Fervent: A Woman's Battle Plan to Serious, Specific, and Strategic Prayer

by Priscilla Shirer

In prayer you gain your strength—the power to gird yourself with armor that extinguishes every weapon your enemy wields.

That’s why the apostle Paul prayed so fervently that the true identity of those first-century believers would be unveiled in their hearts. Hear that again: He wasn’t asking God to make sure the early believers received these things. They already had them. He was praying they’d realize they already had them. It wasn’t a shopping list; it was a packing list. They didn’t need to buy them, didn’t need to manufacture them. They just needed to recognize that they had access to them and could now receive them as their own to take full advantage of them.

instead of being a reason for endless shame, guilt, and regret, our past is a reason for endless worship and free-flowing testimony.

Satan’s ploy is to make you believe your core value as a person is tied to how much work you do, how much activity you can accomplish, how much stuff you can accumulate, how much business you can generate. In order to possess any worth under this system—just like Israel under Pharaoh’s rule—you’ve got to be able to rattle off everything you’ve been doing, one by one, adding it all up into a big gob of bullet points and checklists that ought to impress anybody. But why? Who’s drawing the measuring lines? And who’s declaring you deficient for not meeting them? Who’s setting the bar and the benchmarks of your approval? Who’s saying you’re worth nothing more than the overall tally of your output? You know exactly who.

Because once you’ve tasted the bold, intense flavors of fervent prayer, the blandness of living with anything less than pure freedom and intimacy with God is almost more than you can stand.

Unforgiveness is a strategic “design,” craftily implemented by your enemy to “outwit” you, to cripple your effectiveness in prayer and your power to stand against him victoriously.