Circle Maker: The Long Game

We’ve been in a series of messages based on the book The Circle Maker. We've been learning to pray bold prayers because bold prayers honor God… my hope is that we would become a people desperate for God to move through our prayers.

Desperate for our most important dreams to become a reality. Relationship restored, habits replaced, hurts healed. What is it that if God were to hear that prayer and answer it, would really change things in your life or the life of someone you love? DREAM BIG… and circle that prayer.... to keep circling the promises of God, boldly asking that he answer.

But we also learned that these dreams, especially big dreams, require us to PRAY HARD… not just praying for things to happen, but praying through their existence.

Today we are going to look at the third aspect to having a circle maker prayer life… the key quality to seeing a prayer life like this become a part of your life… But beyond your prayer life, this quality is vital for anyone who wants a life that is different from what everyone around you is willing to accept… Not just your prayer life, but all of life.

That quality is… thinking long.

WE are driving at the point that:

Success isn’t found in tomorrows goal, but in today’s faithfulness.

When Honi circled himself into the prayer circle, he was asking for rain… just as Elijah had… and it did rain, but Honi’s faith - shown in his boldness in asking and willingness to continue - is what became his success…

To say our success isn’t found in the thing we are praying for, but in our faithfulness to pray may sound like the a contradiction to the idea of our call to think long, so let’s break it down.

Because let’s face it.

Every time we quit praying it’s because we don’t think long term… every time we get in financial difficulty, it’s because we don't think long term… Every time we give in to temptation, it’s because we didn’t think long term… Every bad decision is made because we don’t think long term.

Academic under-performance… not thinking long term… health issues, we don’t think long term.

Marshmallow Experiment was performed in the 70’s… kids who at 4-5 were able to resist, that’s amazing in itself.

But the truly amazing thing about the study was that those 4-5 year olds who were able to resist eating the marshmallow now and were able to wait for the two… they tracked those kids through out their lives and that group had less drug use,better happiness, more successful in almost every measurable way… 210 pts higher on SAT… all of that regardless of any factor relating to their parents. It didn’t matter if their parents were divorced, it didn’t matter if mom and dad went to college, were blue collar, white collar, or on welfare… those who could put off immediate gratification lived a happier life.

For some of us it’s our phone… it’s our hobbies… it’s our habits.

It’s called delayed gratification. A willingness to do today something that won’t show a return until some time in the future.

That’s where some biblical truth comes into play.

Romans 12:2 NIV

2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Whats the pattern of this world?

Buy now button

We are trained in short term thinking by Jeff Bezos… we get offended when we can’t get it in 2 days… we lose interest

Dopamine… experiment with rats… 2000/hr… gave up everything, food, water, sex, everything in response to getting it now…

Phones are today’s culprit for giving us dopamine… telling us we are wanted, needed, important… yet the data shows that immediate response leads to death

Are we tired of the ways of the world?

Acts 2:38 NLT

38 Peter replied, “Each of you must repent of your sins and turn to God, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Repent, be baptized - YES… but THEN!

Romans 12:2 is about changing what we believe and how we behave will follow

Romans 12:2 NIV

2 Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.

Iceberg

Our behavior is the tip of the iceberg… belief is all that below that we can’t see, but that drives what we can see.

God says first believe… and your actions will follow.

Thinking long term tells us to stop trying hard… start praying hard… keep believing, keep praying.

Stop looking for quick fixes and start living consistently

Behaviors and customs of this world say take it easy… but when our thinking is renewed we know we are accepted so we deal with he messy stuff now

We see this in Scripture as well. Back to a familiar story of Daniel.

Daniel is known from Scripture as a man of prayer.

The book of Daniel tells a story of a man who understood thinking long. Daniel was a Jewish exile. Taken captive to Babylon at a young age, Daniel rose to the office of prime minister. Despite intense pressure, he lived a model life of integrity and obedience to God. Because of Daniel’s faithfulness, God blessed him with wisdom and the ability to interpret dreams and provide symbolic prophecies about the future.

Scripture tells us that Daniel prayed would go into a closet upstairs in his home 3 times for prayer. We don’t know what he prayed for every day, but I’m sure a regular prayer was that God would restore his people… they were living in exile at the time. He would study the scriptures and pray. At some point he discovered in the writings of the Prophet Jeremiah that the Israelites would remain in exile for 70 years. He wasn’t going to see the answer to his prayer…

But he continued to pray.

