Draw the Circle: The 40 Day Prayer Challenge

by Mark Batterson

If you press into God’s presence like never before, you will experience God like never before.

There is nothing magical about forty days, but there is something biblical about it.

Go home. Lock yourself in your room. Kneel down in the middle of the floor, and with a piece of chalk draw a circle around yourself. There, on your knees, pray fervently and brokenly that God would start a revival within that chalk circle.

the goal of the forty-day prayer challenge isn’t to get what you want by day 40. In fact, the goal isn’t to get what you want at all. The goal is to figure out what God wants, what God wills. Then you start circling it in prayer and don’t stop until God answers.

Too often we pray ASAP prayers — as soon as possible. We need to start praying ALAT prayers — as long as it takes. The goal of the prayer challenge is to establish a prayer habit so you’re still praying on day 41, day 57, day 101, day 365.

One of the biggest misconceptions about prayer is that it means outlining our agenda to God as a divine to-do list. The true purpose of prayer is to get into God’s presence so He can outline His agenda for us. Here’s my advice: pray about what to pray about. God will reveal a promise, a problem, or a person. Then circle whatever God has prompted you to pray for with the same kind of consistency with which the earth circles the sun.

In 1952, a Princeton doctoral student asked Albert Einstein a question: “What original dissertation research is left?” I’m intrigued and inspired by Einstein’s answer: “Find out about prayer.”

when you pray to God regularly, irregular things happen on a regular basis.

The plans of God are only revealed in the presence of God. We don’t get our marching orders until we get on our knees! But if we hit our knees, God will take us places we never imagined going by paths we didn’t even know existed.

If you establish a prayer routine, your life will be anything but routine. You will go to places, do things, and meet people you have no business going to, doing, or meeting. You don’t need to seek opportunity. All you have to do is seek God. And if you seek God, opportunity will seek you.

Don’t worry about meeting the right people. If you meet with God, God will make sure you meet the right people at the right time. After all, there is nobody He doesn’t know. It’s one degree of separation! And if God can change the heart of Pharaoh, He can help you find favor with anybody and everybody. Let God do the promoting and networking. I’m certainly not suggesting that you don’t apply for a promotion or trade business cards, but seek first His kingdom. You’ve got to do God’s will God’s way.

Remember when Moses got impatient4 and took matters into his own hands by killing an Egyptian taskmaster? He thought it would expedite God’s plan. In reality, it delayed God’s plan by forty years. He thought it would bring relief, but it made the burden on the Israelites almost unbearable. That’s what happens when we try to do God’s job for Him. It’s unbearable. When we try to make things go faster, we usually slow things down. When we try to make things easier, we usually make them harder. Don’t try to manufacture your own miracles. Don’t try to answer your own prayers. Don’t try to do God’s job for Him. Stay humble. Stay patient. Stay focused. Keep circling.

It may feel like you are sitting still right now, but you are not. You are on a planet that is rotating on its axis at 1,000 miles per hour. Like clockwork, it makes one full revolution every twenty-four hours. And if that isn’t amazing enough, planet Earth is moving around the sun at speeds approaching 67,000 miles per hour! So the next time you feel like you’ve had an unproductive day, remind yourself that you did travel more than 1.5 million miles through space today.

God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is also great because nothing is too small. The Sovereign One cares about every minute detail of our lives.

mantras. One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right time.

that’s why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered.

God is setting up divine appointments all the time. Only God can make the appointment, but only you can keep the appointment. It’s your job to recognize and respond to the God-ordained opportunities that come your way.

God wants us to get where God wants us to go more than we want to get where God wants us to go. And He is awfully good at getting us there. All we have to do is follow the script of Holy Scripture and the improvisation of the Holy Spirit.

We can’t create divine appointments. All we can do is keep them. We can’t plan God-ordained opportunities. All we can do is seize them. We can’t perform miracles. All we can do is pray for them. Our job is to hear His voice. His job is to establish our steps. And if we do our job, God will do His!

