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

by Mark Batterson

God couldn’t care less about protocol. If He did, Jesus would have chosen the Pharisees as His disciples. But that isn’t who Jesus honored. Jesus honored the prostitute who crashed a party at a Pharisee’s home to anoint His feet. Jesus honored the tax collector who climbed a tree in his three-piece suit just to get a glimpse of Jesus. Jesus honored the four friends who cut in line and cut a hole in someone’s ceiling to help their friend. And in this parable, Jesus honored the woman who drove a judge crazy because she wouldn’t stop knocking.

The common denominator in each of these stories is holy desperation. People took desperate measures to get to God, and God honored them for it. Nothing has changed. God is still honoring spiritual desperadoes who crash parties and climb trees. God is still honoring those who defy protocol with their bold prayers. God is still honoring those who pray with audacity and tenacity. And the persistent widow is selected as the gold standard when it comes to praying hard. Her unrelenting persistence was the only difference between justice and injustice.

The viability of our prayers has more to do with intensity than vocabulary.

That is modeled by the Holy Spirit Himself, who has been intensely and unceasingly interceding for you your entire life. Psalm 32:7 is a must-circle promise. I like the King James Version: “Thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.” Long before you woke up this morning and long after you go to sleep tonight, the Spirit of God was circling you with songs of deliverance. He has been circling you since the day you were conceived, and He’ll circle you until the day you die. He is praying hard for you with ultrasonic groans that cannot be formulated into words, and those unutterable intercessions should fill you with an unspeakable confidence.

God isn’t just for you in some passive sense; God is for you in the most active sense imaginable. The Holy Spirit is praying hard for you. And supernatural synchronicities begin to ...

While there is no denying that innate ability dictates some of your upside potential, your potential is only tapped via persistent effort. Persistence is the magic bullet, and the magic number seems to be ten thousand.

Is prayer any different? It is a habit to be cultivated. It is a discipline to be developed. It is a skill to be practiced. And while I don’t want to reduce praying hard to time logged, if you want to achieve mastery, it might take ten thousand hours. This I know for sure: the bigger the dream the harder you will have to pray.

We allow our circumstances to get between God and us instead of putting God between us and our circumstances.

Is there some dream that God wants to resurrect? Is there some promise you need to reclaim? Is there some miracle you need to start believing for again? The reason many of us give up too soon is that we feel like we have failed if God doesn’t answer our prayer. That isn’t failure. The only way you can fail is if you stop praying. Prayer is a no-lose proposition.

Jesus promises blessing if we are not offended when He does things for others.

I don’t know why God does what He does. I do know that 100 percent of the prayers I don’t pray won’t get answered.”

It’s the circle maker’s mantra: 100 percent of the prayers I don’t pr...

“Never put a comma where God puts a period, and never put a period where God puts a comma.”

Even when it seems like God is four days late, it’s too soon to give up.

Even when it seems like your dream is dead and buried, it’s too soon to put a period there.

There are two degrees of faith in the two statements that Martha makes. The first statement is first-degree faith: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” First-degree faith is preventative faith. Like the prayer of Martha, who believed that Jesus could have kept her brother from dying, first-degree prayers take preventative measures. We ask God to keep bad things from happening. So we pray for safety as we travel, or we pray a hedge of protection around our children. And there is nothing wrong with that, but there is another dimension of faith that believes that God can undo what has already been done. Second-degree faith is resurrection faith. It’s a faith that refuses to put periods at the end of disappointments. It’s a faith that believes that God can reverse the irreversible. It’s a faith that believes it’s not over until God says it’s over. And it’s epitomized by Martha’s “even now” profession of faith: “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

It’s hard times that teach us to pray hard.

When you know you are praying the promises of God, you can pray with holy confidence. It’s the difference between praying on thin ice and praying on solid ground. It’s the difference between praying tentatively and praying tenaciously. You don’t have to second-guess yourself because you know that God wants you to double-click on His promises.

You’ve heard the adage: “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” Here’s a fresh take on that old truth: God said it, I’ve circled it, and that settles it.

It was settled on the cross when Jesus said, “It is finished.” It wasn’t just the final installment on our sin debt; it was the down payment on all of His promises.

“No matter how many promises God has made, they are ...

By the most conservative estimates, there are more than three thousand promises in Scripture. By virtue of what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross, every one of them belongs to you. Every one of them has your name on it. The question is: How many of them have you circled?

The promises of God are like that tree island in the middle of the lake. They are the difference between sinking and swimming because they give you a place to stand.

We often view prayer and Scripture reading as two distinct spiritual disciplines without much overlap, but what if they were meant to be hyperlinked? What if reading became a form of praying and praying became a form of reading?

One of the primary reasons we don’t pray through is because we run out of things to say. Our lack of persistence is really a lack of conversation pieces.

Pray through the Bible. Prayer was never meant to be a monologue; it was meant to be a dialogue. Think of Scripture as God’s part of the script; prayer is our part. Scripture is God’s way of initiating a conversation; prayer is our response. The paradigm shift happens when you realize that the Bible wasn’t meant to be read through; the Bible was meant to be prayed through. And if you pray through it, you’ll never run out of things to talk about.

