Opening in Prayer

You have an enemy…and he’s dead set on destroying all you hold dear and keeping you from experiencing abundant life in Christ. What’s more, his approach to disrupting your life and discrediting your faith isn’t general or generic, not a one-size-fits-all. It’s specific. Personalized. Targeted.

So this audiobook is your chance to strike back. With prayer. With a weapon that really works. Each chapter will guide you in crafting prayer strategies that hit the enemy where it hurts, letting him know you’re on to him and that you won’t back down. Because with every new strategy you build, you’re turning the fiercest battles of life into precise strikes against him and his handiwork, each one infused with the power of God’s spirit.

New York Times best-selling author Priscilla Shirer, widely known for her international speaking, teaching, and writing ministries, brings her new role from the 2015 film War Room into the real lives of today’s women, addressing the topics that affect them most: renewing their passion, refocusing their identity, negotiating family strife, dealing with relentless regrets, navigating impossible schedules, succeeding against temptation, weathering their worst fears, uprooting bitterness, and more. Each chapter exposes the enemy’s cruel, crafty intentions in all kinds of these areas then equips and encourages you to write out your own personalized prayer strategies on tear-out sheets you can post and pray over yourself and your loved ones on a regular basis. Fervent is a hands-on, knees-down, don’t-give-up action guide to practical, purposeful praying.

Opening in prayer to anybody else. This photo probably wouldn’t mean anything.
No one would pay a lot of money or give large amounts of their attention to it.
It wouldn’t be to them the personal treasure that it is to me because to them it’d be just a photo.
A random image of two hands. One of the hands as you see is wrinkled and worn visibly older.
A couple of the nails are a bit bruised and tattered.
There’s no jewelry to adorn any finger and no real attempt at cosmetic touches.
It’s just plain simple, strong and storied yet nobly humbly feminine.
The second hand in the picture lying just over top, the fingers of the first is much younger and smoother brown, same color as the other though with a skin texture that’s still evenly composed and supple nails fairly neat and a tad more youthful a ring on that fourth finger together.
They’re a quick portrait in chronological contrast.
But what I really love about this picture is what’s lying beneath these two hands that old spiral notebook grocery store quality a dollar 49 plus tax on sale, no expensive leather binding or intricately designed acid free paper.
Just 1/4 grade composition book with wide ruled line sheets and a plastic coated cover.
And yet within those pages bound by thin metal rings slightly mashed out of shape by the pressure of frequent use are the vast treasures of a living legacy.
These two hands older and younger belong to a grandmother and a granddaughter.
And this spiral bound filing cabinet contains a grandmother’s prayer request written out, printed off and prayed over during her daily appointment with Jesus, she meets with him the way she’d meet with any important friend faithfully personally and punctually.
And in those early morning moments, she opens up this book of prayer and vocalizes her needs to him as well as the needs of others requests.
She’s been quietly gathering amid her daily dealings.
These two women though separated by several decades of life experiences go out together occasionally on little afternoon dates.
And since a 95 year old metabolism can afford to indulge a predilection for mcdonald’s french fries and vanilla milkshakes.
That’s their usual outing. They drive through for a batch of that salty sweet, hot and cold combination.
Then they meander random neighborhood streets windows down while the lip smacking passenger munches to her heart’s delight.
But it’s also in these moments between her grandmother swallows when this grown grandchild seeks to absorb the treasured wisdom from nearly a century of holy living recently on one of these fast food sprees when the subject of prayer.
Came up. The younger asked the older why she wrote down her prayers in a notebook like that.
Then she waited, even pushing the record button on her iphone.
Hoping not to miss a word of what she knew would be a long, deeply spiritual answer.
One, she’d never want to forget and could pass down in her grandmother’s own voice for generations to come while they glanced at each other.
No one spoke for a few moments.
Another French fry long gulp of milkshake then came these understated words her grandmother said. So I won’t forget.
Hm. Well, there you have it. The message of this whole book in one simple phrase.
Straight from the tender lips of a godly grandma. You write out your prayers so you won’t forget.
