails us. It heals broken hearts and souls that are wounded from past abuse. It sets us free from comparison and competition, and it gives us the confidence to be the person that God created us to be. Only in the love of God can we find true security.
The unconditional love of God is the cure for everything that ails us.
Everyone wants to be loved unconditionally. They want to be loved for who they are and not merely for what they do. I will admit that in the world it is difficult (but not impossible) to find that kind of pure, unselfish love, but we can find it abundantly and freely in Jesus. It is referred to as “perfect” love.
There is no fear in love [dread does not exist], but full-grown (complete, perfect) love turns fear out of doors and expels every trace of terror! For fear brings with it the thought of punishment, and [so] he who is afraid has not reached the full maturity of love [is not yet grown into love’s complete perfection].
1 John 4:18
People who are insecure have great difficulty fully believing that God can love them perfectly, completely, and forever. That is because they feel undeserving of love in their imperfect state, and they have not yet learned that God’s love is a gift of His grace and not something they can earn or deserve.
How can we believe it? I believe a lot of things about God’s promises because I want to. I choose to because believing is what produces peace and joy in my life. I lived many years filled with doubt and unbelief, waiting for some kind of proof that God and His promises were real, and it only produced fear and misery. You can also wait for some proof, which you may never get, or you can accept God’s love by faith and begin your journey of wholeness. The faith I have in my heart has become more real to me than any circumstance ever could. Circumstances can quickly and frequently change. If I based God’s love on circumstance, one day it appears He loves me and then the next it may seem He doesn’t. But when I receive it by faith, it is always mine and can never be taken away from me unless I decide to let it go. This might sound overly simplified, but I believe that we can choose to believe what we want to believe, so why not believe something that will benefit you?
Believe that God loves you. Set your mind and keep it set on the fact that God loves you, not because you deserve it, but because He is love and loving us is simply what He does. There is never a moment in your life when God doesn’t love you! He might be displeased with our behavior at times, but His love for us is constant and uninterrupted.
Take all the time you need to bask in the love of God. Jesus said, “Abide in My love” (see John 15:10), and that means live, dwell, and remain in it at all times. Don’t let anything separate you from the love of God. The apostle Paul teaches us to get rooted and grounded in the love of God.
May Christ through your faith [actually] dwell (settle down, abide, make His permanent home) in your hearts! May you be rooted deep in love and founded securely on love.
Ephesians 3:17
Yes, it is only the unconditional love of God that destroys our insecurity and makes us feel secure in Him. Do you have deep roots in the love of God? Roots deep enough to take you through every storm in life without ever wondering whether or not God loves you? I pray that you do, but if you don’t, you can get very excited because God is working in your life right now, and He is never going to let you go! God is renewing your mind as you read this book, and I believe it is going to help you freely receive God’s love in a greater measure than ever before. With God’s help we are never stuck anywhere with no way out. No matter how long you may have suffered with insecurity, God’s healing and deliverance is available for you. You are on your way to freedom!
I don’t believe that we are born insecure, but it doesn’t seem to take very long for insecurity to rear its ugly head. What happens? All it takes are a few sad experiences of being made to feel that there is something wrong with us and the seeds of tormenting insecurity are sown.
A young girl has acne on her face, but her best friend has beautiful, clear skin. A young boy is hefty and very tall; he towers over all of his skinny, average-height friends. A nine-year-old girl feels that it is her fault that Mom and Dad got a divorce. A boy with a learning disability doesn’t do well in school and he is accused of not reaching his potential simply because everyone has failed to recognize the real problem. A young boy stutters terribly and other children who can often be cruel make fun of him. A woman is married to the man of her dreams and she is devoted to him. She discovers he has been having an affair with another woman, and he leaves her with their two children to care for by herself. A man has worked for a company for 20 years, then without warning he is let go and finds himself unemployed and unable to find a job.
Insecurity can come from any of these types of things and thousands of other things. Satan, the author of fear, is also the author of insecurity, which is in reality a fear that we are not acceptable and that we won’t be taken care of.
