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Podcast: The Antidote to Your Insecurity (Ajith Fernando)

August 26, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

How to Fight Insecurity

In this episode, Ajith Fernando discusses how we as Christians should deal with our insecurities and describes what it looks like to rest in our identity in Christ, even as we work hard for his glory in our day to day lives.

Joyful Perseverance

Joyful Perseverance

Ajith Fernando

Joyful Perseverance offers practical ways to find joy and energy to serve well despite the inevitable disappointments of ministry—embrace God’s grace, guard one’s integrity, groan with God, adopt a life of thanksgiving, and more.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:14 - How to Not Lose Heart

Matt Tully
Ajith, thank you so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Ajith Fernando
Thank you. Nice to talk to you, Matt, again.

Matt Tully
Your new book is about helping Christians to persevere in life and ministry for the long haul, through all of the ups and downs that we often face in our lives. And although pastors and church leaders are a big part of the audience that you’re writing for, I really think that the book is also so valuable for everyday Christians, because we’re all called to faithfulness as we seek to serve Christ, whether that’s in our homes or in our workplaces or as part of the church. And so before we jump into the specific topic of insecurity, can you share a little bit more about why you felt the need to write a book today addressing this broad topic of Christian endurance?

Ajith Fernando
Actually, the book started about twenty years ago. Maybe a little less than that; about seventeen years ago on my thirtieth anniversary of ministry. I happened to be in the States, and I just thought I’d spend the morning with the Lord. I was reading 2 Corinthians 4. Actually, I started with the book and I got stuck at chapter 4 where it says, "having this ministry by the mercy of God, we do not lose heart." And I started to write notes, and I wrote and wrote. But then I thought, "I’m too young. I’m not yet ready to write a book on freshness over the long haul." So I waited another seventeen years. And now after forty-seven years in ministry (it will be forty-eight very soon), I thought, "It’s time for me to write this book." The reason is that I am now since stepping down from leadership of Youth for Christ. I’m still on the staff of Youth for Christ, but I’m no longer the leader. My ministry is primarily with younger leaders, younger pastors, and people like that. Not necessarily full time people, but volunteers and all that. And I realized that a lot of them have problems around midlife. They get disillusioned, they are upset, they are not happy in the Lord, they’re not happy about service. So that made me think seriously about writing this book—how to remain fresh over the years in ministry.

03:44 - Insecurity Is One of the Main Causes of Burnout

Matt Tully
Let’s dig into this topic of insecurity. And that’s one of the chapters and themes that you address in the book, among many others. And honestly, as I thought about it, at first I thought this is a very specific, narrow topic that we need to address that some of us will struggle with at times. But as I thought more about it, I was struck by the many different ways that insecurities that we can struggle with can really affect and even drive our behaviors and our words as Christians, sometimes in ways that we’re probably not even fully aware of. And so I guess to start us off, in your experience, whether in your own life or working with other Christians, Christian leaders, or even just lay Christians, how common are struggles with insecurity?

Ajith Fernando
I think all of us grapple with insecurity. All of us have our insecurities. The key is what we do with them, how we handle our insecurity—in a biblical way. So I think all of us have it in some way or another. In fact, I wrote it in my book that I tell our staff we are all a bunch of psychos. And the editor, I think, thought it was a little too brash for a book, so she took it out. But I think all of us are a bunch of people struggling with insecurities. The key is to let Scripture, our relationship with God, and issues in our lives address this whole issue of insecurity so that we learn to live with it. We learn to live with it in a way that it doesn’t hinder our effectiveness and especially doesn’t take away our joy and contentment in ministry.

Matt Tully
Before we get into, again, some of the causes of insecurity and the way that works itself out in our lives, and then we’ll eventually get to how we fight against it and how we battle it, you write something in the book that really stood out to me. You said that one of the main causes of burnout is insecurity. And I think as we look around the Christian landscape today, certainly among Christian leaders in the church context, but I think for all of us, even lay Christians, it feels like we see a lot of burnout these days. We’re experiencing a lot of the effects of really not pacing ourselves well in our Christian lives, not developing healthy habits, and then that leading to real problems. So how do you see the connection between insecurity and burnout?