Won’t forget who the real enemy is. Won’t forget the one in whom your hope lies.
Won’t forget what your real need and dependencies are.
And later won’t forget the record of how your God responds through intentional, deliberate strategic prayer.
You grab hold of Jesus and everything he’s already done on your behalf.
It’s how you tap into the power of heaven and watch it reverberate in your experiences.
It’s a key part of your offensive weaponry against a cunning foe who prowls around and watches for your weaknesses, your vulnerable places, for any opportunity to destroy you in prayer.
You gain your strength, the power to gird yourself with armor that extinguishes every weapon your enemy wields Paul the Apostle famously said it just like this, put on all of God’s armor so that you’ll be able to stand firm against the strategies of the devil.
That’s Ephesians 6 11. In the new living translation, there’s that word again, strategies, schemes, deceptive plots being concocted for your demise by a very real enemy who is always primed to make his next move.
He works overtime to destroy the relationships and circumstances you want to preserve.
He laughs at your attempts to fix your own issues with timely words and hard work tactics that might affect matters for a moment, but can’t begin to touch his underhanded cunning efforts down where the root issues lie or up in those spiritual heavenly places where such physical weapons were never meant to work for.
We are not fighting against flesh and blood enemies.
Paul writes but against evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against mighty powers in the dark world and against evil spirits in the heavenly places according to verse 12.
So we strap on weapons that work weapons divinely authorize for our success in spiritual warfare.
The belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shoes of peace.
Then we take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation as well as the sword, the very word of God.
But we don’t stop there because neither does Paul in his description of our spiritual armor in Ephesians six, he says, pray in the spirit at all times and on every occasion, stay alert and be persistent in your prayers for all believers everywhere and pray.
There it is the fuel that drives everything. Prayer. We pray till our hands are worn and wrinkled.
We pray until our granddaughters are old enough to understand and learn and copy our example.
We pray until they can one day place their hands across ours, gently rubbing our aging skin and we smile because now they’ll never forget the things that we had the good sense to record in writing for their generation.
They will look back on our legacies and know we stood strong.
We fought the good fight and finished a race in which we would not even think about letting that enemy have his way in our lives or in the lives of those we love.
We pray because our own solutions don’t work.
And because prayer deploys activates and fortifies us against the attacks of the enemy.
We pray because we’re serious about taking back the ground he has sought to take from us.
That’s what we do. And I hope it’s what you do or what you’ve come here to be renewed in doing, but make no mistake.
This enemy will seek to discourage you from doing it, dissuade you disarm you by putting a distaste for prayer in your mouth.
He wants to see you, passionless, powerless, and prayer less quiet.
And because prayer is the divinely ordained mechanism that leads you into the heart and the power and the victory of Christ.
He knows that you’ll remain defeated and undone without it, tired and overwhelmed, inching forward, but mostly backward.
Trying to figure out why the hope and enthusiasm you feel in church doesn’t follow you to the four walls you live within.
And if I were your enemy, that’s exactly what I want.
I’d want to make you devalue the most potent weapon in your arsenal.
I’d strategize against you using carefully calculated methods to disorient and defeat you.
In fact, this approach makes so much devilish sense that it’s exactly what the devil does do to you in real life all underneath the umbrella of deception.
He comes at you too.
Well, don’t just listen to me, hear it from the loud voices who responded when I pulled a large cross section of women asking them to tell me the primary ways the enemy attacks him after boiling down all of their answers into the most common categories of responses.
I ended up with what I believe to be the top 10 of his favorite strategies.
Here’s where he seems to direct them against you. The hardest strategy.
Number one is against your passion.
He seeks to dim your whole desire for prayer, dole your interest in spiritual things and downplay the potency of your most strategic weapons.
That’s from Ephesians six verse 10 through 12. Strategy number two is against your focus.
He disguises himself and manipulates your perspective so that you end up focusing on the wrong culprit, directing your weapons at the wrong enemy.
Second Corinthians 11 14, strategy number three is against your identity.
He magnifies your insecurities leading you to doubt what God says about you and to disregard what he’s given you.