God is the Composer. Your life is His musical score. God is the Artist. Your life is His canvas. God is the Architect. Your life is His blueprint. God is the Writer. You are His book.

More than a hundred years ago, a British revivalist spoke the words to Dwight L. Moody that would transform Moody’s approach to life — words of challenge that echo across every generation: “The world has yet to see5 what God will do with and for and through and in and by the man who is fully and wholly consecrated to Him.”

Consecration always ends in amazing!

We need to work like it depends on us, but we also need to pray like it depends on God.

Jonathan Edwards is famous for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which helped spark the first Great Awakening. Along with his pastorate in North Hampton, Massachusetts, he served as the president of Princeton University. Of his known descendants, there are more than 300 ministers or missionaries, 120 university professors, 60 authors, 30 judges, 14 college presidents, 3 members of Congress, and 1 vice president. That’s an impressive family lineage! And that legacy, like every spiritual genealogy, traces back to a moment of consecration. On January 12, 1723, Jonathan Edwards made a solemn dedication of himself to God. He consecrated himself, all of himself, to God. I made a solemn dedication7 of myself to God, and wrote it down; giving up myself, and all that I had to God; to be for the future, in no respect, my own; to act as one that had no right to himself, in any respect. And solemnly vowed, to take God for my whole portion and felicity; looking on nothing else, as any part of my happiness, nor acting as if it were.

Sometimes the purpose of prayer is to get us out of circumstances, but more often than not, the purpose of prayer is to get us through them. I’m certainly not suggesting we shouldn’t pray deliverance prayers, but there are times we need to pray prevailing prayers. We need to ask God to give us the grace to sustain, the strength to stand firm, and the willpower to keep on keeping on.

We’re often so anxious to get out of difficult, painful, or challenging situations that we fail to grow through them. We’re so fixated on getting out of them that we don’t get anything out of them. We fail to learn the lessons God is trying to teach us or cultivate the character God is trying to grow in us. We’re so focused on God changing our circumstances that we never allow God to change us! So instead of ten or twenty years of experience, we have one year of experience repeated ten or twenty times.

If we’re being completely honest, most of our prayers have as their chief objective our own personal comfort rather than God’s glory. We want to pray away every problem, but those shortsighted prayers would short-circuit God’s perfect plan.

The primary purpose of prayer is not to change circumstances; the primary purpose of prayer is to change

the shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory.

“… yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.” LUKE 11:8

When a drought threatened to destroy a season of crops, a rural church with many farmers in the congregation called for an emergency prayer meeting. Dozens of farmers showed up to pray. Most of them wore their traditional overalls, but one of them wore waders! He got a few funny looks, just like Noah did when he was building the ark, but isn’t that faith at its finest? If we genuinely believe God is going to answer our prayer for rain, isn’t that exactly what we would wear? Why not dress for the miracle? I love the simple, childlike faith of that old, seasoned farmer. He simply said, “I don’t want to walk home wet.” And he didn’t. But everyone else did.

God is honored when we act as if He is going to answer our prayers! And acting as if means acting on our prayers. After hitting our knees, we need to take a small step of faith. And those small steps of faith often turn into giant leaps.

Like Noah, who kept building an ark day after day, we keep hammering away at the dream God has given us. Like the Israelites, who kept circling Jericho for seven days, we keep circling God’s promises. Like Elijah,10 who kept sending his servant back to look for a rain cloud, we actively and expectantly wait for God’s answer.

The last two words of Mark’s gospel are “signs following.” We wish it said “signs preceding.” We want God to go first. That way we don’t need to exercise any faith at all. But we’ve got it backward. If we want to see God move, we need to make a move. If it seems like God isn’t moving in our lives, maybe it’s because we aren’t moving. But if we make a move, God will move heaven and earth to honor our faith.

