The Circle Maker

The Circle Maker (Zondervan, 2011)

Mark Batterson, lead pastor at National Community Church in Washington, DC, wrote The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears in 2011.  Mark’s stated purpose in writing The Circle Maker is to “show you how to claim God-given promises, pursue God-ordained dreams, and seize God-ordained opportunities.”  Drawing circles begins with discerning God’s will, the goal being to glorify God.  As you discern what to circle in prayer and spell out your prayers with specificity, eventually it will spell God’s glory.  God will answer at some point, and His answers are not limited by your requests.  That means you can live with holy anticipation and pray with holy confidence.

Pastor Batterson emphasizes that prayer solving, rather than problem solving, wins the day.  Consistency and intensity are essential to praying.  And after you pray through, you need to praise through, even if God doesn’t answer the way you want or in the time you want.  Ultimately, the size of your prayer comes down to the size of your God.  Your impossible prayer is an easy answer for a mighty God.  Far greater than your capability to receive is God’s capacity to give.  God always provides just enough just in time.  Nothing is too big- or too small- for God.  Sometimes God gets in the way to show us the way.  Divine detours take us to the miracles we need, but don’t necessarily want.

When drawing prayer circles begins to feel long and boring,  because answers don’t seem to be forth coming, Mark encourages us to stop, draw, and pray.  Pray primes us, putting us in a spiritual frame of mind and sanctifying our expectations.  Staring the day in prayer is the best way to establish a daily rhythm in order to have a daily relationship with God.  To break the faith barrier, we need to press in and pray through.  Goal-setting is a great way of simultaneously praying hard, thinking long, and dreaming big.  Each prayer is precious to God and sealed by Him.  The end of a prayer is the beginning of a dream, the beginning of a miracle, the beginning of a promise.

 

 

 

The Circle Maker

Keep circling

“Keep Circling” is the title of the fourth and final section of The Circle Maker.  Mark Batterson begins by describing his 15.5-mile hike with a 4,8000-foot ascent to the top of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.  The trek seemed next to impossible.  But the answer was quite simple: one step at a time.

Pastor Batterson remarks that is how you accomplish any goal.  You can climb the highest mountain or obstacle simply by putting one foot in front of the other and persevering until you reach the top.  Mark draws a parallel with prayer circles:

“Drawing prayer circles is a lot like climbing a mountain.  The dream or promise or miracle may seem impossible, but if you keep circling, anything is possible.  With each prayer, there is a small change in elevation.  With each prayer, you are one step closer to the answer . . . . The more you have to circle something in prayer, the more satisfying it is spiritually.  And, often, the more glory God gets.”

Until recently, Mark wanted God to answer his prayers ASAP.  However, easy or quick answers often get taken for granted.  Mark encourages us to look for the path of greatest glory (for God), not the path of least resistance.  That requires high-degree-of-difficulty prayers, and the persistence to keep circling.  Mark concludes: “Maybe we need to change our prayer approach from as soon as possible to as long as it takes.  Keep circling!”

Today’s question: When you pray, do you look for the path of least resistance or the path of greatest glory for God?  Please share.

Tomorrow’s blog: “Make no little plans”

Keep circling

Establish a daily rhythm

“We need to establish a daily rhythm in order to have a daily relationship with God.  The best way to do that is to begin the day with prayer.”- Mark Batterson

“In the morning, Lord, you hear my voice; in the morning I lay my requests before you and wait expectantly.”- Psalm 5:3

As Mark Batterson concludes Chapter 13 of The Circle Maker, he notes David’s determination to lay his requests before the Lord and wait expectantly.  Most of us, Pastor Batterson states, just wait.  There is a huge difference between waiting and waiting expectantly.

We tend to have low expectations, underestimating how good and great God is.  Prayer is the way for us to sanctify our expectations, priming and readying us for the promises of God.

It also is important for us to find and establish our own rituals or routines.  Mark cites Oswald Chambers: “Let God be as original with other people as He is with you.”  That includes incorporating prayer circles.  Mark explains what applying prayer principles is and is not:

“It’s not a formula; it’s faith.  It’s not a methodology; it’s theology.  It honestly doesn’t matter whether it’s a circle, an oval, or a trapezoid.  Drawing prayer circles is nothing more than laying our requests before God and waiting expectantly.  If walking in circles helps you pray with more consistency and intensity, then make yourself dizzy; if not, then find something, find anything, that helps you pray through.”

Mark offers this equation: Praying hard + thinking long = staying focused.  Just as all of life is meant to be an act of worship, all of life is meant to be a prayer.

