Kevin Williams [00:00:01]:
Well, thank you. I am so glad to be with you today. I’m such a big fan of David and Conia Wright. They are dear friends, first of all, and I love what they are doing with Emerge International Church. Love the purpose and the mission of that church, and the pastors are dedicated instruments of God. I love how God is using them, how they love the Lord and how they love people. We’ve grown to love them over the last 6, 7 years. And, and so I’m delighted to be with you today.
Kevin Williams [00:00:31]:
I’m coming to you from my guitar studio. I’m a guitarist professionally, and whether I play like it or not, and this is where God often meets me and new ideas, new melodies, new songs come out of this little room right here. Recently I delivered this talk at a conference we had in Franklin, Tennessee. And David said, you got to do this for the Emerge audience. So this is only the second time I’ve done this, and I hope you get out of this what’s intended. This is literally where I’m living right now and what God is overflowing in my heart. It’s called Frozen No More. Now, if you’re anywhere near Tennessee, you know what happened on a Saturday in January, January 24th.
Kevin Williams [00:01:24]:
We got about 2 or 3 inches of snow, which is Nothing new for here. We don’t get a lot of snow through the wintertime. We love to see it when it comes. My wife Kathy had gone out, she bought about 5 days’ worth of groceries because we heard there was supposed to be bad weather moving in, you know. And so that’s what you do in Middle Tennessee. You go, first of all, you get all the milk and all the bread that they have at the grocery store, and you just stockpile it up, you know. Well, the conditions started to change late that Saturday and into the early hours of Sunday morning, January 25th. We had freezing rain and an ice storm that moved in, which we are not prepared for here in Middle Tennessee.
Kevin Williams [00:02:04]:
It left thousands literally without power, without heat. There were no safe travel conditions at that time. Winter Storm Fern left trees and power lines wrapped up inside about a half-inch layer of ice, or a little more in some areas. Icy roads, downed power lines, extended power outages impacted over 200,000 households, if you can believe that, along with businesses across the city. There were thousands of people who, who didn’t have power for 2 weeks or even more in a lot of places. Now, we never lost power here at our house, praise the Lord. Our youngest daughter lives about 15-20 minutes from here, more in the downtown area of Nashville. She lost power for 2 days.
Kevin Williams [00:02:52]:
Had a water pipe that burst and all the problems that go along with that. So she brought her dog and stayed with us for 2 days, and we just enjoyed that. But it was really strange. All the traffic lights on West End in downtown Nashville had stopped working because the trees were down, power lines were down, everything was happening. I walk our little dog through the neighborhood here a couple of times a day, and you could see all the damage that we had. Caused by just a half inch of ice on everything. Trees everywhere around our neighborhood were split and uprooted, some of them totally destroyed, and it was hard to walk around here. And as we did walk, I prayed for our neighborhood as I do every day, and God was speaking to my heart as he showed me this.
Kevin Williams [00:03:46]:
Hey, let me do that one more time. And as we walked, I prayed for our neighborhood as I do every day, and as I did, God was speaking to my heart, and he showed me this. Can you tell what that is? It’s a very small leaf. It’s about 2.5 inches, totally encased in ice. It’s inside an ice cocoon. And inside that ice cocoon is a beautiful green leaf, vibrant, full of life and potential. It’s a leaf that’s ready to be what God made it to be, and yet it is frozen in a shell. Now, this is the way that God usually speaks to me.
Kevin Williams [00:04:32]:
You got to get into this hard head of mine, you know, and so he’ll use something visual like this, or sometimes I feel him speaking directly to me, but I began to look at this and I started asking, the Lord these questions. What am I supposed to learn here? First of all, what’s significant about this? And I was just drawn to it, and I couldn’t get away from it. The answer that came is, well, this is you. Well, this produced more questions. You know, what do you mean it’s me? First of all, I’m not frozen in ice. I am alive and I’m creative and I’m productive and I’ve got stuff going on in my life. So what could the ice possibly be in my life? What is the ice in my life? And as I began to listen to the Creator for the answers, he reminded me of how I’ve been feeling for the last 6 or 8 months. I kind of felt like I was spinning my wheels like I was swimming round and round in the same little swimming pool where I’d been for some time now, and, and like my new chapter was just on the horizon but not quite here.
