The Circle Maker

you make a living by what you get, but you make a life by what you give.

Some of the hardest moments in life are when you’ve prayed hard but the answer is no and you don’t know why.

Praying hard is synonymous with working hard. Think of praying hard and working hard as concentric circles.

One litmus test of spiritual maturity is whether your dreams are getting bigger or smaller. The older you get, the more faith you should have because you’ve experienced more of God’s faithfulness. And it is God’s faithfulness that increases our faith and enlarges our dreams.

Sometimes faith seems like a denial of reality, but that’s because we’re holding on to a reality that is more real than the reality we can perceive with our five senses.

Prayer and imagination are directly proportional: the more you pray the bigger your imagination becomes because the Holy Spirit supersizes it with God-sized dreams.

The more you pray the bigger your dreams will become. And the bigger your dreams become the more you will have to pray.

“Never put a comma where God puts a period, and never put a period where God puts a comma.”

If you can trust God when the answer is no, you’re likely to give Him praise when the answer is yes.

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.

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.

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 involves a little pain.

Well-developed faith results in well-defined prayers, and well-defined prayers result in a well-lived life.

journaling is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated spiritual disciplines. Journaling is the difference between learning and remembering.

Sometimes you have to get out of your routine so God can speak to you in a nonroutine ways.

But we should praise God for disappointment because it drives us to our knees. Disappointment is like dream defibrillation. If we respond to it the right way, disappointment can actually restore our prayer rhythm and resurrect our dreams.

I’ve already stated our primary problem: Most of us don’t get what we want because we don’t know what we want. Here’s our secondary problem: Most of us don’t get what we want because we quit circling.

Scripture says that without a vision, people perish. The opposite is true as well. With a vision, people prosper. The future is always created twice. The first creation happens in your mind as you envision the future; the second creation happens when you literally flesh it out.

Having vision beyond your resources is synonymous with dreaming big. And it may feel like you’re setting yourself up for failure, but you’re actually setting God up for a miracle.

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.

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.

One reason many people get frustrated spiritually is that they feel like it should get easier to do the will of God. I don’t know if this will be encouraging or discouraging, but the will of God doesn’t get easier. The will of God gets harder. Here’s why: the harder it gets, the harder you have to pray.

If you make good decisions on a daily basis, it has a cumulative effect that pays dividends the rest of your life.

We pray out of our ignorance, but God answers out of His omniscience. We pray out of our impotence, but God answers out of His omnipotence. God has the ability to answer the prayers we should have prayed but lacked the knowledge or ability to even ask.

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

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 has changed. Isn’t that the point of the Lord’s Prayer? “Give us today our daily bread.”

All you have to worry about is winning the battle today. God can take care of tomorrow.

until His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish, your prayer life will be unplugged from its power supply.

Success is a derivative of persistence.

Our heavenly Father is far too wise and loves us far too much to give us everything we ask for. Someday we’ll thank God for the prayers He didn’t answer as much or more than the ones He did. Our frustration will turn to celebration if we patiently and persistently pray through.

difficult days taught us to pray hard and forced us to think long.

Destiny is not a mystery. For better or for worse, your destiny is the result of your daily decisions and defining decisions.

The only way you can fail is if you quit trying. If you’re still trying, even if you’re failing, you’re succeeding. God is honored when you don’t give up. God is honored when you keep trying.

You don’t have to second-guess yourself because you know that God wants you to double-click on His promises.

Prayer is the way we escape the gravitational pull of the flesh and enter God’s orbit. It’s the way we escape our atmosphere and enter His space. It’s the way we overcome our human limitations and enter the extradimensional realm where all things are possible.

The battle was won before the battle even began. God had already given them the city. All they had to do was circle it.

How desperate are you for the miracle? Desperate enough to pray through the night? How many times are you willing to circle the promise? Until the day you die? How long and loud will you knock on the door of opportunity? Until you knock the door down?

Prayer adds an element of surprise to your life that is more fun than a surprise party or surprise gift or surprise romance. In fact, prayer turns life into a party, a gift, a romance.