Ephesians chapter 1 17 through 19. Strategy number four is against your family.
He wants to disintegrate your family, dividing your home, rendering it chaotic, restless and unfruitful. See Genesis 31 through seven.
Strategy number five is against your confidence. He constantly reminds you of your past mistakes and bad choices.
Hoping to convince you that you’re under God’s judgment rather than under the blood revelation. 12 10.
Strategy number six is against your calling.
He amplifies fear, worry and anxiety until they’re the loudest voices in your head causing you to deem the adventure of following God.
Too risky to attempt Joshua 14 8. Talks about that. Strategy number seven is against your purity.
He tries to tempt you to certain sins, convincing you that you can tolerate them without risking consequence, knowing they’ll only wedge distance between you and God.
Isaiah 59 1 through two. Strategy number eight is against your rest and contentment.
He hopes to overload your life and schedule, pressuring you to constantly push beyond your limits.
Never feeling permission to just say no Deuteronomy 5 15. Strategy number nine is against your heart.
He uses every opportunity to keep old wounds fresh in mind, knowing that anger and hurt and bitterness and unforgiveness will continue to roll the damage forward.
Hebrews 12 15. Strategy number 10 is against your relationships.
He creates disruption and disunity within your circle of friends and within the shared community of the body of Christ.
First Timothy chapter two verse eight. And that’s just 10 of them.
10 of the most usual ways he strategizes against the strength of God’s woman.
Well, two can play at that game and with God on our side taking the lead and setting our own strategy plans.
We’re already in the vast majority, but we must still be diligent and intentional.
We must recognize and cry out against the highly personalized attacks being thrown in our direction.
No, there’s no need to fear, but we’d better be on our guard and we’d better not ever forget like the grandmother in the picture says to keep praying with purpose and precision the way she prays for people like her granddaughter, a granddaughter who just happens to be me.
My name is written in that book of hers has been for decades.
She’s prayed for me since before I was born, asking God to gird and strengthen, to guide and sustain.
That was back when she like me once wore a wedding ring on one of those precious fingers before her husband of more than 50 years.
My grandfather went ahead of her into heaven, but it occurs to me as I look back at this photograph that the wedding ring on my hand and the strong happy trial tested marriage it represents is not attributable to my own abilities and fine behavior.
As much as it’s a direct result of my name being in her book and of her firm resolve to fight for me, for my husband, for our family.
My grandmother, Annie Eleen Canings, the woman to whom I’ve dedicated.
This book has gone to war for me on her knees in prayer, fervent prayer.
And I’ve decided that I want to follow her there.
So with my grandmother’s keen instructions in tow and with the truth of God’s word as my anchor on ultimate truth and reality.
I’ve started the well worn proven discipline of writing down my prayers.
I began by considering my most pressing dilemmas.
The one raging in my own heart, my family, my finances, my health, my ministry and then started writing down my own battle plans for dealing with them based on the truths of scripture.
I resolved to stop using physical means to fight battles that require spiritual remedies, using instead the power of prayer to do what it’s always been designed to do.
I’m certainly not perfect at it, but I’m trying to grow. They’re posted in my closet.
Now, my prayers, I mean, seriously, some are on full sheets of line paper, others are on little slivers of computer paper ripped away after only a sentence or two or even just a word or two but big or small, I’ve dated them and posted them all.
And now there they sit taped right above a row of hooks in the closet where I see them.
Every time I get dressed that way, I won’t forget those strategies.
Help me remember to pray and what to pray and in doing.
So, I get dressed up in my spiritual armor, even while I’m getting dressed for the day.
That’s what this book is all about from my grandmother’s heart to yours, leading you to deliberately and thoughtfully write down your prayer strategies, tearing them right out of this book.
If you like then posting them in a strategic place where you can pray them regularly and consistently into prayer.
A couple of things to mention here though, before we start to develop some intentional strategies of devil busting prayer designed to counteract his specific strategies against us.