Kevin Williams [00:05:55]:
Well, God began to show me the ice in my life, and it was a number of limiting beliefs that had embedded themselves into the operating system of my life. Have you ever confronted the limiting beliefs in your life? Limiting beliefs are deeply held, often unconscious, negative convictions or assumptions about yourself, others, or the world. They feel like absolute truths, but they actually restrict your potential. Now let me show you how this works, okay? Whenever God speaks something into you, an idea for a business or a dream for a better life, picture of a vacation he wants you to take, or a spark of how you are going to change the world or change your life, and you say it doesn’t make sense, you say it’s not logical, It’ll never work. It’s not prudent. It’s not safe. Too risky. It’s not the way I do things.
Kevin Williams [00:07:11]:
I don’t think it’s the right time. Maybe you say, ah, that’s not God. I’ll wait on God. There’s a good one. I don’t have enough money to pull this off. I don’t know how to do it, right? We do that a lot of times. I don’t know the right people. I’m not smart enough.
Kevin Williams [00:07:32]:
I’m not the right person for this. Nobody’s going to buy this idea. Everybody’s going to think I’m crazy when I say whatever. What if I fail? I’ll be embarrassed. Well, what I’ve discovered is this: these limiting beliefs are all masks for one thing, and it’s the biggest enemy of your success, and that is fear. Fear masquerades as all of these limiting beliefs that thwart our ultimate potential. Some of these beliefs are ones that you’ve acquired through your life, and some of them were just handed to you when you were young. Regardless of how it happened, this is the truth.
Kevin Williams [00:08:20]:
Fear is the greatest single obstacle to your success. It limits you and your creativity in every way. Les Brown said, “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we’re living our fears.” Fear will have you shrinking back instead of stepping forward. You, you trade power for comfort. You, you give up growth for safety. You stall out. You, you suffocate. You stand still, not because you’re weak, but because fear has convinced you that you’re weak.
Kevin Williams [00:09:02]:
You feel fear when you’re about to do something unfamiliar, something risky, something that threatens your comfort or control. We play it safe. ‘Cause safe feels good. But a ship in harbor is safe. That’s not what ships are built for. See, these fears have names, and when we label them, well, they become easier to recognize in our lives, and they’re much easier to defeat and eradicate at that point. All of these limiting beliefs are just the fruit of our fears. What about the fear of inadequacy? I don’t know enough.
Kevin Williams [00:09:46]:
I don’t have enough. I’m just not enough. There’s a fear of uncertainty. I don’t know how it’s going to happen. It’s just not logical. It doesn’t make sense. I’ll just wait. Fear of failure.
Kevin Williams [00:10:03]:
What if I fall on my face? What if I just can’t pull it off? All this time and effort, just, it’ll be in vain. And what about my reputation? I’ll just, I’ll just wait. Well, the fact is you can’t fail. You can only learn. There’s no such thing as failure. God says, fear not, for I am with you. Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you.
Kevin Williams [00:10:33]:
Yes, I will help you. I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. That’s a promise you can hold on to every day of your life. What about the fear of public opinion? Yeah, I’ve dealt with this one. What do they think about me when I prove to them that I’m not enough? They’ll say, I told you so, right? What about the fear of rejection? Nobody will like me when I fail. They’ll They’ll avoid me because they’ll know I’m crazy, right? This fear of rejection thing goes way back to primitive times when you were scared of being kicked out of the tribe, you know. There’s a fear of change. I’ve never done it that way.
Kevin Williams [00:11:17]:
That’s kind of scary to me. I’m just going to wait. There’s a fear— oh boy, this one hits home— there’s a fear of losing control. What if this thing takes off, right? I mean, I might be able to get it going, but then what? I mean, I don’t know if I could keep it going. I’m just gonna wait. What about the fear of criticism? Man, this one robs us of our initiative and destroys our power of imagination. It limits our individuality, takes away our self-reliance. It does damage in probably 100 other ways, ways, all because deep down we’re scared of someone criticizing our plan or our methods.
