When you are living in prayer mode–an open mind, open heart, open spirit–it’s amazing how much you can hear.  All I know is that Spirit is speaking all the time.  But only he who has the ear of Samuel can hear the still, small voice. During our 21-Day Prayer Challenge, I filled an entire prayer journal with promptings, impressions, thoughts and ideas.  The flow of revelation went from a trickle to a fire hydrant. I’d be talking to people and God would start talking to me.  There was a heightened sensitivity to the Holy Spirit and His prayer promptings.  Appointments turned into divine appointments.  That’s the new normal.

The outer courts are filled with distraction.  It’s hard to hear.  The holy place is still.  And when you get into the inner courts, all the other voices vying for our attention are silenced.  I’m afraid that most of us live most of our lives in the outer courts.  We’re too Christian to enjoy sin, but we’re too sinful to enjoy Christ.  It’s time to press in.  It’s time to press on.  And it’s as simple as humility.  How do you get further into the presence of God?  Humble yourselves more.

You must become less.  He must become more.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

Psalm 46:10

Please hear me pastors and leaders.

Your job as a leader is to delegate everything you possibly can, but there is one thing you cannot delegate. Please, don’t delegate prayer.  In fact, delegate everything else so you can pray!  Isn’t that the pattern established in Acts 6:4.

It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables.  Brothers and sisters, choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and wisdom.  We will turn this responsibly over to them and will give our attention to prayer.

Let me make a confession.  For fifteen years, I feel like I’ve failed in leading our church in corporate prayer.  I was guilty of gross negligence. But it’s a new day, a new normal at NCC. This 21-Day prayer challenge has been the greatest three week period in NCC history.  Something broke in me, in us during this 21-Day prayer challenge.  Honestly, I think the key was fasting.  I’m never been more empty, more full. I’ve never been weaker, stronger.   I’ve never been more broken, more whole. I can’t even describe it.

Yes, some miracles happened during this 21-Day Prayer Challenge.  A church gave us their church building worth well north of $1 million dollars to NCC.  Ridiculous!  A staff member had a dream that a large check would be written to NCC and that dream was fulfilled right down the penny within 24 hours. Unbelievable!  But the thing that gets me the most excited?  We’ve never praised God like we did last night.  The intensity was off the chart.  There is a raw hungry for God coupled with disciplined desire.  We “gained a position” during these 21 days and we’re not turning back.  It’s our new normal.

I’m so glad Lent follows so quickly.  I’m praying that God gives us marching orders so we know how to leverage the forty days leading up to Easter. I already have a holy hunch.  I’m circling II Chronicles 7:14.  All I can think about is 7:14.

I’m also circling I Corinthians 3:6.  We have planted and watered with our prayers.  God is going to hold up His end of the bargain and “give the increase.”  This is God’s time. We’re going to see a harvest way beyond anything that can be manufactured with the emphasis on the “man” in man-u-factured.

Buckle your seat belts. Keep your arms inside the ride at all times! And hang on for dear life because this prayer roller coaster is headed toward the loop de loop.

We had a great day hosting Dave Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group and author of You Lost Me.  So many amazing insights yesterday, but one statement rocked me to the core.  “We’ve given people just enough of Jesus to be bored, but not enough to be transformed.”  Wow.  There no place for pick-and-choose or cut-and-paste Christianity. It’s all-or-nothing.  Jesus said, “You are neither hot nor cold. I wish you were one or the other.”  I think it was Peter Marshall who said we’re “too Christian” to really enjoy sin and “too sinful” to really enjoy Christ.” A full surrender of your life to Jesus Christ is the only way to find joy, find peace.

By the way, I’ve always been fascinated by something Soren Kierkegaard said: “Boredom is the root of all evil.”  I don’t think I’ve fully grasped that, but I do know that it’s not possible to be bored when you are in the presence of God or the will of God.

In his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, Daniel knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days.

Daniel 6:10

Congratulations! You made it to day 21.  But this isn’t the end. It’s a new beginning!  The goal wasn’t praying for twenty-one days. The goal was establishing a daily habit. Why? If you don’t establish a prayer habit you’ll never break the sin habit.  It’s one or the other.  The choice is yours.

During this 21-day prayer challenge, I did a Daniel fast and I’ll be honest: it was hard.  I can’t wait to eat meat!  But by definition, praying hard is hard.  I experienced some spiritual attacks.  I had a few bad days along the way.  But I also feel like God broke me down so He could build me back up.  He emptied me so He would fill me.  He stretched me so He could strengthen me. And I don’t want it to stop. It’s my new normal. The 21-day prayer challenged raised the ceiling, but that ceiling is the new foundation.  I’m going to press in and press on. God has given me a greater hunger for His presence.  Nothing else will satisfy!