Ajith Fernando
I’m convinced the major cause for burnout is insecurity. We live in a non-specialized, poor country, so we have to do a lot of things that others may not have to do. And so my friends in the West often rebuke me gently, saying that I’m working too hard. But I really don’t think hard work is the cause for burnout, but when you work hard out of a sense of insecurity because you want to prove yourself. There are unrealistic expectations today coming from our celebrity culture where people feel they have to be something in order to be considered successful. And that can be a terrible taskmaster. Basically, insecurity is not being happy about yourself, being ashamed, to some extent, about who you are and wanting to prove yourself. And so for a lot of people who work very hard, the problem is not hard work, but the problem is what motivates them. They work themselves to the ground. For example, not handing over some responsibilities to others, not delegating, not taking a sabbath (which is a very important biblical principle for those in service). They neglect things like that, and that results in them driving themselves to the ground. And so I think not handling hurt properly. The connection between hurt and security is that however bad people have hurt us, God is greater. God’s love is greater. And when we experience the love of God, it helps us live with our hurt. We are not going to recover from our hurt sometimes on this side of heaven, but we can live with it because there’s a greater force that is pushing us in our life, and that is the love of God. But when we allow hurt to take over our emotions, then these are the things that really result in things like burnout.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk through some of the ways that our insecurities can manifest themselves in our lives. You already mentioned the issue of work and hard work. And I think that insight that it’s not necessarily hard work itself that leads to burnout; it’s a motivation that might be behind too much work or overwork. Speak a little bit more to that. Has the temptation towards overwork been something that you yourself have struggled with in the past?

Ajith Fernando
Actually, I’ve always struggled with it. I still, after almost fifty years in ministry, I’m still struggling with it. And I don’t think any one of us are perfectly balanced. I think perfect balance comes only in heaven. But I think we must learn to live with our limitations and not try to push ourselves beyond what we can do. And that’s, for me, because I am not a very organized person, it involves constant mid-course corrections. "You’re working too hard. You’re not spending time at home." And my wife is a great help here, because when she sees me doing that, she will speak to me. And I have learned to take the family’s words on this very seriously. My children are both involved in ministry. One is a volunteer and another is in full-time ministry. So they speak to me very often, "You’re working too hard." And that I take very seriously. So I think that’s one of the things that is a check in my own life and I think should be a check in other’s lives too.

Matt Tully
Do you think that maybe this temptation towards overwork coming out of our own insecurities can be especially prominent for men? Not that women wouldn’t struggle with this as well, but it seems like men can often really fall into this temptation.

Ajith Fernando
Yeah, I think you’re right there. I think we want to be honored, and honor comes, in this world, from success. And when we measure success from criteria that are not necessarily God’s criteria, very often we are going to feel unsuccessful, and that is going to cause the type of attitudes that trigger burnout. I remember reading an article in the Sri Lankan newspapers about how preachers and politicians have affairs. And what it said was that we preachers—and this was not a Christian paper—it said that insecure people work very hard and they come to the top through hard work. But there is that insecurity—that wanting to be affirmed, that wanting to overcome people and to control people so that you can have that sense of being in control—and that makes us susceptible to affairs. For example, you come home, serving the Lord faithfully, and your wife (we are talking about men here) is always complaining that you’re working too hard. And when you go to work, everybody treats you like a god. "Yes, pastor. That’s wonderful. That was a wonderful sermon, pastor." And naturally, you tend to desire that kind of affirmation and not desire coming home to hearing the attacks. So that type of insecurity can easily lead to an affair where you find too much fulfillment from talking to someone of the opposite sex and finding fulfillment that way, trying to fill this insecurity in the wrong way.

