How to Be Brave When You're Scared (& Start Trusting God) | Jess Connolly

You don't have to stop feeling scared to make a faithful choice. Learn how to stop letting fear call the shots and find courage in God's presence, even when life feels overwhelming.

Join Ellen Krause and guest Jess Connolly to discover:

• Why feeling afraid doesn't mean your faith is weak or that you're disappointing God.
• How to recognize when fear is influencing your decisions.
• The difference between the fear of man and the fear of God.
• Why naming your fears is an important step toward healing and courage.
• Practical ways to bring your anxiety to God through prayer, worship, and everyday acts of trust.

Check out Jess' new book, You Can't Be Brave Until You're Scared

Scripture referenced:
Matthew 14:22-33 | Luke 22:54-60 | Psalm 139:23-24

About Jess Connolly:
JessConnolly.com | @jessaconnolly | The Jess Connolly Podcast

Jess' Bible study tools:
Wide margin NIV | Goodnotes | Five Loaves

Nothing to Prove, Nothing to Earn: 6 Choices to Live Free From Striving and Performance. Get yours here!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:56

Oftentimes we do think of fear as this binary switch that you're either afraid or you're brave. You're either scared or you're courageous. And what's true in the kingdom, what's true physiologically, what's true biblically is that those two things happen simultaneously a lot more than we'd like. We can actually be experiencing fear and be experiencing faith at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

At the Coffee of Bible Time podcast, our goal is to help you delight in God's word and thrive in Christian living. Each week, we talk to subject matter experts who broaden your biblical understanding, encourage you in hard times, and provide life-building tips to enhance your Christian walk. We are so glad you have joined us. Welcome back to the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. I'm Ellen, your host. Fear is something that so many of us deal with on a daily basis. We wake up anxious or lie awake at night worrying about situations that are beyond our control. And that worry can feel all consuming. But what if there's another way? What if we don't actually have to obey our fear? Well, that's what we're talking about today. And I'm especially excited for this conversation because our guest has walked this road personally and spent years helping women grow encouraged knowledge of God and spiritual health. Jess Connolly is an author, speaker, church planter, and the host of the Jess Connelly Podcast. She and her husband Nick planted Bright City Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where they're raising their four kids. Jess, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a joy to be here. Well, I'm so glad that you've joined us. You know, we talk a lot about fear, but one thing that we don't really talk about bravery. Totally. How about for you personally, Jess? Can you tell us a little bit more about your own story and what that's looked like in your life?

SPEAKER_00 3:12

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I lived with fear kind of on the surface of my life. Like I was just the kind of girl who would start crying or my hands would start shaking, you know. I would have a very visceral response to fear, but I started struggling with anxiety. It really kind of cemented and solidified in the post-pandemic season. I felt like as a believer and as a Christian leader, you know, I need to have a better handle on this. I need to have the right answers for it. I just need to trust God. I just need to pray through it. Because I couldn't process it, my body was experiencing it and internalizing it in a really profound way. And so I began struggling with pretty debilitating anxiety for a season. I also felt a lot of shame about it. And so I didn't know how to talk about it and I didn't know how to kind of let it hit the air. And truly, honestly, I would say like a lot of my passion to study this and understand it came when I saw other people in my life that I really loved struggling with anxiety, people that I knew were incredibly faithful, people that I knew, you know, really trusted the Lord, people that I knew really spent time in the presence of God. And it was only once people kind of would come around those people that I loved and maybe start to hand them platitudes, or maybe say, like, well, have you tried praying this first? Or have you tried reading this? Or have you tried doing this? And I would look out and be like, they're doing everything. They're doing everything they can do. So there's got to be something more here. Once I began really to start to name my fears out loud, to trace them, to track them, and to ask what courage would look like in the face of them is for me when I kind of started to see a path out of the debilitating sense of I can't help what's happening to me. And I started to see my fear as a formation place, that God wasn't trying to necessarily even rid me of fear, that he wasn't waiting for me to be a fearless believer, but that he wanted to use my fear as a place to incite supernatural trust in me and to call courage out of me.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

You know, Jess, you mentioned the pandemic, and I feel like that was a time where I started to see fear in people that I didn't even know had fear.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 5:14

And I think that that helped others of us understand that, you know what, a lot of people have various fears and anxieties of different kinds. You know, Jess, you distinguish between feeling fear and being obedient to that fear. What does it look like to experience fear versus actually being controlled by it?