The book of Daniel is one of the most amazing biographies in the Bible, one of the most amazing biographies in history.  His ascendancy to a position of power in the Persian Empire defies political science, but it defines the power of prayer circles.  Prayer invites God into the equation, and when that happens, all bets are off.  It doesn’t matter whether it’s the locker room, the boardroom, or the classroom.  It doesn’t matter whether you practice law or medicine or music.  It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do.  If you stop, drop, and pray, then you never know where you’ll go, what you’ll do, or who you’ll meet. The irony is that it was prayer that got Daniel into trouble and it was prayer that got Daniel out of trouble.

Destiny is not a mystery. It’s the byproduct of daily decisions and daily habits.  If you don’t cultivate a prayer habit you’ll miss out on countless God-ordained opportunities.  You’ll never get where God wants you to go. You’ll never become the person He destined you to be.  But if you get into God’s presence via prayer and fasting then nothing will be able to thwart God’s plans and purposes! Even if you’re a political prisoner in Babylon! Prayer defies time, defies space, defies odds!

So we end where we began.

Find a time. Find a place. Then stop, drop, and pray!

Thanks for taking the challenge!

For additional resources, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase.

I Corinthians 3:6

Toward the end of his life, Honi the Circle Maker was walking down a dirt road when he saw a man planting a carob tree.  Always the inquisitive sage, Honi questioned him, “How long will it take this tree to bear fruit?”  The man replied, “Seventy years.”  Honi said, “Are you quite sure you will live another seventy years to eat its fruit?”  The man replied, “Perhaps not.  However, when I was born into this world, I found many carob trees planted by my father and grandfather. Just as they planted trees for me, I am planting trees for my children and grandchildren so they will be able to eat the fruit of these trees.”

This incident led to an insight that changed the way Honi prayed.  In a moment of revelation, the Circle Maker realized that praying is planting.  Each prayer is like a seed that goes in the ground.  It disappears for a season, but it eventually bears fruit that blesses future generations.  In fact, our prayers bear fruit forever. No expiration date!  Even when we die, our prayers don’t.  Each prayer takes on a life, an eternal life, of its own.  I know this because of the moments in my life when the Holy Spirit has reminded me: the prayers of your grandfather are being answered in your life right now.  My grandfather died when I was six!  His prayers did not!  Like a carob tree planted in the ground, our prayer seeds will bear fruit long after we are long gone!

The Circle Maker revolves around 3 mantras: Dream Big, Pray Hard and Think Long.  It’s the last one that is so tough in our quick-fix culture. Almost every prayer we pray has an ASAP attached to it.  Let me introduce a new acronym: ALAT.  Quit praying as soon as possible prayers and start praying as long as it takes prayers! We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in two years, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in ten years!  If you dream big without thinking long you’re headed for a head-on collision with disappointment.  For the record, it is prayer that helps us both dream big and think long!
Drawing prayer circles often feels like a long and boring process. It’s frustrating when you feel like you’ve been circling forever.  You start to wonder if God really hears, if God really cares.  Sometimes His silence is deafening.  We circle the cancer. We circle our children.  We circle the dream.  We circle the sin.  But it doesn’t seem to be making a difference.  What do you do?  My advice: think long.

Circle for seventy years if you have to!  What else are you going to do? Where else are you going to turn?  What other options do you have?  Pray through.

We live in a culture that overvalues fifteen minutes of fame and undervalues lifelong faithfulness.  Maybe we have it backwards?  Just as our greatest successes often come on the heels of our greatest failures, our greatest answers to prayer often come on the heels of our longest prayers.  But if you pray those long and boring prayers, your life will be anything but boring.  The seeds will bear fruit.  God will give the increase.

For free resources or discounted copies of The Circle Maker, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

You will see even greater things than these.

John 1:50

Billy Graham once leveled an indictment against the church in America.  He said, “95% of today’s church activities would continue if the Holy Spirit were removed from us.  In the early Church, 95% of all her activities would have stopped if the Holy Spirit were removed.”

Are we in the 5% or the 95%?

I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we read the Bible and actually believed it. I can’t help but wonder what would happen if we read the bible and actually obeyed it.  Here’s my conviction: if we did what they did in the Bible, we’d experience what they experienced.  Why? Because God is still seated on His throne!  But here is the choice we face: either our experience will conform to Scripture or we’re tempted to make Scripture conform to our experience.