Along the way, Daniel became known as an interpreter of dreams and in that way grew in favor of the various King who held him. At one point, he interpreted some bad news for King Darius, but instead of getting angry with Daniel - he didn’t shoot the messenger - he actually lifted Daniel up, distinguishing him above all others. Well the others got jealous. They knew of Daniels prayer life, his love for God, and they tricked the King into making it a law that no one could worship or pray to any god but the King.

How did Daniel respond?

Daniel 6:10

Daniel 6:10 NIV

10 Now when Daniel learned that the decree had been published, he went home to his upstairs room where the windows opened toward Jerusalem. Three times a day he got down on his knees and prayed, giving thanks to his God, just as he had done before.

Daniel continued to pray. The King found out and we know the result as Daniel being saved in the Lions Den as angels shut the mouths of the lions.

The thing that impresses me about Daniel is this: he knew that his prayers wouldn’t be answered for seventy sevens yet he prayed with a sense of urgency. As a procrastinator, I would have been tempted to wait until the last week of the sixty-ninth year to even start praying. Not Daniel. He had the ability to pray with urgency about things that weren’t urgent. That is an important dimension of thinking long.

Drawing prayer circles often feels like a long and boring process and 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. But it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. What do you do? My advice: stop, drop, and pray. Keep circling. 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 often come on the heels of our longest and most boring prayers. But if you pray long and boring prayers, your life will be anything but boring. Your life will turn into the spiritual adventure it was destined to be. It won’t always get you where you want to go, but it will get you through.

Daniel continued to pray. He had been transformed in his thinking. He understood God’s way was far different from the ways of man.

So he continued to pray.

Now in those years do you think he really prayed every day three times a day for 70 years? Or do you think that he probably missed one somewhere in there? I”m betting that one day he was sick and slept right through his prayer time. I”m betting maybe he ate too much or worked too hard and the next day was out of it for a bit. But what did he do? He kept praying. He didn’t accept a missed prayer as failure. He knew failure was to stop praying.

He was able to think long term, to pray long term, because he understood that God things long term as well.

A couple of things Daniel did to keep his prayers right in front of him… so they didn’t become an after thought.

He changed his posture. WE read how when he heard about the prohibition to prayer, he dropped to his knees to pray. Some folks lift their hands. Sometimes people lay prostrate before the Lord. If your prayer life is getting stale, change your posture.

He fasted. We call it a Daniel fast, because he gave up meat. But Jesus calls his people to fast. Hunger will remind you of what’s going on… or not going on. Fasting, denying yourself will keep you, in prayer.

He had a schedule. Three times a day he would pray. He didn’t have an alarm on his telephone, but if Daniel wasn’t praying, he was preparing to pray. This allowed him to keep his prayer life as his life… not just something he did.

Daniel was thinking long term, because he understood God thought long term.

God thinks long term

Rev 13:8 … Jesus was always Gods plan

Revelation 13:8 NLT

8 And all the people who belong to this world worshiped the beast. They are the ones whose names were not written in the Book of Life that belongs to the Lamb who was slaughtered before the world was made.

He created us knowing we’d struggle with sin… so he made the way out before making the one who needed to be rescued.

We live in a broken world filled with broken people. It’s easy to lose hope. To be hurt by people, even church people and walk away.

But remember, none of this is a surprise to God.

This is the key to seeing God work in our community in our marriages, in our children… knowing that sometimes, with some people, God’s plan takes time - as we put our trust in God, he enables his people to not give up and not give in. We don’t give up on God because he hasn’t given up on us… we don’t give in to the temptation to quit praying just because we don’t see an answer, because we are praying to a God who keeps his promises and he doesn’t live on our timeline.

The world tells us we can’t rely on people, so it’s hard to think long term…

But research has found that some people have an advantage when it comes to thinking long term. Who would you say those people are?.

What if I told you that the group of people who have an advantage in thinking long term, in accepting delayed gratification isn’t kids who put off eating the marshmallow, it’s actually people who have faith in God.

Because we believe in a life to come. The way we see the world and everything in it has in it a long term significance.

IF you’ve been burned by people not keeping their word, try God.

2 Peter 3:8 NIV

8 But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.

God takes a long view on your life… he hasn’t given up on you… so you shouldn’t either… he hasn’t given up on our spouse, so we shouldn’t… he hasn’t given up on our kids, so we shouldn’t.