Today’s question: What has helped you establish a daily rhythm of prayer?  Please share.

Tomorrow’s blog: the new Short Meditation, “Expect great progress”

Establish a daily rhythm

God qualifies the called

“But God doesn’t call the qualified; God qualifies the called.”- Mark Batterson

As Mark Batterson concludes Chapter 7 of The Circle Maker, he defines a big dream as something beyond your human ability to accomplish.  This means it is perfectly natural that there will be moments when you doubt yourself, as Mark describes:

“If you’ve never had a God-sized dream that scared you half to death, then you haven’t really come to life.  If you’ve never been overwhelmed by the impossibility of your plans, then you God is too small.  If your vision isn’t perplexingly impossible, then you need to expand the radiuses of your prayer circles.”

To dream big, Pastor Batterson adds, you have to manage the emotional tension.  A big dream is simultaneously the best and worst feeling in the world.  It’s exhilarating and at the same time frightening because it’s beyond your ability.  That’s when you need to remind yourself that God is bigger than your dream.

Sometimes the power of prayer gives you the strength to walk through your circumstances and carry on.  Even though your circumstances haven’t changed, the burden is taken off your shoulders and put on Christ’s.  God will deliver in His time.  Mark states what happens when you pray circles around a dream that’s too big for you:

“If you keep circling it in prayer, God will get bigger and bigger until you see your impossible prayer for what it really is: an easy answer for an almighty God.”

Today’s question: What big dream(s) do you have?  Please share.

Coming Monday: the new Short Meditation, “If God had a refrigerator”

Tomorrow’s blog: “Praying hard”

 

God qualifies the called

Identifying your Jericho

“Drawing prayer circles begins with identifying your Jericho.”- Mark Batterson

Mark Batterson begins Chapter 3 (“The Jericho Miracle”) of The Circle Maker by stating that prayer is something people instinctively do when facing a challenge far beyond their ability.  Pastor Batterson has no doubt the Israelites were praying as they silently circled Jericho.

Even though God had promised something impossible and had a nonsensical battle plan (from a human perspective), Jericho stands- and falls- as a testimony to the simple truth that if you keep circling the promise, ultimately God will deliver on it.

The miracle at Jericho, Mark encourages, challenges us to confidently  circle the promises God has given to us.  The first step, then, to drawing prayer circles begins with identifying your Jericho:

“You’ve got to define the promises God wants you to stake claim to, the miracles God wants you to believe for, and the dreams God wants you to pursue.  Then you need to keep circling until God gives you what He wants and He wills.  That’s the goal.”

The problem is, Pastor Batterson notes, that most of us don’t get what we want for the simple reason that we don’t know what we want.  As Mark writes: “Instead of drawing circles, we draw blanks.”

That is why identifying your Jericho is essential!

Today’s question: Has your ministry downsizing or vocation loss led you to reassess identifying your Jericho?  Please share.

Tomorrow’s blog:  the new Short Meditation, “No longer a slave”

 

Identifying your Jericho

Bold prayers

“Bold prayers honor God, and God honors bold prayers.”- Mark Batterson

Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D. C., wrote The Circle Maker: Praying Circles Around Your Biggest Dreams and Greatest Fears in 2011.  Max draws and shares powerful insights from the true legend of Honi the circle maker.  Honi, a first-century BC Jewish sage, stood inside the circle he had drawn and boldly, yet humbly, prayed for God to end a year-long drought.  Rain fell and a generation was saved.

God, Pastor Batterson underscores, still is looking for circle makers.  Bold prayers require divine intervention.  Mark writes that the bigger the circle we draw the better, because God gets the glory:

“The great moments in life are the miraculous moments when human impotence and divine omnipotence intersect- and they intersect when we draw a circle around the impossible situations in our lives and invite God to intervene.”

Mark emphasizes it is absolutely imperative to come to terms with this simple but life-changing truth: “God is for you.”  Failure to believe this truth results in timid prayer.  Believing this truth means you will pray audacious prayers.  Either way, Mark states, “who you become is determined by how you pray.”  Pastor Batterson also clearly defines what drawing prayer circles is and is not:

“Drawing prayer circles isn’t some sort of magic trick to get what you want from God.  God is not a genie in a bottle, and your wish is not His command.  His command better be your wish.  If it’s not, you won’t be drawing prayer circles, you’ll end up walking in circles. . . . getting what you want isn’t the goal; the goal is glorifying God by drawing circles around the promises, miracles, and dreams He wants for you.”

Today’s question; Do you pray timid or bold prayers?  Please share.

Tomorrow’s blog: “Identifying your Jericho”

Bold prayers