You Can Become Bold and Fearless

Bold: to be brave, daring, courageous, intrepid, valiant.

God is calling us to be bold. If you have the tendency to not take chances in life because you're afraid of making mistakes, God wants you to know He's pleased with you when you try. It doesn't matter if you don't do everything exactly right. What matters is that you step out in faith, believing God will help you!

Second Timothy 1:7 says that God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power—and He wants us to use it! It doesn't take courage to do what we already know we can do. True courage is displayed when you're afraid to do something but you go ahead and do it anyway. The truth is, we don't ever have to fear because we can ask God for His help anytime we need it.

Taking the Focus Off of Performance

There are so many people who are so afraid of making a mistake that they don't do anything. Instead, they sit around saying, "What if I'm wrong?" Well, we're human. We're going to make mistakes and look silly from time to time.

We can be so afraid of being judged or criticized or getting laughed at. But the only thing fear does in our lives is stop our progress.

What matters to God is relationship…not performance. God knows we aren't perfect, and He's totally okay with it. The problem is, the devil knows it too, and he does his best to tell us every step of the way!

We can be going along, serving God, doing good, stepping out in faith and then all of a sudden, without there being any justification for it, we'll have a day or week when we have an attack on our mind about fear. That's when we need to say what God's Word tells us:

The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. — 2 Corinthians 10:4-5 NIV

Honesty Outweighs Perfection

We can care too much about what people think of us to the point where it totally immobilizes us and we are petrified about looking wrong. But do you know what? I think if we are more truthful, we will actually get more respect than we do by trying to hide everything, pretending we're perfect.

I believe one of the main reasons people like to listen to me is that I tell all my junk. It helps them to relax, to relate to me, and offers them hope that if I can do some of the things I've done and make it, so can they.

We need to stop living in fear of making mistakes, because we will make mistakes—period. God is not asking us to not make any mistakes. He's calling us to be bold—fearless in approaching Him, in stepping out in faith, and in trusting Him to lead us.