Does a Christian need self-confidence?

This question has been puzzling me for some time. I see many a student paralysed in maths exam purely because of a lack of confidence in their ability to solve the problems. They check and double check and, if the question has a non-obvious answer, they become distressed when they reach that inevitable but strange conclusion.

One recent problem involved finding a number which turned out to have to satisfy two different conditions, first x lies between 2 and 4 and second, x is less than 2. Well clearly, a number cannot be both between 2 and 4 and simultaneously less than 2, yet when they reached this conclusion, several students doubted their own work and tried to rectify it by altering their answers.

This leads me to the idea of having confidence in our ability. Can a Christian who is necessarily aware of their own fallibility as a person ever have any self-confidence? It would seem not, and indeed the best answer is to have confidence first in God rather than the self. However, let's just unpick this to see in what way our confidence should manifest itself.

The fact is that each one of us is fallible and limited in every single aspect of our being. We can do nothing without the possiblity of failure lurking in the background like an uninvited member of the paparazzi, haunting our every step. It is precisely our awareness of failure that can paralyse us into inactivity. As Christians, we have to walk this path of life doing what we can, examining our talents and making use of our faculties despite their inevitable failure.

So the problem with self-confidence has its roots in our perceptions of success and failure. Whenever we start a task, we often begin it with a preconceived notion of what it would mean to succeed or fail. This is inevitable in such systems within society as our education systems where success or failure is determined by a percentage score on an exam. Even if we are not being formally examined, we construct parameters for the pass mark in ever undertaking we begin. We often measure the outcome of our labours by comparing the actual result with the intended result; the greater the discrepancy the greater our perception of failure.

Even if we are in complete control of the work, we often take our pass mark from the expectations of others in society. Unintentionally the perceptions and judgments of others affect our own judgment of the quality of our work and thus a judgment on ourselves as human beings. We all know that we "shouldn't care what other people think" but that's a challenge which we nonetheless fail to apply to our lives. We judge ourselves by our actions all to easily, even if our intentions were honourable.

The sooner each one of us stops seeing ourselves as something to be useful to society the better. The sooner that each one of us loves oneself as a person despite faults and failings and foibles, the more that we realise that our successes or failures in life are not the measures of a human being, the more we can be confident that success or failure is only of a passing significance. Aristotle and St Thomas Aquinas would probably say that we cannot measure the substance of a human being, we only measure the accidents of our being. Our substance as human beings requires only love to make us substantial as humans, and that Love comes from God creating us in His own image.

Ultimately, the Prince of the bigger picture, who is responsible for putting everything into a cosmic perspective will show us the effects of our "successes" and "failures" and throw our understanding and measurements upside down. After all, one only ascends the ladder of humility by descending.

So Christian self-confidence must lie, not in the confidence of our ability, but rather in the reality of our existence and its intrinsic meaning as an object created for loving and being loved. Our confidence is in the fact that no matter what we do (including the worst sins), we still have the opportunity to find our worth in the love of God. He will judge us according to what we do, but this judgment is Eternal and far beyond the understandings and comprehensions of what we do. Our self-confidence lies in our confidence that we are loved by God. Do we really believe that?