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March 31 - April 12, 2013
I felt underqualified and overwhelmed, but that is when God has you right where He wants you. That is how you learn to live in raw dependence — and raw dependence is the raw material out of which God performs His greatest miracles.
Raw material God performs His greatest miracles
The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.
Greatest tragedy in life
Now here’s the problem: Most of us don’t get what we want simply because we don’t know what we want. We’ve never circled any of God’s promises. We’ve never written down a list of life goals. We’ve never defined success for ourselves. And our dreams are as nebulous as cumulus clouds. Instead of drawing circles, we draw blanks.
Our problem
So while God is for us, most of us have no idea what we want God to do for us. And that’s why our prayers aren’t just boring to us; they are uninspiring to God.
If faith is being sure of what we hope for, then being unsure of what we hope for is the antithesis of faith, isn’t it?
Don’t just read the Bible. Start circling the promises. Don’t just make a wish. Write down a list of God-glorifying life goals. Don’t just pray. Keep a prayer journal.
If our prayers aren’t specific, however, God gets robbed of the glory that He deserves because we second-guess whether or not He actually answered them.
If you don’t have a personal definition of success, chances are you will succeed at the wrong thing. You’ll get to the end of your life and realize that you spelled success wrong. And if you spell it wrong, you’ll get it wrong.
Drawing prayer circles often feels foolish. And the bigger the circle you draw the more foolish you’ll feel. But if you aren’t willing to step out of the boat, you’ll never walk on water. If you aren’t willing to circle the city, the wall will never fall.
I learned that if you aren’t willing to put yourself in “this is crazy” situations, you’ll never experience “this is awesome” moments. If you aren’t willing to run off the cliff, you’ll never fly.
Having vision beyond your resources is synonymous with dreaming big. And it may feel like you’re setting yourself up for failure, but you’re actually setting God up for a miracle. How God performs the miracle is His job. Your job is drawing a circle around the God-given dream. And if you do your job, you might just find yourself standing waist-deep in three feet of quail.
It’s not our man-made plans that move the Almighty; the Almighty is moved by big dreams and bold prayers.
This is what we often try to do, isn’t it? When God doesn’t answer our prayer right away, we try to answer it for Him. Like the day Moses took matters into his own hands and killed an Egyptian taskmaster, we get ahead of God. But when we try to do God’s job for Him, it always backfires. Trying to get ahead of God cost Moses forty years. Of course, even then, God redeemed the forty years Moses spent as a fugitive tending sheep by prepping him to tend His sheep, the people of Israel. If we repent, God always recycles our mistakes.
no doesn’t always mean no; sometimes no means not yet. We’re too quick to give up on God when He doesn’t answer our prayers when we want or how we want. Maybe your deadline doesn’t fit God’s timeline. Maybe no simply means not yet. Maybe it’s a divine delay.
I have come to expect the unexpected because God is predictably unpredictable.
If you want God to surprise you, you have to give up control. You will lose a measure of predictability, but you will begin to see God move in uncontrollable ways!
When you live in prayer mode, you live with holy anticipation. You know that coincidences are providences.
If you’ve never had a God-sized dream that scared you half to death, then you haven’t really come to life.
If you’ve never been overwhelmed by the impossibility of your plans, then your God is too small.
If your vision isn’t perplexingly impossible, then you need to expand the radiuse...
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If you want to keep growing spiritually, you need to keep stretching. How? By going after dreams that are bigger than you are.
God wants to bless you far more than you want to be blessed. And His capacity to give is far greater than your capacity to receive.
God is hunting you down to bless you. He wants to show you His goodness and His mercy, but too often we run away from it. Why? Because we doubt His good intentions. We can’t believe that God is for us. This is why God reminds us so many different times in many different ways and with many different words.
It may seem like God is nowhere to be seen, but maybe God is setting the stage for a miracle. This I know for sure: God is always stage right. He’s ready to make His grand entrance. All He is waiting for is your prayer cue.
God will keep putting you in situations that stretch your faith, and as your faith stretches, so do your dreams. If you pass the test, you graduate to bigger and bigger dreams. And it won’t get easier; it’ll get harder. It won’t get less complicated; it’ll get more complicated.
But it’s often our unwillingness to take a step of faith and get our feet wet that keeps us from experiencing a miracle.
We’re waiting for God to make a move while God is waiting for us to make a move. We say to God, “Why don’t you part this river?” And God says to us, “Why don’t you get your feet wet?” But if you make a move, you’ll see God move. And He can move heaven and earth.
Have you ever had a moment, as Lisa did, when the Holy Spirit prompted you during prayer to do something that seemed borderline crazy? Have you ever had a moment, as Peter did, when God called you to do something that seemed unsafe? Your response to those promptings will make you or break you. It may seem unsafe or insane, but if you stay in the boat, you’ll never walk on water.
Sometimes you have to get out of your routine so God can speak to you in a nonroutine ways.
Just as our greatest successes often come on the heels of our greatest failures, our greatest answers often come on the heels of our longest and most boring prayers.
Drawing a prayer circle is one way of marking territory — God’s territory.
Just like the sound barrier, there is a faith barrier. And breaking the faith barrier in the spiritual realm is much like breaking the sound barrier in the physical realm. If you want to experience a supernatural breakthrough, you have to pray through. But as you get closer to the breakthrough, it often feels like you’re about to lose control, about to fall apart. That is when you need to press in and pray through.
