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

by Mark Batterson

And if you don’t pray like it depends on God, the biggest miracles and best promises will remain out of your prayer reach.

God is still honoring spiritual desperadoes who crash parties and climb trees.

God isn’t just for you in some passive sense; God is for you in the most active sense imaginable.

I can’t help but ask the counterfactual question: What if Elijah had quit praying after the sixth circle? The obvious answer is that he would have defaulted on the promise and forfeited the miracle.

It felt like God had put me on hold, so I just hung up. Then

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.

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 hard times that teach us to pray hard.

And during those periods of ellipsis, your persistence quotient will increase exponentially.

When you know you are praying the promises of God, you can pray with holy confidence.

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.

Scripture is God’s way of initiating a conversation; prayer is our response.

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?

And that is one of the by-products of answered prayer. It gives us the faith to believe God for bigger and better miracles.

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!

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.

National Community was a fledgling church for five years. Like plowing rock-hard soil, there was nothing easy about planting a church in Washington, DC. It took us five years to grow from our core group of 19 to 250 people. Then it was almost like the Lord declared, “Now is the time of God’s favor.”

Moses pronounced over Joseph:

when God gives a vision, He makes provision.

After twenty-nine days of exhausting all options, we had scraped together $25,000, leaving us $7,500 short. We didn’t know where else to turn, so we turned to Him who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. We knew the dream of building a coffeehouse on Capitol Hill was from God, and we kept circling the promise in Psalm 50:10. The very next day, the day before our deadline, we received two checks in the mail from former NCCers. Both couples had recently moved away from the DC area, but they hadn’t found a church home yet, so they continued to tithe to NCC. I later found out that one of the checks was larger than their normal tithe because it was the tithe on a signing bonus with a new law firm. Neither couple had any clue that we had twenty-four hours to come up with $7,500, but God knew. 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. The total of the two checks combined? Exactly $7,500.

if you chicken out of the game of chicken, God will always give you another chance to get back in the game.

Sometimes we are so focused on the character of God that we forget that God has a personality too.

So why does God provide just enough? Why would God forbid leftovers? What’s wrong with taking a little initiative and gathering enough manna for two days or two weeks? Here’s my take on the manna miracle: The manna was a daily reminder of their daily dependence on God. God wanted to cultivate their daily dependence by providing for their needs on a daily basis. Nothing

God knows that if He provided too much too soon, we’d lose our spiritual hunger.

One reason many people get frustrated spiritually is that they feel like it should get easier to do the will of God.

God will keep putting you in situations that stretch your faith, and as your faith stretches, so do your dreams.

My portfolio as a pastor is twofold: (1) comfort the afflicted and (2) afflict the comfortable.

Let’s be honest: many, if not most, of our prayers are selfish in nature. We pray as if God’s chief objective is our personal comfort. It’s not.

God’s chief objective is His glory. And sometimes His gain inv...

Praying hard is hard because you can’t just pray like it depends on God; you also have to work like it depends on you. You can’t just be willing to pray about it; you also have to be willing to do something about it.

The reason God doesn’t answer our prayers isn’t that we aren’t praying hard enough; the reason, more often than not, is that we aren’t willing to work hard enough.

The reason many of us miss the miracles is that we aren’t looking and listening.

One reason many of us never get an answer to our prayers is that all we do is pray.

I’d much rather have God part the river, and then I’ll step into the miracle. We want God to go first. That way we don’t get our feet wet. But it’s often our unwillingness to take a step of faith and get our feet wet that keeps us from experiencing a miracle.

The key to getting out of the boat is hearing the voice of God.

If you’re going to get out of the boat in the middle of a lake in the middle of the night, you better make sure that Jesus said, “Come.” But if Jesus says, “Come,” you better not stay in the boat.

When God makes something happen, we can thank Him because we can see it.

When God keeps something from happening, we don’t know how to thank Him because we don’t know what He did.

Some of the hardest moments in life are when you’ve prayed hard but the answer is no and you don’t know why. And you may never know why.

The hardest thing about praying hard is enduring unanswered prayers.

Sometimes your only option is trust because it is the last card in your hand, but it’s the wild card.

Only God.

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

All of us love miracles. We just don’t like being in a situation that necessitates one.

We live in a quick-fix, real-time culture. Between the news ticker and Twitter, we’re always in the know, always in the now. We don’t just want to have our cake and eat it too; we want the instant brand. We want to reap the second after we sow, but this isn’t the way it works with dreaming big and praying hard. We

One dimension of thinking long is thinking

different, and prayer is the key to both. 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.

Praying through is long and boring, but it is the price you pay for miracles.

We love a good night’s sleep, but sleepless nights are what define our lives. If you’re going to bring kings to their knees or shut the mouths of lions, sometimes you need to pull an all-nighter.

I’m more and more convinced that the biggest difference between success and failure, both spiritually and occupationally, is your waking-up time on your alarm clock.