12:04 - Insecurity that Leads to a Battle for Control

Matt Tully
That was one of the other ones that you highlighted, just this constant need for affirmation from other people because we are trying to fill that hole that we feel in ourselves. And that sometimes can even go so far as leading to some kind of an affair. Another symptom of our insecurity that you highlight is just the need for control—controlling our own lives, our own situations, and then even controlling other people around us. Can you unpack that a little bit more about what that might look like?

Ajith Fernando
I think that at the heart of control for us as Christians is letting God control. Believing that God is so great that he’s going to look after us, that we don’t have to over emphasize our own abilities and our own control over situations. When we are so thrilled by God and in the security of being his child, I think that is the thing that enables us to overcome this idea of controlling people. I really believe in this old teaching of being like a child. We are like children all the time, depending on a loving heavenly Father. That is the most wonderful thing in our life. We are loved by God, and basking in the presence of God is one of those things that takes away our desire for control because we know that God is controlling us and he’s sufficient for every need. He’s sufficient to fulfill our lives. So I think that’s one of those things that we have to learn, to give time to be with God. In my book I have said how prayer is an antidote to burnout because being in the presence of God attacks our insecurity. "The eternal God is our refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms" (Deut. 33:27). That is security. Now, coming to the point of accepting that is the great challenge of the Christian because such thoughts take a little time to go from the mind to the heart. The distance sometimes between the mind and the heart is a long distance, and we have to allow God to heal us of the things that hinder us from appreciating his love for us.

Matt Tully
So much of our experiences of insecurity can come from this feeling of lack of satisfaction in who we are, in what we’ve done, and even in how other people perceive us. And so I think one natural question can be, How do we strike the right balance between bad insecurity on one hand, but then the other danger could be maybe a complacency with how we’re doing? Do you see those two things as opposite ends of a spectrum, or is there a different way to think about that?

Ajith Fernando
Actually, both of them are the result of a wrong idea of who we are. When you are in enamored by the glory of God, enraptured by what a great God we have, we want to do what we do well. So we drive ourselves. I know "driven" is a bad word nowadays, but we drive ourselves to do well because we are enraptured by the glory of God. And we want to see God glorified in our preaching, in our teaching, in our ministry, in our counseling—whatever we do. And so when we are thrilled with God, we won’t be satisfied with mediocrity. We want to do our job well. On the other hand, when we are thrilled with God, we are not going to be driven by a wrong ambition to be better than others. I think insecurity often results in us wanting to be better than others, to have the best church. Whereas God’s call for us is to do well, but at the same time, working with the unreached, for example. Working in the slums, working with drug addicts. This is not the type of work that shows results that that causes people to say, "This guy is very successful." So we have to find our security in God to have the strength to do that kind of work.

Matt Tully
We measure our own success as Christians by faithfulness to what God has called us to do, and that’s not always going to look like success in the world’s eye. You mentioned this idea of comparison. How central is our tendency to compare to this issue of insecurity?

Ajith Fernando
I think it’s very important. I think more than y’all in the West, we are terrible at this. That’s the way parents motivate their children to do well, through comparison. And I’m a little scared about too much competition, even inside the church. Parents are fighting over their child not getting this, not getting that in the church program. I think the environment of competition and the environment of comparison is unhealthy. If you have grown up always being compared, you can never really enjoy your successes because everyone has somebody who’s better than us in everything we do. And if that is our measure of success, we are not going to be happy people. Whereas if our measure of success is the smile of God as he sees us serving him, then we are going to be happy. We’re going to be thrilled that God is happy and God is delighted in us.

Matt Tully
That might be another core issue, though, behind even our insecurity in general is maybe we don’t always believe that God is smiling at us, that God is happy with us as his children.