Although it is good to get to the root of our insecurities to help us understand them better, it is not vital in recovering from them. Some people are extremely insecure and they have no idea why. They had great parents, a good school experience, lots of friends, earned good grades, and had many other pleasant experiences, but secretly they suffer terribly with feelings of inferiority. A person may even live a double life. She appears to be happy to those around her, but in her secret life she has an eating disorder, hates herself, and always feels insecure. The happy face she puts on is a mask that she wears, and she has everyone fooled but herself and the God who created her. Unless these types of problems are confronted, they may develop into more serious anxiety disorders.
Satan’s goal is to make us dissatisfied with ourselves and then drive us to unhealthy comparisons with other people. He wants us to waste our lives trying to change ourselves into someone else rather than embrace the amazing person God intends us to be. Resist him at the onset of insecurity! If you have believed all kinds of negative things about yourself and suffered with insecurity, why not say good-bye to insecurity and begin your journey toward safe, confident, and secure living right now. Make a bold declaration out of your mouth and say, “I resist insecurity. I resist the devil who is the root of insecurity and fear, and I submit myself to God’s unconditional love and healing.” By faith, receive the free grace of God that is His undeserved favor and power to change.
But He gives us more and more grace (power of the Holy Spirit, to meet this evil tendency and all others fully).
James 4:6
Grace is always available for us in any situation that we encounter in life. It will lift us up and enable us to be successful in all that we need to do. Please believe that you do not have to continue suffering with insecurity. You can be the bold, courageous person that God intends you to be.
In addition to being fearful, some of the symptoms of insecurity are defensiveness, being overly competitive, materialistic, self-promoting, manipulative, controlling and bullying, jealousy and excessive joking, just to mention a few.
Insecure people tend to be very sensitive to any kind of critique, and their first impulse is to defend themselves and try to convince others that they are unflawed.
They may talk excessively about themselves and what they are doing and accomplishing in an effort to prove that they have value. They may feel threatened by others, and especially those who are secure, so they attempt to stay in control of every situation. In a desperate effort to appear powerful, they bully, manipulate, and control.
An insecure person may seek to own a lot of things because it makes them feel important. They are often very competitive. Their goal is to be number one in all things because it makes them feel better than other people. But their behavior only showcases their insecurities rather than hiding them as they had hoped. They work so hard at convincing people they are valuable that it wears them out mentally, emotionally, and physically. I know this is true because I was once very insecure, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was constantly working and trying to prove to myself and everyone else that I was okay.
I don’t believe any person is truly free until they have no need to impress anyone else. It feels so good to be free from the agony of insecurity and have nothing to prove.
Anything that we trust in which can be taken away from us brings insecurity. Only that which cannot be taken away from us brings security.
Source Unknown
What are you clinging to for your security? How stable is it? Are you willing to let it go and totally trust in God? Just so there is no misunderstanding, I am not saying that we should not trust people, employers, banks, or other things that may help us in life, but the truth is that we have no guarantee that they won’t fail. The only lifetime guarantee we can have is found in Jesus.
We can trust other things, but we dare not give them the trust that belongs only to the Lord. I trust my husband and I depend on him, but I also know that as long as I have God, I could go on in life even if something happened to Dave. I trust my friends, but I have been deeply hurt by other friends whom I have trusted in the past, so I don’t trust them to the point of putting all of my confidence in them. I realize that they could disappoint me, but as long as I have God, I will recover and go on.
I have money in the bank, and I have done my best to choose a bank with a great reputation because I don’t want to lose my money, but even if I did, I know I could still be happy. There was a time when I didn’t have the money I have now and I was happy then, and I would survive joyfully without it again if I had to. We must learn to enjoy things without developing too strong of an attachment to them. Truthfully, the world and all that is in it is shaky, and we will only end up hurt and disappointed if we put our trust in it. Anything that we think we need in order to be happy, other than God, is something the devil can use against us!
God often shakes the worldly things that we have our trust in. He does it in order to get us redirected toward Him. He is doing us a huge favor when He does this because sometimes we can have too much of our trust in things and not even realize it.
Are you trusting in yourself? We all do until we learn that due to the inherent weakness of the flesh, we will always end up disappointed in ourselves. We often feel that we can’t trust anyone except ourselves, so we try desperately to take care of ourselves, and when we do we miss out on the amazing protection of God. After many years of being in self-protection mode and experiencing a lot of fear, I finally retired from self-care and turned the task over to God. What a relief to discover that if I cast my care on Him, He will take care of me (see 1 Peter 5:7).