SPEAKER_00 5:36

Now that we're already talking about it, Ellen, I'll I'll stick with the pandemic example because I feel like that's actually a really helpful example. I think a lot of times when we think about this idea of obeying fear, like what does it look like to obey fear? That a lot of people might see that one particular way. Like, well, if you're scared of something, then you would immediately maybe run away from it, and that would be obeying fear. But what's interesting is I think that oftentimes obeying fear can almost look courageous sometimes. And so what we may have even seen if we look back at the pandemic is people who were actually very scared, scared about the world around them, scared about what was happening, scared about what's happening in their communities. And maybe they didn't even look like they were scared, but maybe that unexpressed or that unprocessed fear might have started to look like pride or even anger or even like, you know, extreme self-assuredness. Because sometimes we're so scared of our fear that we don't even want to name it. And so it shows up in different ways. And that can be one way we begin to obey fear. I would say that the distinction for me between like naming and processing our fear and obeying it really, we can't look at just what it looks like from the outside because it can look a variety of different ways. Some person can be obeying their fear and they can look very wise. They can look really patient, they can almost even look content sometimes, and maybe really truly, they're just obeying a fear that's keeping them from going, you know? And then sometimes somebody could be obeying a fear and they might look loud or frustrated, you know, or timid. It could look like a variety of different things. I think the distinction between processing our fear and obeying our fear is are we naming it with the Lord? Are we asking him where that fear came from? And are we asking what courage might look like in the face of that fear? And the great thing about that process is that it's individual to each of us, and it's actually incredibly enjoyable to explore that with the Lord. It sounds terrifying, but when we remember that he's a good father and he's a good shepherd, it can actually be a really enjoyable process.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Yes, absolutely. And Jesus himself in the Bible was an excellent role model of how we're to respond. What can we learn from the way that Jesus responded to his disciples when they were afraid?

SPEAKER_00 7:49

What we see in the New Testament is Jesus actually asked way more questions than he answered. I believe one reason why he did that is because he used questions as a form of formation of saying, like, do you know what you think about this? Who do you say that I am? What is it that you want? He would ask those questions so the person he was with and often his disciples could process where they were at and where they wanted to be. And so what we see him do with the disciples very often is that he would say, Why are you scared? Why do you have little faith? And what's really beautiful and really interesting when we look at this pathway that Jesus used a formation of asking questions is that if we read those biblical stories with a lens of shame, we might hear them and think like he is immediately rebuking his disciples to say, like, why are you scared? What's wrong with you? Why are you scared, Peter, that you are drowning out here in the middle of the water? But when we shake our heads a little bit and we remember that Jesus doesn't ever use shame as a tool, that he loved his disciples, that they were his friends. And actually, when we study the original Greek, the Greek will actually distinguish when Jesus rebukes and when he's just speaking. And then the Greek, every time Jesus would ask his disciples about their fear, he was just speaking. He was just speaking conversationally to them. And so uh taking the example of Peter when he's drowning on the water, when he's started to walk out to Jesus, and Jesus says to him, Like, Peter, why are you so scared? What I think is so beautiful is that when we look at it again, not with a lens of shame, but a lens of remembering that Jesus had come to die and save his friends, to rescue them for eternal and abundant life. If he's looking at Peter, who's facing a very real threat of drowning and losing his life, it's very rare that we would imagine that Jesus would be shaming him for that. Jesus never asked anyone to pretend like life and death didn't matter. In fact, you know, he loved us so much that he came to die for us to purchase us with his life. And so, all that being said, I think what we learn from the way Jesus interacted with his friends is that he asked them to process their fear. He asked them to name it. And he sat with them while they did it. And oftentimes he rescued them as he did it. And giving that example of Jesus and Peter, he actually grabs him so he doesn't drown. He saves him first and then he does the processing with him. I think Jesus was really curious about his disciples' fear, and I think he wanted them to process it because that's where the formation came in.

