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We do know that 100 percent of the prayers we don’t pray won’t get answered.”
Our most powerful prayers are hyperlinked to the promises of God. When you know you are praying the promises of God, you can pray with holy confidence.
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?
Job 22:28:
Matthew 18:18.
Isaiah 59:21.
Luke ...
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Luke 2:52
One of my responsibilities as a father is not only circling my children in prayer but also teaching them to circle the promises of God.
Parents are prophets to their children.
Philippians 4:4 – 8.
and the favor of him who dwelt in the burning bush.
when I discovered the power of praying circles around the pharaohs in your life.
emotionally and spiritually exhausting, but that is how you increase your persistence quotient.
Psalm 50:10
if He provided too much too soon, we’d lose our spiritual hunger.
He knows we’d stop trusting in our Provider and start trusting in the provision.
One of our fundamental misunderstandings of spiritual maturity is thinking that it should ...
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The goal isn’t independence; the goal is code...
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With every promotion, there are complications. As you earn more income, your taxes will become more complicated. My point? Blessings will complicate your life, but they will complicate your life in ways God wants it complicated.
(James 5:17)
Praying earnestly literally means “praying with a prayer.” It’s more than words. It means acting on your prayers because you expect an answer.
Revelation 3:7 – 8.
That phrase was part of the Bill of Congress signed by Teddy Roosevelt on February 28, 1903. It stated simply, “A Bill of Congress to create a Union Station and for other purposes.” It’s that last phrase, and for other purposes, that jumped off the page and into my spirit. Nearly a hundred years after that bill passed, Union Station started serving God’s purposes through the ministry of National Community Church. Roosevelt thought he was building a train station. He had no idea that he was building a church — a church with a mass transportation system, parking garage, and forty-restaurant food
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You can’t pray for open doors if you aren’t willing accept closed doors, because one leads to the other.
Exodus 14:13 – 14:
When we pray, our prayers exit our own reality of space and time. They have no time or space restrictions because the God who answers them exists outside of the space and time He created. You never know when His timeless answer will reenter the atmosphere of our lives, and that should fill us with holy anticipation.
Never underestimate His ability to show up anytime, anyplace, anyhow. He has infinite answers to our finite prayers. He answers them more than once. He answers them forever. The problem, of course, is that we want immediate results. Forever is fine, but we want answers instantly.
the speed of a seed
the key to dreaming big and praying hard is thinking long. Instead of thinking in terms of time, we must think in terms of eternity. Instead of thinking in terms of ourselves, we must think in terms of our children and grandchildren. Instead of thinking in seven-day cycles, we must think in terms of seventy-year timelines, as Honi the circle maker did.
On the Swedish island Visingsö, there is a mysterious forest of oak trees; mysterious because oak trees aren’t indigenous to the island, and its origin was unknown for more than a century.
One dimension of thinking long is thinking different,
Prayer doesn’t just change circumstances; more important, it changes us. It doesn’t just alter external realities; it alters internal realities so that we see with spiritual eyes. It gives us peripheral vision. It corrects our nearsightedness. It enables us to see beyond our circumstances, beyond ourselves, beyond time.
I’ve come to the conviction that one prayer can accomplish more than a thousand plans.
work like it depends on them, but they also know how to pray like it depends on God.
If you’re willing to dream big and pray hard and think long, you might just brings kings to their knees and shut the mouths of lions.
Daniel. He had the ability to pray with urgency about things that weren’t urgent. That is an important dimension of thinking long.
It’s not just where you end up that’s important; it’s how you get there. The harder the better. It’s true in life; it’s true in prayer.
“In the circle of successful living, prayer is the hub that holds the wheel together. Without our contact with God we are nothing. With it, we are ‘a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.’”2
And it was this prayerful posture that led to one of the most unlikely rises to power in political history. How does a prisoner of war become prime minister of the country that took him captive in the first place?
Physical posture is an important part of prayer. It’s like a prayer within a prayer. Posture is to prayer as tone is to communication. If words are what you say, then posture is how you say it. There is a reason that Scripture prescribes a wide variety of postures such as kneeling, falling prostrate on one’s face, the laying on of hands, and anointing someone’s head with oil. Physical postures help posture our hearts and minds.
Humility honors God, and God honors humility. Why not kneel? It certainly can’t hurt.
Proximity creates intimacy. Proximity proclaims authority. Drawing a prayer circle is one way of marking territory — God’s territory.
One of the most unique and special proximity prayers involved the dedication of a Senate office to God.
priming experiments on unsuspecting undergraduates. One of the experiments involved a scrambled-sentence test. The first test was sprinkled with rude words like disturb, bother, and intrude. The second test was sprinkled with polite words like respect,
Our minds are subconsciously primed by everything that is happening all the time. It’s a testament to the fact that our minds are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” It also testifies to the fact that we had better be good stewards of the things we allow into our visual and auditory cortices. Everything we see and hear is priming us in a positive or negative way.
Prayer is priming. Prayer puts us in a spiritual frame of mind. Prayer helps us see and seize the God-ordained opportunities that are all around us all the time.
Somewhere near the intersection of science and spirituality is a paradigm-shifting principle best seen in the priming exercise practiced by King David: In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.
One of the reasons that many people don’t feel an intimacy with God is because they don’t have a daily rhythm with God; they have a weekly rhythm.
Our biggest shortcoming is low expectations. We underestimate how good and how great God is by 15.5 billion light-years. The solution to this problem is prayer. Prayer is the way we sanctify our expectations.
