Faith and Prayer as an Expression of Insecurity

I have come to understand that the way we approach faith and prayer is quite often from a standpoint of insecurity. When a person is insecure they often seek to control the way things happen.

Insecurity leads a person to establish specific expectations. When things do not happen exactly the way that you expected, then you become frustrated and disappointed. It is during such times of disappointment that you can read a whole lot of meaning into the situation that has no solid basis whatsoever.

Say for instance, a person might have a job interview lined-up. The person is anxious by nature, and as expected, the person is rather nervous about the forthcoming interview. In this anxious state, the person sees this job interview as the only means of fulfilling his needs. He feels that if he does not pass the interview, he will feel like a failure and he will be distraught as he believes that he will not get his needs met as a consequence.

The day of the interview comes and as expected, he is decidedly nervous. The interview ends and it just so happens that he did not pass the interview. Understandably, the person is disappointed, but he takes the occasion to mean that he is a failure and he is overcome by a sense of dread that he will never get a job, and therefore, will struggle to get his needs met.

If an insecure person such as this gets hold of faith teaching, he will be delighted that there is a means available by which he can control the power of God at will. The security of an insecure person comes through the belief that he has control over what does or does not happen in his life. He will read of testimonies of people who applied God’s Word to a particular situation in order to bring about a specific outcome and meet a specific need. This approach is perfectly scriptural.

But the mistake that people often make is in trying to use faith in order to make specific demands on God in order to control circumstances – when it is done out of a sense of insecurity. Faith works by love and there is no fear in love. If a person fears, they will not have love, and therefore, they will not have faith.