SPEAKER_01 10:09

Absolutely. And you know, I can remember even my dad saying, Well, what is it that you're afraid of? Yeah. And forcing me to look internally to try to identify what exactly it is, and then perhaps having him then help me understand that I didn't need to be afraid because of God who's bigger than you know, every possible fear that I could have.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Absolutely, absolutely. And what's so beautiful is um, you know, this this concept is kind of wrapped up in the title of the book. You can't be brave until you're scared. Because I think oftentimes we do think of fear as this binary switch, that you're either afraid or you're brave. You're either scared or you're courageous. And what's true in the kingdom, what's true physiologically, what's true biblically is that those two things happen simultaneously a lot more than we'd like. We can actually be experiencing fear and be experiencing faith at the same time. They're not mutually exclusive.

SPEAKER_01 11:10

Yes, so true. Well, let's talk a little bit about fear in daily life. One of the things that makes fear so tricky is that it's not always obvious. And it can actually be a subtle motivating factor for decisions that we make. How can we start to discern what's really happening in our hearts?

SPEAKER_00 11:30

You know, a lot of times I like to ask the question of who am I honoring here? Who is getting the honor here? Who is getting the reverence here? And a lot of times, if I'm honest, like something that might look wise or something that might even look thoughtful might actually be motivated more by me giving reverence to my preference or me giving reverence to my comfort, or even me giving reverence to other people through the means of people pleasing. But again, at the same time, sometimes something might look the same from the outside, but in my heart, I might be giving wild reverence to the Lord, you know, and I might be truly deciding like it's his voice that I want to obey. And I love that you're asking like such thoughtful questions, Ellen. And I I think it's interesting that we keep coming back to this idea. The crazy part is that we don't get to dictate what this looks like for anybody else from the outside. We don't get to look at anybody else's life and say, like, look, they're so courageous, or like, look, they're so wise. And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't honor and, you know, speak life over people, but oftentimes it it is more of an internal barometer. And it does take a lot more of internal checks that we have to process with the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

You know, one of the internal checks that we do is assessing what the fear is. And you've sort of come up with this phrase, naming it is 90%. And you use that a lot, right? When you're counseling and discipling women. Why is there so much power in actually naming our fears?

SPEAKER_00 13:05

Yeah. Good question. I think there's a ton of power in it, precisely because what we won't name, we can't see healed, and we'll continually repeat what we don't repair. And so it would be wild for us to, you know, constantly hope that God will bring us into courage or bring bravery to us if if we're just not really willing to share with him what our fear is. But what's so powerful about naming it is that I think that a lot of us can't even imagine the jump to processing our fear with the Lord because we just couldn't imagine saying it out loud. We couldn't imagine saying it out loud to even ourselves or writing it in our journals. And so the process is incredibly transformative just to purely name what we're scared about and to do it without a lens of shame, to do it without condemnation for ourselves. That's the main reason why. But I would say a follow-up reason why it's so transformative is because oftentimes once we name our fear, and if we can do it without shame or condemnation, after that we get to discern do I want to keep obeying this fear? Do I want to keep listening to it? And once we've named it, we have a little bit more discernment to make that decision with our life.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

So true. And that includes prayer. Because I know for me, just even writing down the fears, talking to God about it and asking the Lord to help you in whatever particular fear it is. If someone's listening to this and realizing that they have a whole list of fears, maybe that they've never really admitted to, where do they start? What do they do?

SPEAKER_00 14:39

So this actually sounds really simple, but I'll tell you it takes guts to even do. But I would highly suggest starting with physically writing it down. So maybe taking a blank sheet of paper and just saying, you know, for three to five minutes, I'm gonna write down every single thing I can think of that I'm scared of. That's it. I'm gonna just write it down. I'm not gonna try to answer it. I'm not gonna edit myself. I'm not gonna try to fix it. I'm not gonna try to write a Bible verse beside it. I'm I'm just gonna name it. And then my my second encouragement for them is after they do that, the experiment for the first time, I would say take a deep breath and then do it one more time. Because oftentimes we aren't even totally willing and ready to be honest with our fears the first time we write it down. It takes a it takes a second shot. And so I would say that could be a great follow-up thing to do. And then from there, we get to do exactly what you said, Elon. We get to take that list to the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 15:30

You know, for me, and I think for a lot of people, the fear of man, so to speak, as it's referenced so many times in the Bible, my fear of man can be greater than my fear of God. Help our listeners understand like the difference between. I remember learning this when I was a, you know, a younger Christian, but it was so impactful for me. For someone maybe who doesn't understand, can you kind of dissect that?