Whenever the conversation of demonic activity comes up in a book like this, most people scatter to one of two extremes, either they overestimate Satan’s influence and power living with an inflated erroneous perspective of his abilities or they underestimate him.
They don’t assign him any credit at all for the difficulties he’s stirring up beneath the surface of their lives.
One extreme leaves you saddled with undue fear and anxiety.
The other just makes you well stupid, too blunt to say it like that.
Well, sorry, unaware and completely open to every single attack which of these categories do you fall into or lean toward either?
Let’s be clear, no matter which way you gravitate.
Satan is not God and he is not God’s counterpart or peer. They’re not even on the same playing field.
His influence and authority and power don’t even touch the fringe of what our Lord is capable of doing.
Read ahead to revelation 19 and 20 sometime the so-called Titanic clash of end time foes is what’s commonly known as the battle of Armageddon.
Know what it really is, more like the devil and his demons getting all dressed up with no place to go.
It’s over before it even starts.
The only thing that makes it a war is that it becomes a prisoner of war.
Satan is nothing but a copycat trying desperately to convince you that he’s more powerful than he actually is because remember, he does have limitations boundaries.
He cannot cross no matter how much he desires or how hard he tries.
For instance, he can’t be everywhere at once. Only God is omnipresent. He can’t read your mind.
Only God is omniscient. He is merely an illusionist using cunning trickery to deceive and mislead only our God can work flat out unmistakable miracles.
And last but certainly not least he’s running out of time. Our God is eternal.
So even though he’s been given temporary clearance to strategize and antagonize, we don’t need to pray from a position of fear or weakness against Him quite the opposite.
You and I coming to the Father through the mighty name of Jesus can pray like the victorious saints of God.
We’ve been empowered to be and we can expect to prevail, but we can’t expect to experience this power unless we’re serious about joining the battle in prayer.
All right, then before we get going, here are just a few bits and pieces of framework that might help you in getting started.
We’ll be using these reminders throughout to help the prayers you write, stay anchored and strong.
Here’s our acronym P stands for praise.
You see, Thanksgiving is one of the most important aspects of prayer.
It’s not just a means of warming up or buttering up.
It’s not just a preamble before getting down to what we really wanna say, gratitude to God for who he is and what he’s already done should thread throughout every prayer because ultimately his name and his fame are the only reasons any of this matters.
The r stands for repentance.
God’s real desire in addition to displaying his glory is to claim your heart and the hearts of those you love.
So prayer, while it’s certainly a place to deal with the objectives and details we want to see happen in our circumstances is also about what’s happening on the inside where real transformation occurs.
Expect prayer to expose where you’re still resisting him, not only resisting his commands, but resisting the manifold blessings and benefits he gives to those who follow line your strategies with repentance, the courage to trust and turn and walk his way.
The A stands for asking, make your request known be personal and specific, write down details of your own issues and difficulties as they relate to the broader issue we discussed in that particular chapter as well as how you perhaps see the enemy’s hand at work in them or where you suspect he might be aiming next.
You’re not begging. You’ve been invited to ask, seek and knock God’s expecting you. He’s wanting you here.
The best place to look is to Him. The why stands for? Yes.
All of God’s promises the Bible says have been fulfilled in Christ with a resounding yes, that’s second Corinthians 1 20.
You may not understand what all is happening in your life right now.
But any possible explanation pales in comparison to what you do know because of your faith in God’s goodness and assurances.
So allow your prayer to be accentuated with his own words from scripture.
His promises to you that correspond to your need. I’ll provide lots of options in each chapter to choose from.
There is nothing more powerful than praying God’s own word, praying like this.
You can expect God to respond in accordance with his own sovereign, eternal will and his boundless love for you.
Or as someone more clever than I have said, prayer releases all your eternal resources.
I like that acronym but if you’re still uneasy about it all, if you’re not sure you’ll know how to get the hang of this.
No worries. As you keep listening, you’re entering the prayer strategy zone and I guarantee you, God’s spirit is gonna show you exactly how to get started.
Speaking of which, why don’t we do just that get started? If you’ve had it, then let’s do it.
Let’s get after it. Let’s pray.