Thomas Jefferson loved the teachings of Jesus.  In fact, he said they were “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” But Thomas Jefferson was a child of the Enlightenment.  He didn’t have a cognitive category for miracles so he literally took a pair of scissors and cut them out of his King James Bible.  It took him two or three nights.  And by the time he was done he cut out the virgin birth, cut out the angels, cut out the resurrection.  Jefferson extracted every miracle and the end result was a book titled the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth or what is commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible.

Here’s the deal. You can’t pick-and-choose.  You can’t cut-and-paste.  And while most of us would never take a pair of scissors and physically cut verses out of our Bibles, we do what Jefferson did.  We ignore certain verses.  We avoid certain verses.  And we may not cut them out with scissors, but our god gets smaller and smaller and smaller.  We practice cut-and-paste Christianity.  We only believe what we can comprehend with our cerebral cortex and we only embrace what we can control.

Aren’t you hungry for more? More grace? More power? More miracles?

I wonder if our faith is so subnormal that the normal of the Bible seems abnormal.  We need a new normal.  Prayer meetings should be normal.  Miracles that are the byproduct of prayer should be normal.  Radical conversions should be the normal.  But there is a price to be paid.  The price is prayer.

Are you willing to pray the price?

For free resources or discounted copies of The Circle Maker, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

Take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.

II Corinthians 10:5

I’d rather have 1 God idea than 1000 good ideas. Good ideas are good, but God ideas change the course of history!  Where do you get those ideas?  Not from brainstorming. You get them from prayerstorming. It’s praying in a way that allows the Holy Spirit to conceive ideas in our minds and hearts and spirits.  You never know where a God idea might come from, but prayer is the incubator.  And when the idea is conceived, stewardship demands that you “take it captive.”  By the way, this is where keeping a prayer journal to write down ideas, impressions, and promptings of the Holy Spirit comes in handy.

We have a core conviction at National Community Church: there are ways of doing church that no one has thought of yet. I also believe that there are ways of doing missions, ways of doing evangelism, ways of doing discipleship, ways of doing worship that no one has thought of yet.  Six times the Psalmist said, “Sing to the Lord a new song.”  Can I also suggest that we need to pray a new prayer?

After we have prayed like it depends on God, and the God idea is conceived, then we need to work like it depends on us.  It takes blood, sweat, and tears to turn God ideas into reality!  But work ethic + prayer ethic = miracles!

I love it when people find creative ways to further kingdom causes via business endeavors.  That’s what we’ve tried to do with Ebenezers coffeehouse on Capitol Hill. Every penny of our $121,000 net profit goes to missions!  I pray that God would raise up a generation of anointed entrepreneurs!  Tom and Alana are a great example.  A few years ago we prayed over them and sent them to Nepal as “business missionaries.”  Their big dream?  To provide meaningful life-changing jobs for 1 million people.  That’s a big prayer circle!  Their most recent endeavor? Cloudfactory.  Love the name!  Love the concept!  It’s more than a business.  It’s both a prayer and an answer to prayer for those who are employed by them.  They put computer-based tasks in the hands of talented people in developing countries.  Simple yet revolutionary!

It’s time to praystorm the gates of hell and take back the territory that rightfully belongs to our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.  Good ideas won’t get it done.  Only God ideas!  But 1 God idea is worth more than a 1000 good ideas!

For free resources or bulk discounts, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

On the seventh day you are to march around the city seven times.

Joshua 6:4

Can I ask a counterfactual question: what would have happened if the Israelites had stopped circling Jericho on day six? The obvious answer is this: they would have forfeited the miracle right before it happened.  The wall of Jericho would not have fallen and the promise would have remained unclaimed.

Nothing has changed.

I wonder how many of us have forfeited promises, forfeited miracles, forfeited dreams because we quit circling too soon.  Please don’t read that and get depressed.  God is the God of second chances!  It should inspire us to pray through.  Or to borrow vocabulary from The Circle Maker: keep circling!

Let me share a prayer testimony from someone who attended NCC for many years while they lived in DC.  They just read The Circle Maker and shared a few of the prayer circles they’ve drawn over the years.  This one involves a piece of legislation.  See if it doesn’t inspire you to keep circling!

In 1994, I authored legislation that forced the cable industry to fully scramble their pornography channels.  In our community, the Spice Channel was just one click away from the cartoon channel.  Congressman Duncan Hunter allowed me to use his office as a base camp as I prepared to personally visit all 435 Congressional offices and all 100 Senate offices.  It took me a week to visit all 535 offices, delivering the legislation and video evidence to each one. Every morning before starting my trek I did a prayer walk around the US Capitol 7 times and prayed for the spiritual walls of evil to come down.  And on the last day, at the end of the last circle, (a little concerned about how the Capitol Police would respond) I shouted loudly for the walls to come down.