We may seek to feel secure in our own self-righteousness. We try to do the right thing so we can feel good about ourselves, but that is not God’s plan. God wants us to feel good about ourselves, not merely because we do the right thing, but because He loves us and has made us right with Him through Jesus Christ.
… The righteousness of God which comes by believing with personal trust and confident reliance on Jesus Christ (the Messiah)…
Romans 3:22
The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians of how he once trusted in his own righteousness for his worth and value. He said that he had grounds to rely on himself more than any man. He kept the law and was a very religious man. He was from the right neighborhood, had the right education, the right friends and connections. He even said that it was difficult to find anything wrong with him (see Philippians 3:4–6). He was smug in his own self-righteousness until God revealed to him that true righteousness is only found through Christ. After receiving that revelation from God, he declared that everything he thought he had before was all rubbish compared to knowing Christ Jesus as his Lord. He wanted to be found and known as in Christ, not having any self-achieved righteousness based on his own ability (see Philippians 3:8–9). When we make this transition from trusting ourselves to trusting God, we enjoy a freedom and a type of rest that we have never known before.
Are you wearing yourself out trying to take care of yourself? If so, you can also retire from self-care and start truly enjoying life. God wants us to totally depend on Him because He is the only one who can be totally depended on to take care of us and give us what we need. We are all quite independent, but the Holy Spirit works in us until we are totally dependent on God. I suggest that you begin each day by remembering that you need God in all that you do, and that without Him you will not be truly successful. Tell God that you need Him and that you are choosing to put your trust in Him rather than in yourself or anything else. This will help you position yourself properly before you even begin the day.
Paul spoke of times when their troubles were so intense that they felt they had received the very sentence of death, but that it was to keep them from trusting in themselves instead of on God (see 2 Corinthians 1:8–9). At times God must allow our troubles to be more than we can possibly handle on our own so we will ultimately realize our need for Him. If you feel right now that what is going on in your life is more than you can bear, you don’t see a way out, and you absolutely don’t know what to do, then you are in a good place. You now know that the only thing you can do is trust God, and that is exactly what He wants. God wants us to be totally dependent on Him. Jesus said, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5 NIV). It takes us a long time to fully realize that, and in order to, we often have to go through many difficult and disappointing things on our journey from independence to total dependence on God.
We see a good example in Job’s life. Job was a godly man, but he had self-righteousness issues. He thought so highly of himself that he even dared to find fault with God. God allowed enough difficulty to come into his life that he finally realized only God is truly righteous at all times. Job came to the end of his own wisdom and righteousness and finally said in reply to God’s confrontation, “Behold, I am of small account and vile! What shall I answer You? I lay my hand upon my mouth” (Job 40:4). We must fully realize that God is everything and we are nothing without Him, and only then can we receive Him in the full measure of all He desires to give to us. God certainly didn’t want Job to feel bad about himself, but it was necessary for him to come to the realization that he was nothing apart from God, and certainly not wiser than God in any way.
When we enter a relationship with God through Jesus Christ, we are offered an exchanged life. We give Him everything we are and everything we are not, and He gives us everything He is. We give Him our sin and He gives us His righteousness; we give Him our fears and insecurities and He gives us His faith and security. Being a Christian is much more than having our sins forgiven and trying to be good so we can go to Heaven when we die. It is a glorious life of freedom, love, faith, righteousness, hope, joy, and peace. It is a life of accomplishment and bearing good fruit through Jesus that glorifies Him.
When we are insecure we try to do good things so we can feel good about ourselves and be admired by people, but when our security is in Christ, we do what we do through Him and for Him alone. A life in Christ is an entirely new way of living!
When our security is found in Christ and we no longer feel that we have to perform in order to have value, we are set free from many fears. As long as we have deep-rooted fears about ourselves and our worth and value, we will have fear in most areas of life. Knowing who we are in Christ and accepting and loving ourselves only because God accepts and loves us is amazingly wonderful. When we know that we are weak in ourselves, then we don’t expect something from ourselves that we are not able to do. I know that I will make mistakes, that I need help from other people and from God, and nothing I can do will make me a success in life unless God gives me His undeserved favor. We must know beyond a shadow of a doubt that without Christ we are nothing, and that in us (our flesh) dwells no good thing. We are useless without God! But with Jesus, we can do all things—we are strong in Him, accepted in Him, made right with God through Him, justified in Him, and forgiven through Him. It feels so good not to feel pressured to impress anyone! Our worth is in Christ, not in what other people think of us.
