The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears

by Mark Batterson

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.

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.

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.

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

We sometimes pray as if God doesn’t want to keep His promises.

have no idea how badly God wants to keep His promise! That’s why He made the pro...

We sometimes pray as if our bold prayers that circle the promises of God might offend the God who made them. Are you kidding me? God is offended by anything less! There is nothing God wants to ...

And His capacity to give is far greater than your capacity to receive.

Parents begging their children to open their gifts early may seem a little dysfunctional, 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.

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.

They identified words that were descriptive and prescriptive of their kids; then they had them framed to hang on the walls in their rooms. They often wondered whether those words meant anything, but their oldest daughter, who is now grown up and out of their house, recently told them that on some nights when she couldn’t fall asleep, she would look at those words on the wall, and they would speak to her. Those framed words started to frame her. She started to see herself in light of her God-ordained identity and destiny.

It was nothing more, or maybe I should say nothing less, than the favor of God. It was God’s time. It was God’s favor. It was God’s word. And God was watching over it.

The favor of Him who dwells in the burning bush is a unique dimension of God’s favor that enables you to stand before those who would naturally stand in opposition to you, but they supernaturally step aside or stand behind you. That is how the favor of Him who dwells in the burning bush manifested itself when Moses stood before Pharaoh.

circles around the pharaohs in your life. Every time I got angry, I converted that anger into a prayer. Let’s just say that I came as close as I had ever come to praying without ceasing!

It also taught us how to pray like it depends on God and work like it depends on us.

I learned that we don’t have to be afraid of the enemy’s attacks. They are counterproductive when we counteract them with prayer. The more opposition we experience, the harder we have to pray, and the harder we have to pray, the more miracles God does.

Neither couple knew that their obedience was our miracle, but God knew. He always knows. And if we pray in alignment with the will of God, He always provides.

If we chicken out, we miss out on the miracle; if we pray through, God will come through, but it may well be at the last moment possible.

God loves showing up in unexpected ways at unexpected times.

sure: God is always stage right. He’s ready to make His grand entrance. All He is waiting for is your prayer cue.

The goal isn’t independence; the goal is codependence on God. Our desire for self-sufficiency is a subtle expression of our sinful nature. It’s a desire to get to a place where we don’t need God, don’t need faith, and don’t need to pray. We want God to provide more so we need Him less.

but the will of God doesn’t get easier.

the harder it gets, the harder you have to pray.

God will keep putting you in situations that stretch your faith, and as your faith stretches, so do your dreams. If you pass the test, you graduate to bigger and bigger dreams.

The blessings of God won’t just bless you; they will also complicate your life.

Sin will complicate your life in negative ways. The blessings of God will complicate your life in positive ways.

Lord, complicate my life.

We pray as if God’s chief objective is our personal comfort. It’s not. God’s chief objective is His glory.

God is great not just because nothing is too big for Him; God is great because nothing is too small for Him.

But two-thirds of praying hard is listening and looking.

One reason many of us never get an answer to our prayers is that all we do is pray. You can’t just pray like Elijah; you have to act like Elijah. You can’t just get on your knees; you also have to look toward the sea.

Obey the crazy prompting.

And it is God’s strange and mysterious ways that renew our awe, our trust, and our dependence.

Let me spell it out: If you want to see crazy miracles, obey the crazy promptings of the Holy Spirit.

By definition, praying hard is praying when it’s hard to pray. And it’s the hard times that teach us to pray hard.

And God doesn’t settle for what is good.

Our frustration will turn to celebration if we patiently and persistently pray through.

Sometimes God gets in the way to show us the way.

but I do know what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to be afraid. We’re going to stand still. And we’re going to see the deliverance of the Lord.”

Each prayer is like a seed that gets planted in the ground. It disappears for a season, but it eventually bears fruit that blesses future generations. In fact, our prayers bear fruit forever.

the prayers of my grandparents are being answered in my life right now. Their prayers outlived them.

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.

Because we are surrounded by technologies that make our lives faster and easier, we tend to think about spiritual realities in those terms. But almost all spiritual realities in Scripture are described in longer and harder agricultural terms.

But the key to dreaming big and praying hard is thinking long.

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 have to remind myself of God’s faithfulness to answer my prayers, even after I am long gone.

Like any good lawyer, the lawyers at IJM know how to work like it depends on them, but they also know how to pray like it depends on God.