I have a friend who says that most men are afraid of their wives. My joke has always been that I’m afraid of my wife and I’m not even married to her yet. Ha.
Men, even though we like to act tough and hide it, often get all wuss like when we are around someone we like. We act differently. We become too nice or desperate. This is bad for many reasons but one thing for sure, as long as you are afraid of the girl, she will not be attracted to you.
Women are constantly subconsciously testing men. Do they feel safe with you? Can you take care of them? Can you stand up to them and therefore stand up for them? If you fail the test, you will not be attractive.
This is why we need to face the our insecurities with women.
Insecurity leads to all sorts of bad actions. Defensiveness, nervous movements, bad jokes, talking too excitedly, being sarcastic, talking about ourselves all the time to prove ourselves, or acting tough just to name a few. These things make us appear desperate – because we are.
Now obviously dealing with the opposite sex is not the only place that we face insecurity, far from it. But it is one place that almost all of us at some point experience it.
Here’s a harsh truth. More than making us unattractive or keeping us from a full dating life, insecurity is a sin. It’s not some type of humility. Humility is having a right view of who I am in comparison to God and relation to others. It means being not self focused. That’s not insecurity.
Insecurity means that I am looking for my security and identity in someone other than Jesus. If I’m insecure around a woman that means I need her approval. I’ve given her the power to define me and how I feel about myself. This is totally wrong, a form of idolatry, and it’s not attractive.
Insecurity is also a sin because it is fear based. Fear of rejection, or fear of what others think of me. Fear is never from God. The truth is, every decision we make, we make either out of love or out of fear. There’s not much in between.
And this leads to perhaps the biggest reason insecurity is sin. Insecurity gets in the way of loving others. Think about it. If I “like” this girl and am desperate for her to like me, then there is no way I can really love her. You can’t love someone when you are more worried about what they think of you than what is best for them. It’s impossible. As long as you are focused on attaining or keeping their approval you aren’t free to love them. As long as you are being insecure, the focus is on you not them.
This gets in the way of all sorts of ministry and it for sure gets in the way of loving those closest to us. It also keeps us from allowing others to love us because we are constantly putting up different subconscious walls to “protect” ourselves.
You can’t have insecurity and intimacy. Intimacy requires safety and safety requires security.
Jesus was never insecure. In fact no one has ever been more secure in who he was than Jesus. This is one of the reasons that so many people were drawn to Him and why so many people hated him.
He was comfortable and confident. Therefore when you had a conversation with Him He could be fully engaged. He was completely free to love each person He encountered precisely because He didn’t need them to like Him. It’s not that He didn’t want people to like him – heck He invited people to follow Him for heaven’s sake, but His identity did not depend (and by the way doesn’t now) on whether you followed Him or not. He is who He is, regardless of what anybody else does.
This is why the more I find my identity in Christ the less insecure I will be. The more that I know how loved and secure I am in Him the less I have to fear. I can’t just know about Jesus and His truth – I have to figure out how to actually live out of it.
Mostly what we do instead is try to cover up and hide our insecurities. We pick only the challenges that we can win. And in dating we only pursue people we know will like us, or we stumble around unsuccessfully chasing the women that we really want or we pursue no one.
Christian men should be the most confident attractive men that a woman can run into. But are we? Not from what I’ve seen.
We have to face our insecurities. So, when are you insecure? Where does that come from for you? What in your story has made you that way? Do you live more out of your fear or your identity in Christ?
More Than Don't Have Sex 
AWESOME post, Justin! What a great explanation of why insecurity is a sin and how it keeps us from being the people God wants us to be.
I think what April (Peaceful Wife) thinks. Great post.
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Best Post Ive read on insecurities… help Lord Jesus LOL
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A “player”, “pick up artist”, or “alpha male” who has all the confidence in the world in regards to approaching women may not even be a Christian. So if confidence in approaching women doesn’t automatically reflect a strong faith or confidence in Christ (or any at all), why would fear or insecurity about approaching women reflect a LACK of faith or confidence in Christ?
Everybody is insecure about something. And why would insecurities prevent a man from being able to fully love a woman any more than they would prevent a woman from fully loving a man?
This is really a lot of different things. Confidence with women doesn’t make someone a Christian. But that doesn’t mean that as a Christian that I should stay insecure with women. That’s the point of the post.
Insecurity of dealing with women gets in the way of loving a woman because if I’m afraid of her or how she’ll react then I’m focused on me, not her.
Women who are insecure also have a hard time loving women. However this is not a blog about women. I’m writing to help men, mostly, not so much women.
Insecurity is a sin. We all have it because we all have sin. It’s not a worse sin than anything else. But it’s still a sign of sin. Not just in this area.
“But that doesn’t mean that as a Christian that I should stay insecure with women.”
Why do men owe this to women as part of being a Christian anymore than they owe it to us?
Everyone has vices, and sometimes people may never overcome them, due to the fact that we all inhabit sin-cursed bodies and live in a sin-cursed world. And no one is worthy of or can earn someone else’s love; otherwise, it isn’t love. I think that really any insecurity can interfere with our loving someone else, as any insecurity can cause us to worry and take our focus off of other people.
I can see how lack of confidence around women would have the most direct and perhaps severe impact on my ability to love a woman. But if that disqualifies a man from loving a woman, couldn’t any insecurity be a disqualifier?
Besides, once a man and a woman are already married and committed to each other, some of that insecurity and lack of confidence might could go away, seeing as though they had a degree of success and managed to “pull it off.” Perhaps even getting a first date could help a man start to overcome insecurity, even if he wasn’t confident when asking a woman out. I don’t know for sure that any of this could happen, but I suppose it’s possible. And it’s a benefit that could not be had if insecurity should disqualify a man altogether from the get go.
The only person using the word disqualify is you. You’re arguing against something I’m not saying. I’m not saying that being insecure disqualifies anybody. I’m saying it very often gets in the way of getting a date. Which typically is the first step to marriage.
Men don’t owe to women. But women don’t owe you or me or anyone else a date either. So owing has nothing to do with it at all.
This has nothing to do with love initially. It has to do with getting a date.
And yes, we all have insecurities. As I said and you said. We all have sin. It’s not a disqualifier. However it can get it the way. So why not work on it.
Okay.
I apologize then for arguing about disqualification. I suppose my own insecurities led me to assume the worst and believe that – just as Christians who have the mentality that love and relationships are women’s for the taking, and that men DO owe women dates would likely believe – you WERE communicating that insecurity is an all-out disqualifier for men.
To make matters worse, I don’t even have good social skills. And I’m not just socially awkward; sometimes my own mere existence is awkward to me. To tell you the truth, I’ve been suicidal twice over the past 10 years.
And, I suppose it’s possible that a man could get lucky and get a date before a woman has a chance to perceive any insecurity in him about approaching women, dating, love, etc., especially if he gets some help from God. I’m not saying that this is likely, but it I do think it’s possible. Perhaps a man and a woman could make a great first impression on each other one day, but not on the next depending on what all had happened that day and thus, what kind of a mood they were in, how they happened to be dressed, whatever the case may be.