If you’re going to make a fresh start with faith in your life, you need to face your fears. Don’t let them control you! Fear has an incredible ability to paralyze our potential—to keep us from launching out and having faith in our lives.

When we choose fear over faith, it makes us skeptical—we’re afraid of trying anything new. It makes us selfish—we’re afraid to commit to God and to others. It makes us short-sighted—we focus on the past and not on the future.

A man named Bartimaeus faced a fear that is familiar to many of us: the fear of rejection. He was blind and wanted to be healed. He knew that to shout out to Jesus over the crowd wasn’t the right thing to do. He knew that people would look down on him for it, but he was desperate. And he knew that Jesus Christ was the only one who could help him.

So he got Jesus’ attention. The Bible says, “Many of the people scolded him and told him to be quiet. But he shouted even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’” (Mark 10:48 GNT).

And look what happened: When he shouted out to Jesus, everyone around him told him, “Don’t do that. Be quiet. Don’t make a scene. Surely Jesus Christ isn’t interested in you. He has more important things to do.”

The devil whispers things like that to a lot of us. When an opportunity for faith comes into our hearts, thoughts like, “God surely wouldn’t be interested in me” or “Don’t make a scene” or “What would people think of me?” keep us from having faith. When you see an opportunity to change, there are all kinds of shouts from inside and around you that tell you not to rock the boat.

But God is asking you to do something greater than you’ve ever done before: He’s asking you to depend on him completely. Don’t you think that’s going to feel a little bit scary? Of course it is.

When God asks something of you, you have a choice. Are you going to fall back on your fear and stay the way you are? Or are you going to tame your fear and step forward in faith?