It’s time to face your audience.  Your speech, memory verse or musical number has been rehearsed many times yet your stomach is full of butterflies.  Your hands sweat making it hard to hold on to your musical instrument.  Your fear is making you forget parts of your memory verse that you knew very well up until now.

What are you nervous about?  The audience is full of people who love you or classmates waiting to give their presentations.  You are not afraid of the people watching.  You know most of the people.  Nobody has a gun pointed at you.  Nobody is waiting for the ultimate booboo so they can laugh at you.

What is it, really?  It’s the devil.  You are suddenly lead to believe you will forget words, trip on the way to the podium, voice may fail or possibly drop a prop.  What if you miss a note or the prop or instrument breaks?  What if?  What if? What if?  It’s all about you in your mind.  It’s not a feeling of rejection from an audience but more of a feeling of self worth.  It’s you presenting you.  It’s your presentation and you are revealing part of yourself.  It’s not the presentation that has you nervous but your work, talent, skills and style that you are exposing.

Wait, you are a child of God.  Jesus lives in your heart, therefore the love of Jesus Christ flows through you.  You are not exposing yourself after all.  You are allowing Jesus to be through you what you cannot accomplish on your own.  Sure you have talent and skills but you also have a beautiful spirit that calls upon Jesus to make this presentation through you.  God’s greatest display of strength is in your weakness.  Now you are ready to present Jesus Christ back to Him with the speech, musical number or memory verse He gave to you.  All the rehearsals were between you and Jesus and so is the presentation.

2 Timothy 1:7 Living Bible

For the Holy Spirit, God’s gift, does not want you to be afraid of people, but to be wise and strong, and to love them and enjoy being with them.