Kevin Williams [00:12:09]:
Here’s the good news: the fear of man brings a snare—that’s a trap—but whoever trusts in the Lord shall be safe. You ever had the fear of something bad happening? You know, and you say, I don’t want to rock the boat here. Things are pretty good right now. Don’t want to mess this up. You know, sometimes we have a fear of getting hurt. That’s a biggie. It’s so uncertain, you know, I’m just sure to get hurt in this deal somehow. I’m just going to back off.
Kevin Williams [00:12:42]:
A fear of loss or a fear of going broke. I might lose everything in this. What about a fear of making a mistake? Any perfectionists out there? That’s when you say, “I’ll just wait till I know how to do every part of this before I start,” and you analyze it to death. Oh, Zig Ziglar, gosh, what an influence he was on me. He said, “If you wait till all the lights are green before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.” Some of us have a fear of just plain old embarrassment. This kind of fear leads to total paralysis of ideas and action. I mean, at the very least, it leads to procrastination, and that leads to more doubt and fear and totally short-circuits our creativity. Gives us a plethora of reasons why we shouldn’t and why we can’t and why we won’t.
Kevin Williams [00:13:44]:
These are the fears that keep us from everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Will Smith said this, he said, “The best things in life are just on the other side of fear. Your goals, dreams, and desires are only beyond your fear.” The thing that keeps us stuck or frozen in that cocoon of ice is that we don’t see these things in our own life. We’re pretty blind to these things. We don’t even know we have these limiting beliefs, much less the fear that is underneath them. And these beliefs are camouflaged. I mean, we hold them firm, you know. The way we think of it is it’s just habit, uh, to us.
Kevin Williams [00:14:33]:
And our whole paradigm, the way we think is just sort of the way we think. We believe it because we believe it. We never question it. Now I’m going to let you in on a revelation that I got as God began to teach me through this little bitty leaf wrapped in ice. And the secret is this: fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind. I’m going to say it again: fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in your mind. It’s only there because you’ve said yes to it somewhere down the line. I have too.
Kevin Williams [00:15:09]:
I know the feeling. And whether you knew it or not, just like you said yes to it, you can say no to it. God didn’t give us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and self-control. And here’s the truth that most never hear. Fear itself isn’t what stops you. Inaction is. The real enemy isn’t the fear you feel. It’s the pause you take because of it.
Kevin Williams [00:15:44]:
It’s the opportunity that you don’t chase. The silence that you choose instead of speaking up. It’s the dream that you shelve for some other time. W. Clement Stone said, “Thinking will not overcome fear, but action will.” This is radical. This is proof that we are trusting God to deliver and turn loaves and fishes into a feast. That’s how we lay it on the line. That is how we wipe out our fear and melt the ice.
Kevin Williams [00:16:23]:
In our lives. Most people are waiting for that fear to disappear before they ever take action. They’re waiting to feel brave. They’re waiting to feel certain, but that moment never comes. You know that as well as I do. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the action taken in spite of it. If you’re waiting to feel ready, you’re going to be waiting all your life.
Kevin Williams [00:16:51]:
The ones who are out there moving mountains and changing industries and making history, guess what? They feel fear too, but they walk forward anyway. That’s the shift. That’s the edge. You don’t need to be fearless. You just need to stop obeying fear like it’s a command. Stop giving it authority it never earned. The only one that has authority in your life is Christ. Fear can sit in the passenger seat with you, but it does not get to touch the wheel anymore.
Kevin Williams [00:17:28]:
And this is where it gets powerful: the more you move through fear, the smaller it becomes. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live, and before they know it, time just runs out. You don’t need less fear, you just need more movement. Trust it to God. My favorite scripture, Proverbs 3:5-6: Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Don’t lean to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he’ll direct your path.
Kevin Williams [00:18:14]:
He’ll make that path straight for you. Trust. Don’t overanalyze. Don’t overthink. Don’t negotiate. Just move, because fear hates momentum. And the moment you act, fear begins to die. Something I’ve learned is fear is a master storyteller.