Our worth is in Christ, not in what other people think of us.
Insecurity produces fear, worry, and anxiety, but security produces boldness and courage. Insecurity produces frustration, struggle, restlessness, and fatigue, but security produces rest, peace, and joy. Insecurity produces an inability to make decisions, but the person who is secure is decisive. Insecurity produces avoidance of others and isolation, but security produces love, confidence, and good relationships.
Insecurity is very hard on relationships. When one person feels that they must constantly try to make the other person feel good about themselves, it steals their freedom. They cannot be honest, and eventually, they get so weary that they may feel that keeping the relationship is not worth the work it takes. When we are in relationship with an insecure person we find that their needs are abnormal. They need an unusual amount of encouragement, and we have to constantly be careful not to hurt their feelings. Although we all like to be made to feel valuable, when we are secure in Christ, we get what we need from Him. His love and acceptance make us feel special and valuable even when people don’t.
Most of our unhappiness and frustration in all areas of life can be traced back to our own insecurities, but thankfully we have an answer in Jesus.
Choose an area in your life in which you experience insecurity and pray about it. Make a decision to give your fears to God and receive His grace to enable you to be full of faith in that area. Be sure to remember that we don’t usually overcome a problem overnight, but rather little by little. The Lord told the Israelites that He would defeat their enemies little by little so that the beast of the field would not increase among them. My personal belief is that “the beast” is pride. As we humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand, we receive His grace and experience His freedom.
And the Lord your God will clear out those nations before you, little by little; you may not consume them quickly, lest the beasts of the field increase among you.
Deuteronomy 7:22
Read, study, and meditate on God’s Word about being free from fear and secure in Him. His Word will renew your mind, and fear will turn to faith and courage. Take the steps of faith that God leads you to take even though you might still feel some fear, and as you go forward you will begin to sense more and more freedom. For example, if you would love to apply for a position that would be a promotion for you in your company, but have been too insecure and fearful to do so, step out and try it. Even if you don’t get the position, you will have been successful in stepping out in faith, and that is the most important thing.
One of the keys to success is to never give up. Even though we may not sense any change after we have prayed, it is vitally important that we continue believing in God’s promise to deliver us from a life of fear. When the Holy Spirit is walking me out of bondage into freedom in any area, I often say that I am free from a thing even while I am still experiencing no freedom at all. By doing this, I am declaring my belief that God and His promise are greater than my problem and that it is only a matter of time before I experience the fullness of His freedom. He has never failed me and He will never fail you either. Believe in your heart and, at the right time, you will see with your eyes! Joy is released in our lives through believing. Once we choose to believe God’s Word, we receive joy and peace, and that helps us enjoy life while we are waiting for the fullness of God’s promise to manifest.
I am sure that the idea of believing what you cannot see or feel may be a bit foreign to you unless you have already learned this powerful biblical principle. If it is, I totally understand. We live in a world where everything is based on seeing and feeling. God’s kingdom operates on an entirely different principle, and as citizens of His domain, we are required to believe first and see later. You may be thinking, Joyce, I just can’t do that, but I know from experience that you can decide to believe what you want to if you stop letting your thoughts and emotions rule you. Doubt may attack you, but you can be like Abraham of whom it was said, “No unbelief or distrust made him waver (doubtingly question) concerning the promise of God…” (Romans 4:20). You can doubt your doubts instead of believing them!
You can doubt your doubts instead of believing them!
Choose to believe right now that you are on your way to enjoying complete freedom from all insecurity. You are making a journey. I cannot tell you exactly how long it will be, but I do know that God is faithful and His promises are for all who will choose to believe them. You do not have to live in the agony of the fear that you are not able or acceptable, because the truth is that you can do all that God wants you to do through Jesus Christ. His strength is yours if you will humble yourself and receive it.