You need to come to terms with this two-sided truth: 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.

that’s the way it works: God closes doors in order to open bigger and better doors.

The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.

If you allow them to, your disappointments will create drag. If you allow them to, your doubts will nosedive your dreams. But if you pray through, God will come through and you’ll experience a supernatural breakthrough.

If you’re an entrepreneur, pray circles around your product.

Maybe there is something you’ve been praying for that you need to start fasting for. You need to take it to the next level. You need to draw a double circle by fasting for your children or for a friend or for your business.

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

And for the record, even if God doesn’t answer the way you want, you still need to praise through. That is when it’s most difficult to praise God, but that is also when our praise is most pure and most pleasing to God.

This is where fasting comes into play. Fasting gives you more power to pray because it’s an exercise in willpower. The physical discipline gives you the spiritual discipline to pray through. An empty stomach leads to a full spirit.

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

When you live by faith, it often feels like you are risking your reputation. You’re not. You’re risking God’s reputation. It’s not your faith that is on the line. It’s His faithfulness. Why? Because God is the one who made the promise, and He is the only one who can keep it. The battle doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to God. And because the battle doesn’t belong to you, neither does the glory.

God knows that if He provided too much too soon, we’d lose our spiritual hunger. He knows we’d stop trusting in our Provider and start trusting in the provision.

What we perceive as unanswered prayers are often the greatest answers.

It will involve more risk, but if you are willing to go there, you’ll realize that you didn’t risk anything at all.

There is nothing God wants to do more than prove His power by keeping His promises. But we doubt God because we doubt ourselves. We don’t ask God to extend His hand because we don’t know His heart.

At some point, most of us stop living out of imagination and start living out of memory. Instead of creating the future, we start repeating the past. Instead of living by faith, we live by logic.

Instead of letting things happen, goals help us make things happen. Instead of living by default, goals help us live by design. Instead of living out of memory, goals help us live out of imagination.

Praying hard is asking God to make your life harder. The harder you pray, the harder you will have to work. And that is a blessing from God.

Miracles are the by-product of prayers that were prayed by you or for you. And that should be all the motivation you need to pray.

God is still honoring spiritual desperadoes who crash parties and climb trees. God is still honoring those who defy protocol with their bold prayers. God is still honoring those who pray with audacity and tenacity.

The viability of our prayers has more to do with intensity than vocabulary.

we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year. Of course, we also tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade.

It won’t get less complicated; it’ll get more complicated. But complications are evidence of God’s blessing.

God isn’t offended by your biggest dreams or boldest prayers. He is offended by anything less. If your prayers aren’t impossible to you, they are insulting to God.

Prayer is asking God to do something, future tense; praise is believing that God has already done it, past tense.

My greatest fear is that my kids might someday walk away from the faith, but I have learned to rebuke that fear, because fear is not of God. Then I remind myself that I have circled Luke 2:52, and I have circled my children with that blessing thousands of times. Those prayers are bottled by God, and the Holy Spirit will unseal them in the lives of my children long after I’m gone.

Prayers are prophecies. They are the best predictors of your spiritual future. Who you become is determined by how you pray.

By the most conservative estimates, there are more than three thousand promises in Scripture. By virtue of what Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross, every one of them belongs to you. Every one of them has your name on it. The question is: How many of them have you circled?

The degree of satisfaction is directly proportional to the degree of difficulty. The harder the climb, the sweeter the summit.

Do you trust that God is for you even when He doesn’t give you what you asked for? Do you trust that He has reasons beyond your reason? Do you trust that His plan is better than yours?

Reading is the way you get through the Bible; prayer is the way you get the Bible through you.

God has determined that certain expressions of His power will only be exercised in response to prayer. Simply put, God won’t do it unless you pray for it. We have not because we ask not,

“God does not answer vague prayers.” When I read that statement, I was immediately convicted by how vague my prayers were. Some of them were so vague that there was no way of knowing whether God had answered them or not.

In formulaic terms, change of pace + change of place = change of perspective.