I wanted to commit, but I was scared.
Really scared.
Scared that I would be asked to do something I really didn’t want to do.
I’m petrified of public speaking.
I remember in my teen years other youth getting up in front of a church crowd and giving impromptu personal testimonies. Telling everyone about how God had changed them.
The thought of getting up and speaking impromptu in front of a crowd truly terrified me, especially about something so close to my heart. I knew that if I had to get up my mind would go blank and I would be unable to speak. I felt there was something wrong with me. Why did I have to feel so scared!
Fast forward 20 years and I am mum of a baby and a toddler and I wanted to follow God. I wanted to fully commit to him, but I was terrified that he would ask me to do what I feared most – get up in front of a crowd and give a speech about how he’d changed my life.
I wanted to totally surrender to him, but not if he asked me to do the thing I feared most.
Then I read Tozer.
The scary prayer
Aiden Tozer wrote a prayer that made me feel not so alone.
In his short, 90 page, bestselling book that he wrote in one night, ‘The Pursuit of God’, Tozer writes the prayer that changed my life:
“Father, I want to know You, but my cowardly heart fears to give up its toys. I cannot part with them without inward bleeding, and I do not try to hide from You the terror of the parting. I come trembling, but I do come.”
A W Tozer
It was ok for me to feel scared. I wasn’t the only one.
I prayed the prayer and I meant it. It was a moment of shaky courage and then the rest was left up to God.
The break through
Before praying this prayer I could feel a literal wall around my heart. I felt like the wall made it impossible for me to really connect with God. I couldn’t break through on my own. Tozer made me realise that I was never meant to break through the wall on my own:
‘God must do everything for us. Our part is to yield and trust.’
I yielded and the wall disappeared. I felt God come closer to me than I had felt for a long, long time. It felt good. So good!
2000 years ago Paul said a similar thing:
It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us….You’re not “doing” anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: “God has set everything right between him and me!”
Romans 10:9 MSG
Not as scary as I thought
I also realised that God created me and knew me better than anyone, even better than I knew myself. He knew that public speaking was a fear of mine and it wasn’t something I was naturally good at. He wasn’t going to ask me to do something that I was terrible at. He is a good God.
Fast forward to today – 10 years later. I have not once felt God call me to get up in front of a crowd to give a speech. I have felt him call me to many other things, but he has always first given me a deep desire to do those things.