Ajith Fernando
Yes. And one of the ways that I have found that God brings healing to that is through acceptance by the community. Christianity is lived in community, and we experienced the love of God sometimes first through the love of people. When we find that people accept us, love us, and are committed to our welfare, then we get the feeling that we are lovable, which opens the door for us to accept that God loves us. I think it’s very important for us to grow in community. Community is another one of the solutions to insecurity. Sadly, we are living in such a mobile culture that we don’t have the time and the opportunity to develop deep friendships. I think we have to really desperately as a church recover the art of Christian friendship. Through our friends we experience acceptance, and God’s ministry to us is often mediated through friends.

Matt Tully
That’s such a helpful reminder because I think sometimes our tendency, especially those of us who come from a more theologically informed background and our churches who are just maybe very gospel centered, we can sometimes portray issues like this as ultimately it’s our theology that’s wrong. Ultimately, we just need to do better with praying, do better with reading the word, and think more clearly about what God has done for us. We almost want to downplay the importance of other people because we’re worried that we might start rooting our identity or our confidence in what other people are saying about us. So how do you keep that in perspective, even as you emphasize the importance of the church?

Ajith Fernando
I think one of the things that we have to remember is that we evangelicals are very poor in our doctrine of the body. That is also a theological truth that I think we have often neglected, and we need to restore biblical understanding of what it means to be a body, what it means to be people who grow together, whose growth is in the plural, not a singular thing. So I think that’s one thing. It’s not theology versus practice or theology versus community. It is a theology of community that comes also from the Bible.

20:07 - Antidotes to Insecurity

Matt Tully
You mentioned prayer a few minutes ago as one of the key antidotes to our insecurity. I wonder if you could address the person who hears you say that, and honestly, they kind of roll their eyes and they think to themselves, "I know. Prayer is always the first answer to anything that Christians are struggling with." How would you counsel that person who’s maybe having that response to listen and really think carefully about why prayer is so important here?

Ajith Fernando
A lot of people may be hindered from experiencing the powerful effects of prayer because of personal hurts that they have. And I think this has been overdone recently. There’s so much talk about hurt, and we have psychologized the Christian life. But I think there’s a place for healing, for forgiveness. These are some of the things that make it difficult for us to experience the love of God. So I think in addition to prayer—prayer is basic—but sometimes there are hindrances to experiencing the full benefits of prayer. And for example I really believe that learning to lament. In Romans it says we are subjected to frustration, and the result of this frustration is groaning. I think we have to learn the art of groaning. I’m glad that the church is realizing the need for this because we think we have to always feel good all the time and look good. Whereas in the Bible, I just finished a series of studies—ten studies on the Psalms—and there is so much lament in the Psalms. And that is God’s way of healing us. Because when we open ourselves to express our pain to God, we give God
an opportunity to comfort us.

Matt Tully
And sometimes I think we don’t do that because we feel like we’re not allowed. We feel like we don’t have permission to speak to God in our pain.

Ajith Fernando
That’s right. In fact, I tell people that very often the worship leader asks, "Is everybody happy today? If you’re happy, raise your hand." And so we get them to fall into the temptation of lying. That’s not necessary. You don’t have to be bubbly all the time just because we’re Christians. And I think we need to teach that. All these things can be overdone, but we have to keep it in perspective. I think the overriding theme in all of this is grace. We are people who are trying, who are opening ourselves to the abundant grace of God. And if there are hindrances to grace, let those come out so that grace can be applied to those hindrances.

Matt Tully
Another antidote to our insecurities that you talk about in the book is just maybe a more intentional recognition of the ways that God has gifted us, the ways that God has equipped us for the ministry that he calls us to. Speak a little bit more to the importance of that work.

