--Wed MidWeek 41: Circle Maker 2-- First Circles

Worship with MARCIE

My God is Big Enough

Review

Be a Circle Maker:

The Solution to 10,000 Problems

The Solution to 10,000 Problems

by Mark Batterson

It was the first century BC, and a devastating drought threatened to destroy a generation — the generation before Jesus. The last of the Jewish prophets had died off nearly four centuries before.

Miracles were such a distant memory that they seemed like a false memory. And God was nowhere to be heard.

His name was Honi, an eccentric sage.

And even if the people could no longer hear God, he believed that God could still hear them.

HE DREW A CIRCLE AND BEGAN TO PRAY.

The dirt turned into mud and the legend of the circle maker had been born.

TODAY—NOTHING HAS CHANGED...

God is for you, just as Honi experienced on that dry day.

God is ready and waiting for us --

We are ONE PRAYER away

from a dream fulfilled

a promise kept

a miracle performed

WE ARE ONE PRAYER CIRCLE AWAY

not a genie in a bottle or wish

DRAWING PRAYER CIRCLES STARTS:

Discerning what God wants!

Discerning what God wills!

where His sovereign will becomes your sanctified wish.

GETTING WHAT YOU WANT IS NOT THE GOAL—

The goal is glorifying God by drawing circles around the promises, miracles, and dreams He wants for you.

IT’S ALL ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS

THAT ARE GOD-CENTERED

NOT SELF-CENTERED!

PART TWO OF CHAPTER SEVEN

MARK talks about drawing his First Circle..

Over the years, I’ve drawn prayer circles around promises in Scripture and promises the Holy Spirit has conceived in my spirit. I’ve drawn prayer circles around impossible situations and impossible people.

I’ve drawn prayer circles around everything from life goals to pieces of property. But let me begin at the beginning and retrace the first prayer circle I ever drew.

When I was a twenty-two-year-old seminary student, I tried to plant a church on the north shore of Chicago, but that plant never took root.

Six months later, with a failed church plant on my résumé, Lora and I moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C. The opportunity to attempt another church plant presented itself, and my knee-jerk reaction was to say no, but God gave me the courage to face my fears, swallow my pride, and try again.

There was nothing easy about our first year of church planting. Our total church income was $2,000 a month, and $1,600 of that went to rent the D.C. public school cafetorium where we held Sunday services.

On a good Sunday, twenty-five people would show up. That’s when I learned to close my eyes in worship because it was too depressing to open them.

While I had a seminary education, I really had no idea how to lead. That’s challenging when you are the leader.

I felt underqualified and overwhelmed, but that is when God has you right where He wants you. That is how you learn to live in raw dependence — and raw dependence is the raw material out of which God performs His greatest miracles.

One day, as I was dreaming about the church God wanted to establish on Capitol Hill, I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to do a prayer walk. I would often pace and pray in the spare bedroom in our house that doubled as the church office, but this prompting was different.

I was reading through the book of Joshua at the time, and one of the promises jumped off the page and into my spirit.

“I’m giving you every square inch of the land you set your foot on — just as I promised Moses.”

As I read that promise given to Joshua, I felt that God wanted me to stake claim to the land He had called us to and pray a perimeter all the way around Capitol Hill.

I had a Honi-like confidence that just as this promise had been transferred from Moses to Joshua, God would transfer the promise to me if I had enough faith to circle it.

So one hot and humid August morning, I drew what would be my first prayer circle. It still ranks as the longest prayer walk I’ve ever done and the biggest prayer circle I’ve ever drawn.

Starting at the front door of our row house on Capitol Hill, I walked east on F Street and turned south on 8th Street. I crossed East Capitol, the street that bisects the NE and SE quadrants of the city, and turned west on M Street SE. I then completed the circle, which was actually more of a square, by heading north on South Capitol Street. I paused to pray in front of the Capitol for a few minutes. Then I completed the 4.7-mile circle by taking a right turn at Union Station and heading home.

It’s hard to describe what I felt when I finished drawing that circle. My feet were sore, but my spirit soared. I felt the same kind of holy confidence the Israelites must have felt when they crossed the Jordan River on dry ground and stepped foot in the Promised Land for the first time.