SPEAKER_00 15:57

Yeah. Specifically what the fear of man is. Yeah. Fear of man versus the fear of God. Oh, versus the fear of God. Amazing, incredible. Yeah. Well, to be totally fair, anyone who's listening, even those of us who maybe grew up in the church and are really familiar with those phrases, I think sometimes we can get hypnotized by the complexity of both. You know, sometimes we can get so familiar with the phrases we don't know what they mean anymore. So fear of man is essentially this it is having an incorrect ordered awe. So it's having more awe or more reverence for humans than we do for God. So anytime we want someone's approval or their love or even their acceptance more than we want what we already have from God in those means, that would be the fear of man. And then on the flip side, fear of God is essentially just rightly ordered off. It's having an understanding of a worldview that places him as supreme and as prime at the center of our universe. Now, what's really helpful for most of us to note is that especially for most Christians, we have something that is a formal theology and then we have a functional theology. So our formal theology is like what we say we believe, what we all agree about on paper. And so most of us would sitting here having our coffee would say, like, totally, God should be at the center of everything. We should revere God the most. We, yes, we won't rightly order it all. We're not gonna worship people. We would never worship people. That's our formal theology. Our functional theology, however, is very different because very often we will wake up and we will order our entire day around pleasing other people and getting their approval. And we may even do it under the banner of love and do it under the banner of service, under the banner of leadership. And so again, it becomes one of those conversations of, you know, do we have ruthless honesty about what's going on internally? And is our heart and our mind and what's happening in our souls is all of that exposed to him and his capacity to speak into it?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

That's so deep. And I think about the fear of man that comes into place. And I'm thinking actually of Peter, you know, before the rooster crows three times, you will deny me. I mean, you can have the strongest convictions about believing that you love God, and yet this fear of man can become almost incapacitating. Totally. How have you seen in maybe some of the people that you've counseled just go from understanding that the fear of man needs to take its seat, so to speak?

SPEAKER_00 18:28

Totally. I think it for us, for most of us, it really does start with paying attention to our own habits and the spaces where our fear of man creeps in, and then just holding it up to the Lord and confessing it. And so again, I don't think it's always, always, always as simple as naming it as 90%. But you know, we do hear a story like Peter, and we and we look at him, you know, just so ensorciled by this fear of man in such a chokehold, and it's so confusing because, you know, chapters before, he's just gonna continually declare Jesus as Lord and say, like, I'll never leave you. I'd never go anywhere. And we think, like, how could he? But for all of us in our hearts and in our days and in our time, and in the way that we, you know, spend our money, it is so easy for us to just continually place our allegiance with people and with their approval. And so I think it starts with kind of a real Psalm 139 look at ourselves to say, Lord, search me and know me, find any wicked way in me, give me eyes to see where fear of man has a stronghold in my life. Let me not pretend that I could never struggle with this like our friend Peter, but instead show me where I where I have preference for the approval of humans more than the intimacy that I have with you.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

And then what would you say to helping someone grow in the awe of God?

SPEAKER_00 19:51

Such a good question. I love this question. If we're looking to grow in the awe of God, which is also an incredible way to get free of the fear of man, because we could probably spend the rest of our lives, you know, waking up every day and saying, like, okay, I don't want to fear people anymore. I don't want to fear people anymore. But if we don't have something to replace that with, we might never see growth. And so we do absolutely want to replace our fear of man with a rightly ordered awe of God, a holy fear of God. So some ways that we can increase reverence in our life or increase awe in our life is I would say, you know, number one, when we sense ourselves kind of being caught up in a moment or, you know, caught up in worship or even like caught up in his word, don't immediately rush past that. For many of us, like when we start to kind of feel this overwhelming sense of like, oh, he's near or he's moving or he's speaking or I'm sensing his presence, we we shut it down very quickly because it makes us nervous. So we could, we could just linger in God's presence and linger in awe. I often encourage people to get their their somatic experience involved, get their body involved, worshiping God, get their body involved in prayer, you know, go on a prayer walk, find yourselves on your knees if you're if you're in a worship service. Just get your body involved to come into a posture of reverence, truly, and and come into agreement with what's happening there. Spending time in nature, spending time in silence, all of those things are incredible ways that we can increase our awe of God.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Absolutely. And I love uh worship music is just I love the invitation into that worship experience doing that. Yeah. What does this look like in ordinary life for someone, let's say, who's, you know, sitting in their car anxious about something? How does holy awe meet them in that place?