Ajith Fernando
In my personal life, this has been very important. I felt God had called me to the ministry when I was in my teens, but I was a very shy person who wouldn’t open my mouth in public. And I felt very bad about myself. I felt inferior. And then I realized God has called me to preach. And I dared not tell anyone that I want to be a preacher until they discovered when they asked me to speak. They discovered that maybe I have the gift of preaching. So that has been one of the great thrills of my life, that the great God has chosen me to do some work for him. And this is a great thrill for every Christian that God has given all of us. The gift is not basic; it’s not primary. But through the gift, we can discover the primary thing: that we are important to God. And when the gift becomes too important to us, the Lord will mercifully send us a few rebukes where we mess up on our gifts so that we we come back and put the emphasis where it should be, which is on the grace of God.

Matt Tully
There are certainly two temptations. We can put too much stock in the gifts that God has given us, and we can start to root our identity in those gifts. Which I think is something that is probably a particular temptation for pastors and leaders in the church because we see how we are using these things to build up other Christians. That’s a danger. But I think you’re getting at that it’s also a danger to maybe not even be aware or not pay attention to the ways that God has gifted us for service.

Ajith Fernando
Yeah. I think so.

24:52 - The Role of Counseling in Battling Insecurity

Matt Tully
One other area that you highlight or approach to dealing with our insecurity and battling our insecurities is counseling, whether that’s counseling from other Christian friends who know us and care about us and who have maturity, or maybe even counseling from a professional counselor who has a lot of experience with this. How do we know when receiving that kind of counsel from other people specifically designed to help us deal with our insecurity is warranted?

Ajith Fernando
Firstly, I think all Christians need to have friends. And the best counselors are our friends. They don’t have to be professionals. Somebody once said that psychotherapy is the purchase of friendship because you don’t have friends. The whole idea of long conversations with "holy conversation," they used to call it. Christians chatting about the things of God. These things serve to help us understand ourselves. And our friends will perhaps, by observation and by seeing what we are up to, realize that we need some special help and we need to advise them to go. Now, this is a very sensitive area because I think a lot of counseling today is not biblical. It’s more helping people discover themselves and not telling them how God wants them to live, which is an aspect of Christianity where sin is recognized as a thing that hinders people. Those all have to be taken into account. But I think it is helpful for people to go and share with others. And I think their friends are the first recourse. I think pastors are another source. And sometimes pastors will realize, "This situation is a bit too complicated for me to handle. We need someone who’s more aware of the issues, and we can send them to that type of person."

Matt Tully
That’s so helpful. It can be so hard for us as Christians to open up, whether that’s with our pastor or with a friend, as these issues of insecurity and the ways that we feel bad about ourselves can be so sensitive. So how would you encourage somebody who feels like, "I just don’t see how I could ever tell someone this stuff. It’s too painful. It’s too personal."

Ajith Fernando
I think you can’t force anybody to confess like that, so you have to get close and live with the person. Be close to the person and spend the time that is necessary. But I think one of the main reasons why this is a problem is that many of our communities are not grace-oriented communities. People enter the kingdom through grace, and they live in the kingdom by law. We tend to put performance so important that we don’t, when a person sins, for example, we are tempted to gossip about it. But if grace was important, our response would be, "How can I help this person? And I will do what is best for this person." So I’ve been trying to pursue this idea of encouraging pastors to have friends, and I realized that the main ingredient that enables this kind of friendship is relationships that are bathed in grace. We are not perfect people. We are fellow sinners yearning to be like Jesus, and we’ll get all the help that we can possibly get. If that kind of ambition is seen in our lives, other people will start coming and sharing with us. So many people have been hurt because people have misused the information they gave. I think that is because grace is not at the heart of these relationships.

Matt Tully
Ajith, thank you so much for helping us think maybe a little bit more carefully and a little bit more biblically about this issue of insecurity and the way that, for all of us, it plays itself out in our lives in different ways. But the gospel comes into that, and all these good relationships that we have with other believers can come into that and really cause us to live out of our identities in Christ, not pursue our own identities through our own strength. We really appreciate you taking the time today.

Ajith Fernando
Thank you, Matt. It was nice to talk to you.

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