The Bible is a promise book and a prayer book. And while reading is reactive, prayer is proactive.

Reading is the way you get through the Bible; prayer is the way you get ...

As you pray, the Holy Spirit will quicken certain promis...

It’s very difficult to predict what and when and where and how, but over time, the promises of Go...

Do you have a favorite place to pray? A place where you get better reception? A place where your mind is more focused? A place where you have more faith? I love praying on top of the coffeehouse because I feel like I’m praying on top of a miracle. It’s hard not to pray with faith when you’re praying in a place where God has already done a miracle.

God’s answer to Elijah gave him the faith he needed to pray hard. And that is one of the by-products of answered prayer. It gives us the faith to believe God for bigger and better miracles. With each answered prayer, we draw bigger prayer circles. With each act of faithfulness, our faith increases. With each promise kept, our persistence quotient grows.

My only explanation is that we circled Matthew 18:18. Our prayers were hyperlinked to that promise, and we double-clicked it by praying hard. “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” The word bind means “to place a contract on something.” This is precisely what happens when you pray. When you pray for something in the earthly realm, God puts a contract on it in the heavenly realm if you are praying in accordance with the will of God. So while February 7, 2002, is the date we signed the physical contract, the spiritual contract predates it by several years. The deal dates back to the first prayer circle we drew around it.

It’s interesting to note that after cooler heads prevailed, and Honi was honored for his prayer that saved a generation, the Sanhedrin sent him a missive citing Job 22:28: “Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee.” They recognized the binding power of Honi’s prayer: “You have decreed [on earth] below and the Holy One … fulfills your word [in heaven] above.” This language is very similar to the promise Jesus made in Matthew 18:18. There is a strong likelihood that Jesus was familiar with the legend of the circle maker because of its historical proximity. Who knows, maybe He had Honi in mind when He made this promise.

The Bible tells us that the Lord is watching over His word to perform it.

There is nothing God loves more than keeping His promises. He is actively watching and waiting for us to simply take Him at His word. He is watching over Matthew 18:18. He is watching over Isaiah 59:21. He is watching over Luke 7:23. He is watching over each and every promise, and if that doesn’t fill you with holy confidence, nothing will.

Praying hard is standing on the promises of God. And when we stand on His word, God stands by His...

We sometimes pray as if God doesn’t want to keep His promises. You have no idea how badly God wants to keep His promise! That’s why H...

There is nothing God wants to do more than prove His power by keeping His promises.

We don’t ask God to extend His hand because we don’t know His heart. Psalm 84:11 captures the heart of the heavenly Father: No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly. God is not holding out or holding back. It’s not in His nature to withhold any good thing from us. He most certainly won’t bless disobedience, but He most certainly will bless obedience. If you take God at His word, you’ll make the joyful discovery that 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.

but this is the heart of our heavenly Father. He can hardly wait to keep His promises. He can hardly wait to perform His word. He can hardly wait to answer our prayers. And when we simply take Him at His word, He can hardly contain His joy.

My favorite sentence in the twenty-third psalm is this: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.” The word follow isn’t a strong enough translation. It’s a hunting term in Hebrew. It’s like God is hunting you down — but not to harm you; 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.

If you asked me what I pray for more than anything else, the answer is the favor of God.

While it’s tough to describe or define, I think the favor of God is what God does for you that you cannot do for yourself.

Almost every night, I circle my kids with this simple prayer: “Lord, let them grow in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” I realize that Luke 2:52 isn’t technically a promise, but I think I’m on sound theological ground. Luke 2:52 is a time-lapse description of Jesus’ development as a child, and we’re called to be just like Jesus, so why wouldn’t I circle it? Why shouldn’t I turn it into a blessing and pray it around my children?

He is watching and waiting for opportunities to favor His children.

So we circle Scripture by praying it. Then Scripture encircles us.

The longer I live the more I crave the favor of God. The greatest moments in life are the moments when God intervenes on our behalf and blesses us way beyond what we expect or deserve. It’s a humble reminder of His sovereignty. And these favor moments become our favorite memories.

Every verse on favor is circled in my Bible, but my personal favorite is one of the blessings that Moses pronounced over Joseph: May the LORD bless his land with the precious dew from heaven above and with the deep waters that lie below; with the best the sun brings forth and the finest the moon can yield; with the choicest gifts of the ancient mountains and the fruitfulness of the everlasting hills; with the best gifts of the earth and its fullness and the favor of him who dwelt in the burning bush. Did you catch “the favor” in the last phrase? God’s favor is multidimensional, but this may rank as my favorite kind: “the favor of him who dwelt in the burning bush.” And I love the fact that this blessing is pronounced by Moses himself. He knew whereof he spoke because he is the one who heard the Voice in the bush.

The hard thing about praying hard is letting God do the heavy lifting. You have to trust the favor of God to do for you what you cannot do for yourself. You have to trust God to change hearts, even the heart of Pharaoh.