SPEAKER_00 21:36

So good. I love this incredibly practical question. Let's say you're driving in your car and you're kind of like working through your day, everything that's coming up, maybe you're thinking about some forms you've got to fill out for your kids, or you know, that friend that you didn't reach out to who's going through a hard time, or oh my gosh, I gotta get all the laundry done before we go on that trip next week. So, one thing that you can immediately work on doing is to stop that pattern of ruminating. So, to interrupt that pattern of ruminating, what you could actually do rather than pretending like all of that doesn't matter to you, is you could start talking to the Lord about it. You could start saying, like, God, I feel overwhelmed. Lord, I feel overwhelmed with the laundry and the forms. And I and hold on, I'm realizing I'm feeling some shame about not reaching out at that friend. Can I just pray right now as I drive to talk to you about her and ask you to intercede on her behalf? And again, that is such a great question because this is a great example of where our fear becomes not our failure from faith, but the formation place of our intimate trust with Jesus.

SPEAKER_01 22:36

Yes, and the recognition that we can take action as well. Yeah. It's it's leading us to a place, like you said, of uh maybe reaching out to someone or inviting them into that process as well.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:51

One thing in the book, Jess, that I thought you were so vulnerable in regards to this. This fear over man is the experience as being a wife of a pastor, which my daughter is as well. Is there's just you know a lot of anxiety that can go around that, you know, feeling like you have expectations that you have to live up to. And I just love how vulnerable you were. You've written an amazing book called You Can't Be Brave Until You're Scared. And I just wanted to share that one example of something that people could read in there and see how you've gone through that process and how you came out the other side as well. It was so encouraging to me.

SPEAKER_00 23:35

So grateful. Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Well, as we start to close up here, I want to end with the woman who's listening right now and just maybe is just feeling exhausted, carrying all of her fears. What do you want her to hear today from this conversation?

SPEAKER_00 23:54

The first thing I want her to hear is you are exhausted because this is an exhausting world. And you are scared because this is a terrifying world. And I do not believe that your friend and savior Jesus would shame you for your fatigue or for your fear. But I do believe he wants to meet you in it to bring supernatural courage and bravery and also supernatural rest and shalom, maybe where you least expect it.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Absolutely. Because it's walking through some of those darkest tunnels and then later looking back and seeing how God has miraculously worked in helping you get through it is shaping who you're becoming. Yes. I love that God can work even in our fears. Well, Jess, tell our listeners where they can go to learn more about you and this topic of tackling your fear with the help of God.

SPEAKER_00 24:54

I am Jess A. Connolly on social media, and you can find my book, You Can't Be Brave Until You're Scared, on Amazon or anywhere where you buy books. And my website is jessconnelly.com.

SPEAKER_01 25:05

Well, we will make sure we include those links in our show notes for sure. Before I let you go, I need to ask you our favorite rapid fire questions here. Little tips for our listeners. What is your go-to Bible and what translation is it?

SPEAKER_00 25:21

I have a wide margin NIV Bible. And I love the wide margins because I like to take a lot of notes.

SPEAKER_01 25:28

Okay, well, that leads me into the second question then. Do you have any favorite Bible journaling supplies that you like to use?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

I do like to take notes in the margin, but I also really enjoy using the Good Notes app on my iPad. And so oftentimes I'll get scripture from the UVersion app on my iPad and research things online and put little notes in there as well.

SPEAKER_01 25:50

That's a great tool. Okay, last one then. What is your favorite app or website for Bible study tools?

SPEAKER_00 25:57

There is a new app that actually some very close friends of mine developed called Five Loaves. And it is an incredible Bible study tool, and it has been just changing the way I study the word for the last year.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Oh, that's so exciting. Okay. We will make sure we include a link in our notes for that as well. We need to take a look at that. That's so fun. Jess, thank you so much just for being here, for sharing your authentic story and wanting to be so encouraging to other people.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Thank you so much for having me. It was a joy to be on the podcast today. You're most welcome.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

And to our listeners, whatever you're facing today, I hope you remember that being afraid doesn't mean that we're failing God and that fear doesn't have to be the thing that's calling the shots in our lives. I know that for me personally, I am walking away from this conversation, encouraged to bring my fears into the light and fix my eyes on Jesus. Well, thank you so much for joining us, and we'll see you all next time on the Coffee and Bible Time podcast. Have a blessed day.