The Circle Maker (Enhanced Edition): Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

So why does Jesus do it this way? He could have provided the four-drachma coin in a more conventional manner, but He tells Peter to go fish for it. I think there are a few reasons. First of all, God loves doing different miracles in different ways because it reveals different dimensions of His power and personality. But I wonder if the biggest reason is that Jesus wanted to see if Peter would trust Him in the realm where Peter had the greatest professional proficiency and self-sufficiency. As a professional fisherman, fishing was the one area where Peter would have been most tempted to think he didn’t need Jesus. He thought he knew every trick of the fishing trade, but Jesus wanted to show him a new trick. We’ll call it “the coin in the mouth of the fish” trick. We know how the story ends. Peter catches a fish and cashes in a smelly coin. But if you’ve caught hundreds of thousands of fish, none of which has ever had a coin in its mouth, how do you have the faith to believe that the next one will have a four-drachma coin? It seems impossible, doesn’t it? But there is only one way to find out if God will keep His promise: Obey the crazy prompting.