A few days earlier I was in the Longworth Congressional Building and had just left the 220th Congressional office totally depressed.   In almost every office that I visited I was told that I was too late; Chairman Dingle had finished the Telecommunication’s Bill and there was no way that he would ever reopen it for an amendment, because if he opened it for mine, it would open it for everyone else’s, and that wasn’t going to happen. I was in the lobby on the second floor of the Longworth, went over to a window, sat on its cold marble sill, and hung my head in defeat.  I said to myself, I should stop wasting my time and go home to San Diego.

Never before, and never since, has God spoken to me so clearly. While I sat there looking down at the marble tiled floor, totally dejected, these words were spoken to me as clear as a bell, “Who is doing this, you or Me?” I can’t explain how I felt when I heard those words, but I straightened up and responded, “You are Lord!”  Instantly I was filled with more excitement than when I had first begun and at each of the following 215 offices, my presentations were given with power and faith.

I was in the Canon Congressional Building, and had just made my last presentation to the last Congressional office (I am not exaggerating when I tell you this); as my leg crossed the threshold as I exited the 435th office, my pager rang.  Chairman Dingle had just agreed to allow my amendment to be added to his Telecommunication’s Bill.

Maybe you’ve been praying for the salvation of a loved one what seems like an eternity.  Maybe you feel like you can’t handle the financial stress or relational tension any longer. Maybe you feel like your dream is as distant now as it was a decade ago.

My advice?  Keep circling!

What other option do you have?

To pray or not to pray.

That is the question, isn’t it?

Don’t just pray. Keep praying.  Then pray some more!

For free resources or bulk discounts, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.

My book tour kicks into high gear in the next few days.  It’s a little overwhelming to be honest. I’m a homebody. Love my family and my church family.  At the same time, I’m so excited to see the beginnings of a prayer revival.  I saw it in New York and Baltimore last week. All of that to say this: I covet your prayers!

I’ll be in Cleveland, Ohio Thursday night.  Come on out to A Greater Cause conference.  There are also live streaming venues in several cities across Ohio.

On Sunday, I’ll be in Baltimore with Ken Patterson at Grace International Church.

Gonna be a crazy weekend. We have our NCC leadership retreat on Friday and Saturday.  I’ll speak at NCC on Saturday night and Sunday morning.  Then up to Baltimore for a late AM service.  I’ll finish up in Lancaster, PA speaking to a group of independent bookstore owners.

This happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

John 9:3

Pray.

Pray Hard.

Pray Through.

But don’t pray away.

How many times did the blind man in John 9 pray for healing?  How many times did his parents beg God to give their little boy his eyesight?  I wonder how many prayers went unanswered.  Or did they? Ultimately, the man born blind was healed but not until it would yield the greatest glory.

Let’s be honest, 90% of our prayers revolve around personal comfort, not God’s glory.  Too often we try to pray away every problem.  But what if that is the very thing that God wants to leverage for his glory?  Let’s not be too quick to pray away the pain, the suffering, the situation, the problem.  Let’s not just pray “get me out” prayers.  We sometimes need to pray “get me through” prayers.

We need a paradigm-shift in our prayer lives.  It’s not about us. It’s all about God.  And when you begin to pray for God’s glory above and beyond everything else it’s a game changer!  You no longer pray away every problem.  You pray through the problem.  You know that God might do a miracle, but that isn’t the goal. The goal is God’s glory.  And if suffering with grace yields more glory to God then so be it.

Remember when Paul prayed that God would take away his thorn in the flesh?  God didn’t answer that prayer the way Paul wanted. Why?  I’m not entirely sure.  Maybe it forced a greater dependence upon God which yielded more glory for God.  Maybe it kept him humble.  But God has reasons that are way beyond our reason! I’ve prayed that God would heal me of asthma so many times I’ve lost count, but God hasn’t chosen to answer that particular prayer.  I’m still asking, but in the meantime I’m trusting that Father knows best.

Too often we’re so anxious to “get out” of difficult situations that we never “get anything out” of those difficult situations.  We don’t learn the lessons God is teaching or cultivate the character God is developing.  Sometimes prayer is meant to change external circumstances and bring deliverance.  Sometimes prayer is meant to change us internally and help us walk through those situations with His grace, His power.  It takes discernment to know what God wills, but let’s not try to pray away the very thing God wants to leverage to put His glory on display!

Don’t pray away. Pray through.

For free resources or bulk discounts, visit www.thecirclemaker.com.