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God is not a genie in a bottle, and your wish is not His command. His command better be your wish. If it’s not, you won’t be drawing prayer circles; you’ll end up walking in circles.
Drawing prayer circles starts with discerning what God wants, what God wills. And until His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish, your prayer life will be unplugged from its power supply.
The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.
We pray out of our ignorance, but God answers out of His omniscience. We pray out of our impotence, but God answers out of His omnipotence. God has the ability to answer the prayers we should have prayed but lacked the knowledge or ability to even ask.
“What do you want me to do for you?” Seriously? Is that question even necessary? Isn’t it obvious what they want? They’re blind. Yet Jesus forced them to define exactly what they wanted from Him. Jesus made them verbalize their desire. He made them spell it out, but it wasn’t because Jesus didn’t know what they wanted; He wanted to make sure they knew what they wanted. And that is where drawing prayer circles begins: knowing what to circle.
Well-developed faith results in well-defined prayers, and well-defined prayers result in a well-lived life.
Like the two blind men outside Jericho, you need an encounter with the Son of God. You need an answer to the question He is still asking: What do you want me to do for you?
it’s spelled healing. If your child is far from God, it’s spelled salvation.
If you have a vision beyond your resources, it’s spelled provision.
dollar figure that will get you out of debt. And sometimes Jericho has the same spelling as someone’s name. For me, Jericho has three different spellings: Parker, Summer, and Josiah.
When you spell out your prayers with specificity, it will eventually spell God’s glory.
We talk about “doing” the will of God, but the will of God has much more to do with “being” than “doing.” It’s not about being in the right place at the right time; it’s about being the right person, even if you find yourself in the wrong circumstances.
You need to circle the goals God wants you to go after, the promises God wants you to claim, and the dreams God wants you to pursue. And once you spell Jericho, you need to circle it in prayer. Then you need to keep circling until the walls come tumbling down.
That is precisely what prayer does. It helps you get outside the problem. It helps you circle the miracle. It helps you see all the way around the situation.
If you can, go someplace that inspires you. A change in scenery often translates into a change of perspective. A change in routine often results in revelation. In formulaic terms, change of pace + change of place = change of perspective.
But there are also situations where you need to grab hold of the horns of the altar and refuse to let go until God answers. Like Honi, you refuse to move from the circle until God moves. You intercede until God intervenes.
Praying through is all about consistency.
Circle makers know that it’s always too soon to quit praying because you never know when the wall is about to fall.
Praying through is all about intensity. It’s not quantitative; it’s qualitative. Drawing prayer circles involves more than words; it’s gut-wrenching groans and heartbreaking tears. Praying through doesn’t just bend God’s ear; it touches the heart of your heavenly Father.
God had already given them the city. All they had to do was circle it.
Imagination is the road less taken, but it is the pathway of prayer. Prayer and imagination are directly proportional: the more you pray the bigger your imagination becomes because the Holy Spirit supersizes it with God-sized dreams.
I have a big imagination. I just don't have the strength to carry out my dreams.
If you keep praying, you’ll keep dreaming, and conversely, if you keep dreaming, you’ll keep praying. Dreaming is a form of praying, and praying is a form of dreaming. The more you pray the bigger your dreams will become. And the bigger your dreams become the more you will have to pray. In that process of drawing ever-enlarging prayer circles, the sphere of God’s glory is expanded.
The day we stop dreaming is the day we start dying.
When imagination is sacrificed on the altar of logic, God is robbed of the glory that ...
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Nothing honors God more than a big dream that is way beyond our ability to accomplish. Why? Because there is no way we can take credit for it. And nothing is better for our spiritual development than a big dream because it keeps us on our knees in raw dependence on God.
I am dreaming! I haven't lost my dream! there is hope for me!
And if you aren’t willing to follow the star, you’ll miss out on the greatest adventure of your life.
Circle makers are risk takers.
Moses had learned this lesson well: If you don’t take the risk, you forfeit the miracle.
Do you recall what Jesus did right before the miracle? It says Jesus “gave thanks.” He didn’t wait until after the miracle; He thanked God for the miracle before the miracle happened.
I need to Start doing this over my student loans and believe for miracles!!!!!
We can’t figure out how to do what God has called us to do, so we don’t do it at all.
The greatest risk is failing to circle the promises of God because we forfeit the miracles God wants to perform.
I have no idea what your financial situation is, but I do know this. If you give beyond your ability, God will bless you beyond your ability. God wants to bless you thirty-, sixty-, hundredfold. And if you are willing to subtract what you are spending on yourself and add it to what you are investing in the kingdom, God will do the multiplication. If you believe that, you’ll circle the promises of God and reap the reward. If you don’t, you won’t.
Of course, I threw in the obligatory “if it be Your will” at the end. That tagline may sound spiritual, but it was less a submission to God’s will and more a profession of doubt. If you aren’t careful, the will of God can become a cop-out
this is exactly what I do
If you’re a doctor, pray circles around your patients and ask God to give you X-ray insight.
If you’re an entrepreneur, pray circles around your product.
vision beyond your resources,
God gives you a vision because you trust that the One who gave you the vision is going to make provision. And for the record, if the vision is from God, it will most definitely be beyond your means.
the Almighty is moved by big dreams and bold prayers.
shouldn’t seek answers as much as we should
By resisting the temptation to manufacture your own answer to your own prayer.
“Lord, do something unpredictable and uncontrollable.”
Are your problems bigger than God, or is God bigger than your problems? Our biggest problem is our small view of God.
Until you come to the conviction that God’s grace and power know no limits, you will draw small prayer circles. Once you embrace the omnipotence of God, you’ll draw ever-enlarging circles around your God-given, God-sized dreams.
God is able. I don’t always know if He will, but I always know that He can.
By definition, a big dream is a dream that is bigger than you. In other words, it’s beyond your human ability to accomplish. And this means there will be moments when you doubt yourself. That’s normal. But that’s when you need to remind yourself that your dream isn’t bigger than God; God is 15.5 billion light-years bigger than your dream.
Yes!!
The question is this: Are you called to write? That’s the only question you need to answer. And if the answer is yes, then you need to write the book as an act of obedience. It doesn’t matter whether anyone reads it or not.
parable of the persistent widow is one of the most pixilated pictures of prayer in Scripture. It shows us what praying hard looks like: knocking until your knuckles are raw, crying out until your voice is lost, pleading until your tears run dry. Praying hard is praying through. And if you pray through, God will come through. But it will be God’s will, God’s way. The phrase used to describe the widow’s
The viability of our prayers is not contingent on scrabbling the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet into the right combinations like abracadabra. God already knows the last punctuation mark before we pronounce the first syllable. 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.
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
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It doesn’t matter whether it’s athletics or academics, music or math. There are no shortcuts. There are no substitutes. Success is a derivative of persistence.