Kevin Williams [00:18:37]:
Fear crafts lies so believable and so emotionally convincing that they feel like truth. But here’s the brutal fact: fear is a liar, and the most dangerous lies it tells are about you. These lies are told to you about you. Fear whispers that you’re not ready, that you’re not smart enough, you’re not talented enough, you’re not worthy enough. If you try, you’ll fail, and if you speak, they’ll laugh. If you chase that dream, you’ll just crash and burn. And because fear wears the voice of your own mind, it’s our own voice, we start to believe it, and we accept it as reality, and we never realize it’s just a story. It’s a story that’s been repeated so many times that it became familiar to us.
Kevin Williams [00:19:40]:
It’s not true, it’s just familiar. Fear thrives in imagination. Takes a moment of uncertainty and it builds an entire movie around it. So you don’t just worry about a difficult conversation, you see it going horribly wrong in your mind. And you don’t just hesitate to try something new, you see yourself failing miserably and permanently. You don’t just fear the rejection, you imagine beyond it. You imagine the humiliation and abandonment and this proof that you never had what it takes in the first place. That’s how fear wins.
Kevin Williams [00:20:24]:
Not with truth, but with repetition. The more you rehearse that worst-case scenario in your mind, the more you begin to feel your breathing kind of get shallow, you know, that feeling, and your heart starts racing, and suddenly you’re not living in the present. You’re imprisoned in a future that hasn’t even happened. But here is the breakthrough. If fear is built by repetition, so is confidence. If fear is a story, you can tell a better one. One where you speak and you’re heard. One where you leap and you land.
Kevin Williams [00:21:12]:
One where you fail and you rise anyway. If you can visualize defeat, brother and sister, you can visualize victory. If you can rehearse disaster, you can rehearse domination. This, this is the battlefield right here. It’s not out there, it’s in here. Fear doesn’t start out there somewhere, it starts in our thoughts and in the silent, invisible stories that we repeat to ourselves. Stories of inadequacy, stories of danger, things that might go wrong, stories that just play on a loop, and it’s shaping our reality without us even realizing it. But here’s the truth: I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Kevin Williams [00:21:58]:
Amen. I’m not here to be ruled by fear, and neither are you. You’re here to reclaim your mind, to take back the pen and write a new script. Fear doesn’t just steal your moments, You see, fear, my friend, steals your legacy. It convinces you to shrink, play it safe, sit down when you were built to stand tall. And here’s the question: what if you really knew the cost? What if you could see the future that fear is quietly robbing you of. Because that’s the, that’s the thing that most people don’t realize. They’re choosing fear.
Kevin Williams [00:22:52]:
They’re choosing fear. I mean, they think they’re choosing comfort. They think they’re choosing safety or familiarity. What they’re really doing is just burying their greatness under excuses. They’re trading impact for ease, trading legacy for security. Ray Bradbury said, “You gotta jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.” I love that quote. And you can do this. Our Heavenly Father is waiting to deliver us from all our fears.
Kevin Williams [00:23:37]:
and it starts with us recognizing them and giving them to him. And then we choose to move forward. We choose to act confidently and move through the fear and watch it dissipate like that ice melted in Nashville. Don’t choose to stay in the ice. Don’t be like this guy. Don’t let the music die in you. Fear only has power when I obey it. And the moment I challenge it, it shrinks.
Kevin Williams [00:24:08]:
The moment I push through, it dies. Now, my friend, now is the time to release the warrior that God built you to be. I believe in you, and I believe God is faithful to us all the time. You are capable. You can do this. And throughout this week, I want you to examine your life, okay? I want you to look for these limiting beliefs. It’ll take some examination. Find where you are frozen.
Kevin Williams [00:24:41]:
Dig down to that fear underneath. I want you to label it. I want you to declare that you will no longer bow to these fears and give them to God. He’s capable to take them, okay? But you gotta give them, and you gotta know what they are, and then move confidently in spite of what you feel. I want you to watch how God proves that he is faithful when you do this. And from this day forward, my friend, you are frozen no more. Say that with me: frozen no more. God bless you.
Kevin Williams [00:25:21]:
I have been honored to be your guest today, and I hope to get to do this again. And I can’t wait to see where the ice in your life melts and freedom begins. God bless you.