I couldn’t wait to see the way God would honor that prayer. That prayer circle had taken nearly three hours to complete because my prayer pace is slower than my normal pace, but God has been answering that three-hour prayer for the past fifteen years.

Since the day I drew that prayer circle around Capitol Hill, National Community Church has grown into one church with seven locations around the metro D.C. area. We’re on the verge of launching our first international campus in Berlin, Germany. And God has given us the privilege of influencing tens of thousands of people over the last decade and a half.

All Bets Are Off

As I look over my shoulder, I’m grateful for the miracles God has done, and I’m keenly aware of the fact that every miracle has a genealogy. If you trace those miracles all the way back to their origin, you’ll find a prayer circle.

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 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, or maybe I should say, we have not because we circle not. The greatest tragedy in life is the prayers that go unanswered because they go unasked.

Now here’s the good news:

If you do pray, all bets are off. You can live with holy anticipation because you never know how or when or where God is going to answer, but I promise you this: He will answer. And His answers are not limited by your requests. 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.

During my prayer walk around Capitol Hill, I drew circles around things I didn’t even know how to ask for. Without even knowing it, I drew prayer circles around people who would one day come to faith in Jesus Christ at our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill that wasn’t even an idea yet.

Without even knowing it, I walked right by a piece of property at 8th Street and Virginia Avenue SE that we would purchase thirteen years later as a result of a $3 million gift that wasn’t even a prayer yet. Without even knowing it, I walked right under a theater marquee on Barracks Row, the main street of Capitol Hill, that we would renovate and reopen as our seventh location fifteen years later.

Those answers are a testament to the power of God and a reminder that if you draw prayer circles, God will answer those prayers somehow, someway, sometime. God has been answering that prayer for fifteen years, and He’ll keep answering it forever. Like Honi, your prayers have the potential to change the course of history. It’s time to start circling.

Chapter 3

The Solution to Ten Thousand Problems

Imagine more than a million birds flying in formation. Now imagine them falling from the sky. There wasn’t a food source within a week’s walk, but God delivered dinner right to the doorstep of the Israelites while they wandered in the wilderness. Right before that quail miracle, God asks Moses a question. It’s more than a question; it’s the question. Your answer to this question, the question, will determine the size of your prayer circles.

“Is there a limit to my power?”

The obvious answer to that question is no. God is omnipotent, which means by definition, there is nothing God cannot do. Yet many of us pray as if our problems are bigger than God. So let me remind you of this high-octane truth that should fuel your faith: God is infinitely bigger than your biggest problem or biggest dream. And while we’re on the topic, His grace is infinitely bigger than your biggest sin.

The modern mystic A. W. Tozer believed that a low view of God is the cause of a hundred lesser evils, but a high view of God is the solution to ten thousand temporal problems.

If that’s true, and I believe it is, then your biggest problem isn’t an impending divorce or failing business or doctor’s diagnosis.

Please understand, I’m not making light of your relational or financial or health issues. I certainly don’t want to minimize the overwhelming challenges you may be facing.

But in order to regain a godly perspective on your problems, you have to answer this question: Are your problems bigger than God, or is God bigger than your problems? Our biggest problem is our small view of God. That is the cause of all lesser evils. And it’s a high view of God that is the solution to all other problems.

Is there a limit to my power?

Have you answered the question? There are only two options:

yes or no.

Until you come to the conviction that God’s grace and power know no limits, you will draw small prayer circles.

Once you embrace the omnipotence of God, you’ll draw ever-enlarging circles around your God-given, God-sized dreams.

How big is your God?

Is He big enough to heal your marriage or heal your child?

Is He bigger than a positive MRI or a negative evaluation?

Is He bigger than your secret sin or secret dream?

[Batterson, M. (2011). Be a circle maker: the solution to 10,000 problems. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.]

How big is your God?

It Only Takes a Spark of faith to move into the Spiritual Realm and just see HOW BIG OUR GOD REALLY IS!!!!

Worship with MARCIE to end with

It Only Takes a Spark