There comes a moment when we need to make a statement of faith. I’m not talking about a collection of theological truths written on paper; I’m talking about a statement of faith written with our lives. Faith is not a noun; it’s a verb — an action verb. The greatest and truest statement of faith is a life well lived. It is faith fleshed out through risks and sacrifices. It is daring to go after a dream that is destined to fail without divine intervention.

We can pray until our knees are numb, but if our praying isn’t accompanied by acting, then we won’t get anywhere. We need to put feet to our faith. After kneeling do...

When the Israelites were on the verge of entering the Promised Land, God commanded the priests to step into the river. It’s one of the most counterintuitive commands in Scripture: “When you reach the banks of the Jordan River,11 take a few steps into the river.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like getting my feet wet. I’d much rather have God part the river, and then I’ll step into the miracle. That way I don’t get my feet wet, but if we aren’t willing to get our feet wet, we’ll never walk through parted rivers on dry ground.

A round the turn of the twentieth century, the agricultural economy of the South was suffering as the boll weevil devastated cotton crops. The soil was being depleted of nutrients because farmers planted cotton year in and year out. Enter George Washington Carver, one of the most brilliant scientific minds of the twentieth century. Carver introduced the concept of crop rotation and encouraged farmers to plant peanuts instead of cotton. The rotation of crops revived the soil, but it didn’t revive the economy because there was no market for peanuts. The abundant peanut crop rotted in warehouses because supply was greater than demand. When frustrated farmers complained to Carver, he did what he had always done: he took a long walk and had a long talk with God. George Washington Carver routinely got up at 4:00 a.m., walked through the woods, and asked God to reveal the mysteries of nature. Job 12:7–8 was one of the most-circled promises in his Bible. “But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you.” Carver took that promise at face value. He literally asked God to reveal the mysteries of nature. And God answered his prayer. Carver is famous for discovering more than three hundred uses for the peanut, but the genesis of those revelations was one conversation with God. In his own inimitable fashion, Carver shared the story behind the story. I asked ...

We don’t get a vision from God by going to conferences. We might get some good ideas, but God-ideas are only revealed in the presence of God.

prayer is the difference between the best you can do and the best God can do.

If we hit our knees, the Holy Spirit will do the heavy lifting. If we hit our knees, the Holy Spirit will reveal things that can only be discovered in the presence of God. If we hit our knees, the Holy Spirit will give us God-ideas for our ministry, family, business — for our lives.

Our biggest problem is our small view of God. That is the cause of all lesser evils. And a high view of God is the solution to all other problems.

Until we come to the conviction that God’s grace and God’s power know no limits, we will draw small prayer circles. But once we embrace the omnipotence of God, we’ll draw ever-enlarging circles around our God-given, God-sized dreams.

Nolan Bushnell, the creator of the Atari video game system, once stated, “Everyone who’s ever taken14 a shower has had an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it who makes a difference.”

Never underestimate the power of a single prayer.

In their classic book Geeks & Geezers, business gurus Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas

Being a first-class noticer15 allows you to recognize talent, identify opportunities, and avoid pitfalls. Leaders who succeed again and again are geniuses at grasping context. This is one of those characteristics, like taste, that is difficult to break down into its component parts. But the ability to weigh a welter of factors, some as subtle as how very different groups of people will interpret a gesture, is one of the hallmarks of a true leader.

Have you ever noticed that when you pray, coincidences happen? And when you don’t, they don’t. It’s more than coincidence; it’s providence. Prayer creates divine opportunities. But prayer also sanctifies the reticular activating system and enables you to see the God-ordained opportunities that are all around you all the time. And once you see them, you have to seize them.

The Aramaic word for prayer (slotha) means “to set a trap.” Opportunities are like wild animals. They are tough to capture. If you’re going to seize them, you’ve got to set prayer traps.

We often think of prayer as nothing more than words spoken to God, but maybe it’s more than that. Prayer is not a monologue; it’s a dialogue. We speak to God with everything from words to groans to thoughts. And God speaks to us...