This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom, and we are starting today a look at 2 Corinthians
chapter 3. We're actually continuing in this chapter as we begin to go through
it, a look that we began last week at how to deal with the feelings that we
sometimes have of inadequacy in ministry as we're serving other people. What do
you do when you have self-doubt?

What do you do when you feel like, "I don't know if I have it in me to do this
that God's asking me to do, to serve in this way? " Well, there are four
responses to all kinds of doubts, but it's also true about self-doubt. One
response is to listen to your doubts.

So you start agreeing, "I really am not capable. I really am not able," and you
have this pity party, you know, pity party. It's when you bring the shades in
your house all together so it gets really dark and you just sit all alone and
usually chocolate's involved somehow, and you have this pity party.

You're kicking yourself, you're putting yourself down, you're scolding yourself,
you're calling yourself names. You're the goat. Well, stop calling yourself
names.

Start calling on God's name, and we're going to talk this week as we look
through this chapter at how you do that. You can listen to your doubts. Other
people, you can try to ignore your doubts.

Now listening to your doubts makes them big, but trying to ignore your doubts
makes them even bigger. Thomas wanted to do this. He doubted that Jesus was
resurrected, but Jesus forced him to face his doubts.

Look at my hands. Look at my side, he said. So you have to face them.

Ignoring them, they just grow bigger and bigger in that corner. Other people,
they try to lie to their doubts. You confront them and you say, "Well, they're
just not real," but your doubts really are real.

You really do have those feelings, and you can only lie for so long. You can't
lie to your doubts by running this tape over and over in your mind or even an
actual physical audio over and over that says, "I can do anything. I can do
anything.

" Deep down, you know you can't. Deep down, you know that there's things you
cannot do. So lying to your doubts doesn't work.

Ignoring your doubts doesn't work. Listening to your doubts doesn't work. What
does work?

What works is telling your doubts the truth and acting on that truth. The truth
is what you need to deal with doubt. So you tell your doubts the truth, and then
you act on that truth.

You start with the truth. You start with the truth. Now, you may be thinking,
"Well, I know the truth, but it's not enough.

" Well, you may know the truth, but you have to then act on the truth. Many
believers that I know are stuck because they know the truth, but they're not
acting on it in any way. Find some small way, some small place that you can act
on that truth, and we're going to talk about some truths that you can act on
this week.

We're going to talk this week together about what makes us feel competent for
the task of ministry, because it's a huge task, the task of serving others and
making a difference for Jesus' name. What makes you feel competent for that?
People try to build feelings of competence in themselves, apart from God, in two
different ways.

One is self-promotion. I build myself up, and the other is external promotion. I
try to get other people to build me up.

Confidence is usually a sign of a sharp and deep struggle with inferiority in
somebody's life. If you see somebody who's promoting themselves a lot, almost
100% of the time, you know they're struggling with feelings of inadequacy, of
inferiority. In fact, here in chapter 3, beginning in verses 1 to 3, Paul notes,
he's going to note for us as we walk through this, the true birthplace of
genuine confidence, godly kind of confidence.

But he begins by talking about the need not to try to build false confidence
into our lives, human confidence. Listen to what he says in verses 1 to 3. Are
we beginning to commend ourselves again?

Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you?
You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by
everybody. You show that you're a letter from Christ, the result of our
ministry, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the Living God, not on
tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts.

Now Paul talks in these verses about letters, and he talks about letters of
recommendation. In that day, a professional teacher would have a letter of
recommendation that he would take to the next city, telling everybody that he
was a good teacher. And Paul says, "I don't need to build myself up this way.

I don't need to commend myself. I don't need self-promotion. And I don't need
letters from others.

I don't need promotion from others. " In fact, what he says here is very
important when it comes to ministry. He says, "You are our letter.

" What God's doing in your life, how God's changing your life, how you're
serving God. That's our letter. And he's telling us something extremely
important here.

The answer to your feelings of inadequacy is to look past yourself to serving
others. As long as you keep looking at yourself and trying to build yourself up
through self-promotion, or looking to somebody else to try to build you up
through their promotion, you're not going to get enough promotion to get to a
place of feeling adequate for the task. What you do when you feel inadequate for
ministry is you look around and you think, "Who can I serve?

" You look past yourself to serve others. If you're feeling right now incapable
for the task that God has put before you, the question is, "Who can you serve
today? Who can you serve?

" Instead of getting someone to write something good about you to make you feel
better about yourself, or writing something great about yourself to make you
feel better about yourself, I mean, that's what the internet is for, right, to
write good things about ourselves. Instead of doing that, you write something
into somebody else's life by encouraging them, by serving them, by ministering
to them. Because the result of your ministry, Paul talks about that here, the
result of your ministry is not the applause of others or the recognition of
others.

The result of your ministry isn't even meant to be a personal sense of
self-satisfaction. The result of ministry is change lives. Paul says you are our
letter, and when you begin to live for that, you begin to defeat feelings of
inadequacy.

And whenever I begin to sense feelings of inadequacy rising up again in my life,
I'm reminded that what I need to do is turn back to living for changed lives.
Now, as we walk through these verses, Paul talked about two specific things
regarding changed lives. First, he said, "When I look at your life, we've
written into your life," he says, "it's written with the Spirit," and he says,
"it's written not on tablets of stone, but in the human heart.

" That's all about changed lives. It's written not with ink. It's not with
something temporary.

It's not with something human, but it's written with the Spirit. God's the one
who changed the life. We just get to be involved in the process.

And then he says, "It's written not on tablets of stone, but in the human heart.
" Now, we're going to see what he's talking about as we walk through this
chapter, tablets of stone. He's going to talk about the Ten Commandments, where
letters were written, tablets of stone, the law was written, but it didn't get
to the human heart.

It didn't change lives. It showed the people of Israel where they were wrong,
but it never made them right with God. And Paul says, "Because of Jesus, I have
the opportunity to write on somebody's heart, to write on somebody's life.

" So when you look at what Paul has to say in these verses, he's talking about
what I do when I feel inadequate. And I certainly understand that. I would just
say to you very genuinely as we walk through this chapter this week that one of
my great struggles in life is feelings of inadequacy.

And how do I deal with those? How do I walk through those? And so this chapter
and the next chapter we're going to look at are powerful chapters in my own life
about how do we deal with this.

And it begins with this. When you feel inadequate, you don't try to build
yourself up. You don't try to get somebody else to build you up.

You look for somebody to serve. That's the way out of feelings of inadequacy.
Let's take a minute to pray together.

And as we pray, would you just look to Jesus and say, "Jesus, in those times
when I feel like I'm not capable for the moment or for the task, I pray that
instead of reacting in pride, instead of reacting in fear and looking for
someone to build me up or trying to build myself up in the sight of others, that
instead I'd look for someone who needs encouragement, someone who needs
strengthening. In fact, even today, Lord, put someone in my path that in Jesus'
name I can serve because of my love for you. Would you give me the strength,
Jesus?

Would you give me a new way of looking at things? I ask this in your name. Amen.

" Tomorrow we're going to look together at another powerful way that we defeat
feelings of inadequacy.