The Circle Maker 3: Pray Hard Series

By the most conservative estimates, there are more than 3,000 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?

Circling Promises

What I’m about to share has the power to revolutionize the way you pray and the way you read the Bible. We often view prayer and Scripture reading as two distinct spiritual disciplines without much overlap, but what if they were meant to be hyperlinked? What if reading became a form of praying and praying became a form of reading?

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. Like an awkward conversation, we don’t know what to say. Or like a conversation on its last leg, we run out of things to talk about. That’s when our prayers turn into a bunch of overused and misapplied clichés. So instead of praying hard about a big dream, we’re left with small talk. Our prayers are as meaningless as a conversation about the weather.

The solution? Pray through the Bible.

Application:

What promise do you need to circle?

It starts with changing the way you read the Bible. In fact, the Bible wasn’t meant to be read through. The Bible was meant to be prayed through. And if you pray through it, you’ll never run out of promises to circle.

The Bible is a promise book and a prayer book. And while reading is reactive, prayer is proactive. Reading is the way you get through the Bible. Prayer is the way you get the Bible through you. As you pray, the Holy Spirit will quicken certain promises to your spirit. It’s very difficult to predict what and when and where and how, but over time, the promises of God will become your promises. Then you need to circle those promises, both figuratively and literally. I never read without a pen so that I can underline, asterisk, and circle. I literally circle the promises in my Bible. Then I do it figuratively by circling them in prayer.

One of my treasured possessions is my grandfather’s Bible. I sometimes do devotions in his Bible because I want to see the verses he underlined. I love reading his notes in the margins. And I love seeing what promises he circled. The thing that I love most about his Bible is that it literally had to be taped together because it was falling apart. It wasn’t just well read. It was well prayed.

Closing Illustration:

Share a story about a promise that you or someone in your church has held onto. Maybe it’s a corporate promise related to your vision. Example from the Circle Maker: circling 201 F Street, NE in prayer while circling Matthew 18:18 (TCM, pages 99–100).

1 Romans 8:26.

2 1 Kings 18:45.

3 2 Corinthians 1:20.